But most postmodern thinkers preferred their onions unmediated. The idea of experience remained indispensable to a characteristic project of twentieth-century intellectual life: making sense of sensations in the absence of God. Nietzsche, the godfather of this enterprise, appears frequently in Jay's account but receives no sustained attention except as a precursor of poststructuralism. For Georges Bataille, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, the pursuit of extreme sexual and imaginative experience--the Surrealist "derangement of the senses"--became ever more fevered. This quest for intensity was often ironically at odds with the experience of reading the prose that described it, prose that was filled with opaque abstractions and sweeping assertions. In the end, Jay argues, the French thinkers offered a "reconstitution" rather than a rejection of the idea of experience.

They started by abandoning the quest for wholeness. For Bataille, Barthes and Foucault, the sense that personal identity had become dispersed was not a soul sickness to be cured but a source of strength. All three exalted the emancipatory possibilities of the fragmented self. Indeed, they pressed the point, celebrating the loss of conscious control in ecstatic self-immolation. They seemed to be groping toward a mystical experience beyond language, without closure and without God. Death, for them, was not merely an inescapable necessity (as it had been for midcentury existentialists and neo-orthodox theologians) but a "limit-experience" to be courted. Unlike the Fascist cult of death, this courtship rejected conventional virile heroism and instead evoked the dream of Nietzsche (in Jay's words): "the sacrifice of the integral, armored self in the hope of recovering a lost Dionysian community."

Yet the recovery of community could never be complete. The rejection of wholeness, the fear of stasis, the suspicion even of stillness--these habits of mind created a common pattern in the French poststructuralists' writings, a kind of rhetorical brinkmanship. As Jay observes, Bataille's "willingness to live life as a radical experiment, involving the body as well as the mind, risking danger in the quest for a certain version of redemption," led him to construct the concept of "inner experience"--an amalgam of violence, pain and erotic ecstasy. Yet his own "inner experiences" of sexual experimentation were momentary punctuations of his mundane life. One could immerse oneself in the abyss of nonbeing, but only temporarily.

Bataille is one of the people we have to thank for all the chatter about "transgression" in the academy during the past several decades. Barthes is another. Searching obsessively for forbidden sexual pleasure, he compared gay cruising to the mystic's quest for union with the deity. But there was no salvation for Barthes, no sense of oneness or quietude, or even regret over their absence. The quest for wholeness, he believed, was a fool's errand. His own quest was committed to endless repetition, subject to occasional impotence and failure, but always recharged by aspiration for the fleeting frisson. Authentic experience, for Barthes, was not something lost in a harmonious past but endlessly (if temporarily) re-created in a chaotic, discontinuous present.

Foucault was a little more open to the postlapsarian model: He suspected that modern sexuality had actually been devalued under the guise of liberation--and those suspicions led him to his most probing work, The History of Sexuality, which unmasked the rhetoric of sexual freedom to reveal its complicity with new forms of social coercion. Acutely aware of the limits of liberation, Foucault was even more committed than Barthes to exploring "limit-experiences" in theory and practice. He wanted nothing less than to pulverize the conventional unified self. Like his heroes Nietzsche, Bataille and the novelist Maurice Blanchot, Foucault demanded that experience perform what he called "the task of 'tearing' the subject from itself in such a way that it is no longer the subject as such, or that it is completely 'other' than itself so that it may arrive at its annihilation, its dissociation. It is this de-subjectifying undertaking, the idea of a 'limit-experience' that tears the subject from itself, which is the fundamental lesson that I have learned from these authors." How a "limit-experience" became a "lesson" was obscure. And how one put this quest for limit-experience into practice was an equally tricky question; much has been guessed about Foucault's adventures beyond his study.

But those questions are less interesting than a larger one: How do we assess the life of the mind in a society where fully individuated selves celebrate the implosion of the self, and the "limit-experience" of annihilation becomes a topic to be discussed over Pepperidge Farm cookies and Styrofoam cups of coffee? In the postmodern academy, intellectuals still ponder the possibilities of intense experience--though many emphasize the "performative" dimensions of behavior once deemed spontaneous. In current talk about experience, the contrast between form and content is even greater than it once was: Abstract formulations sanctify transgressive limit-experiences. Sade (at least in some circles) has supplanted Marx as the revolutionary thinker du jour.

Extraordinary intellectual fashions reveal larger historical significance. The shrinkage of social vision from the democratic socialism of Thompson and Williams to the desperate individualism of Barthes and Foucault suggests the impoverishment of cultural politics on the left during the late twentieth century. Other, more tentative questions can be raised about the poststructuralist vogue, as well. Is there a link, however elusive, between the poststructuralist courtship of violent death and the postmodern media's mass-produced simulation of it? Or between the intellectual fascination with limit-experiences and the popular culture of apocalypse? Who knows? Maybe Foucault and Jerry Falwell are brothers under the skin. It would not be the first time the cult of experience had connected a demonic divine and a holy devil.

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