ABSTRACT
This chapter aims at rehabilitating the idea of excess by suggesting that excess is a crucial part of sexual experience. The phenomenon of excess, the overstepping of boundaries, the sense of overbrimming with inordinate arousal that makes one feel it cannot be encompassed, is crucial for the psychoanalytic theorizing of sexuality. As a platform for thinking about the 'otherness' of sexuality, the chapter has proposed that they looks at sexual experience as comprising three strands. Psychosexuality is characteristically woven with specific, uniquely poignant body sensations; it is excessive of normal functioning, of work rationality and purposefulness, and even of containment; and, finally, it is enigmatic, being based on the mystery of the desired other's unconscious intentions and the mystified longings they call forth in our embodied mind. An abomination can feel like a rich excess, a gift overcoming any restrictive rule, at the same time as it can mean defying the law to the point of loathsomeness.
