In her recent and lucid monograph, Kathryn Reklis attempts to engage with the concept of ‘subjectivity’ as it is presented in early and late modernity. To wit, she argues that the valorisation of autonomous and rational subjects within the burgeoning material conditions of modernity did not exclude the formation of alternative subjectivities. One such alternative subjectivity took the mode of bodily ecstasy vis-à-vis religious experience. On this front, Reklis isolates Jonathan Edwards as an implicit endorser and primary validator of embodied ecstasy. Of course, Edwards would never have used the language of ‘subjectivity,’ and was certainly sceptical of placing any deciding value on embodied ecstasy as a marker of religious affection. But the question is valid: does the theology of Jonathan Edwards allow for the crafting of a ‘modern subject’ who engages inter-subjectively with the modern world through his or her ecstatic religious body? Reklis thinks that it does. She argues that Edwards's theological anthropology bequeaths to modern theology one scheme by which to imagine a stable subject who resists the threat of fragmentation between aesthetic and material concerns. Following the contours of performance theory, Reklis writes that

Reklis contends that, from town to town, revival participants were physically expressing consummation in Edwards's theological vision through ‘ecstatic gestures that took on the quality of kinesthetic imagination as the scenario made its way around the Atlantic’ (p. 96). Parishioners, quite literally, had a ‘way of knowing in their bodies what it meant to be swallowed up in God, to convey that truth to others, and to recognize in others the same consummation’ (p. 97). In this manner, ‘kinesthetic imagination’ is a means of bodily ‘thinking through’ knowledge, while simultaneously transmitting (possibly reinventing) that knowledge through mere bodily enactment. Overall, Reklis's conclusion regarding an alternative subjectivity fails to convince, primarily because, as a ressourcement of Edwards, it misconstrues his theological anthropology. In doing so, her thesis succumbs to the same bifurcation of reason and affection, public and private, which she is seeking to avoid. Edwards endorsed bodily effects insofar as they were an outworking of the united constitution of affection and intellect natural to created humanity. But to place such a full-throated emphasis on kinesthetic imagination actually supplants the synthesis that Edwards was at pains to maintain in Religious affections. Embodied affection and rational norms belong together for Edwards. It is a great achievement of Edwards's theological anthropology that he succumbs neither to the danger of uncontested immediate experience, nor to the assumptions of a highly rationalistic and scientific society. As such, the formation of a true Edwardsian alternate subjectivity resists privatisation and ‘vain imaginings’, as well as capitulation to societal norms. Unfortunately then, Reklis's thesis, if divorced from Edwards's total anthropology, re-inscribes the binary self that she opposes.