Seite - 181 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 05/02

mation, persist in the possibility of his finally seeing ontological oneness. The occasion for this sort of sight is always available, waiting to be actualized, and when it is, such experiences give rise to intense sensations of rapture. Not only is this the first time we see Jack appear to express a feeling resembling some- thing like joy in the film, but at the moment of his euphoria, Jack also is outside. No longer is he cloistered in the built environment, which until then had been symbolic of his estrangement from the world (figs. 6a–b). Such experiences of exhilaration are politically disruptive since they stake nothing on causal consequence, and therefore nothing on traditional and his- torical narrative-based methods of meaning-making. The individual and their ac- cess to ecstatic revelation is the prime locus of concern, not social institutions which often function to curb individualism to secure more favorable prospects for social order. There is good reason governments feel hostile toward charis- matic visionaries, which is the same reason the established church has histori- cally distrusted mystics who linger on the margins of the faith – to receive exhil- arating insight is to receive an unsettling power, strong enough to surprise us out of our propriety and traditional commitments. This force, if left unchecked, is strong enough even to upset institutionalized conventions whose ways have become so culturally engrained that the chances of their ever changing almost require the radical inbreaking of transhistorical political vision. For this reason, George Kateb identifies in Emerson’s politics a kind of anarchist “wildness”.24 It is not just that a politics of ecstatic vision fails to conform to the norms and habits of public reason, but that such a politics often will call the foundations of public order themselves into question. CONCLUSION Though society’s most powerful institutions and overall organization may ap- pear immutable, such appearances are not indicative of society’s – and no less the world’s – true nature. This is Connolly’s argument in his book The Fragili- ty of Things.25 Myriad self-organizing ecologies constitute our world, including geological, biological, and climate systems, as well as cultural and economic systems with multiform relations and complex entanglements. Because these many systems harbor their own creative capacities – from tectonic shifts on the earth’s surface to the so-called “logic” of the market – which, in turn, ramify in the larger ecosystems in which they participate, the world, Connolly concludes, is doubtless a fragile place, easily spun round by the slightest change in human and nonhuman fields. 24 Kateb 2006, 245–271. 25 Connolly 2013. Narrative and Experiment, Religion and Politics in The Tree of Life | 181www.jrfm.eu 2019, 5/2, 167–185