Kali's Child: The Mysticfal and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna

Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1998. Softcover. Good+ (ex-library with stamps and labels throughout, light shelfwear to wraps and block, inscribed on ffep for previous owner, several markings and underlining throughout.). Light blue wraps, color illustration on front cover, red and yellow lettering; xxxiii, 386 pp. "The author explores the life and teachings of Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, a nineteenth-century Bengali saint who played a major role in the creation of modern Hinduism. Through extended textual and symbolic analyses of Ramakrishna's censored "secret talk," the author demonstrates that the saint's famous ecstatic and visionary experiences were driven by mystico-erotic energies that he neither fully accepted nor understood. The result is a striking new vision of Ramakrishna as a conflicted, homoerotic Tantric mystic that is as complex as it is clear and as sympathetic to the historical Ramakrishna as it is critical of his traditional portraits". In a substantial new preface to this second edition, the author answers his critics, addresses the controversy the book has generated in India, and traces the genealogy of his work in the history of psychoanalytic discourse on mysticism, Hinduism, and Ramakrishna himself."-website description. Contents include: Introduction: Approaching the secret. Defining the study: recovering the text and revealing the secret ; The mystical and the erotic ; Ramakrishna's Tantric world ; The study's symbolic structure: K l 's child ; The Hindu unconscious. -- K l 's sword: anxious desire and the first vision. K l 's sword ; From the village to the temple, 1836-1856 ; A textual study of Ramakrishna's "anxious desire": discerning a vocabulary of desire ; Ramakrishna's "anxious desire" in the eyes of his contemporaries ; "Her sword as his flute" -- K l as mother and lover: interpreting Ramakrishna's Tantric practices ; K l as mother and lover ; The secret years: textual considerations ; The secret years: textual considerations ; The secret years: the practices according to the Pur as, 1856-1861 ; The secret years: the practices according to the Tantras, 1861-1865 ; The hero and the child ; Cleaving the bitch in two.