The rhetorical project of the manic mode is best defined as a politics, far-reaching but ultimately uneven, of levelling. This levelling agenda explains not only the enthusiastic propensity for catalogues and for the use of certain topoi from Biblical prophets, but also more blatantly “irrational” rhetorical features. These latter features include the disjunctiveness of enthusiastic rhetoric – its “stammering tongue,” its deliberately fractured evocations of the ineffable – as well as its peculiarly serious playfulness with language. A certain rhetoric of bodily desire, moreover, drawing on the Song of Songs, serves as a favorite medium for a “levelling” of the mind/body hierarchy. What gives a certain unity to this constellation of rhetorical effects is a consistent collective project in which the levelling “materiality” of paralogical language figures the body.

We must not forget, however, that the body itself is a politically contested figure. For my point is precisely not to reproduce the conservative bromide that enthusiasm is merely displaced eroticism. As James Grantham Turner points out, “the secular diagnosis of ‘Enthusiasm’ as a genital disorder…was already strong at the time of the English Revolution.”