Georges Bataille

Reprint. Originally published: Death and sensuality. New York: Walker, 1962.

Death and Sensuality

Erotism

aybüke

In the foregoing proposition there is a basic truth: taboos founded on terror are not only there to be obeyed. There is always another side to the matter. It is always a temptation to knock down a barrier; the forbidden action takes on a significance it lacks before fear widens the gap between us and it and invests it with an aura of excitement. "There is nothing", writes de Sade, "that can set bounds to licentiousness. . . The best way of enlarging and multiplying one's desires is to try to limit them") Nothing can set bounds to licentiousness ... or rather, generally speaking, there is nothing that can conquer violence.

For each man who regards it with awe, the corpse is the image of his own destiny. It bears witness to a violence which destroys not one man alone but all men in the end.

the urge towards love, pushed to its limit, is an urge toward death. This link ought not to sound paradoxical.

The world of work and reason is the basis of human life but work does not absorb us completely and if reason gives the orders our obedience is never unlimited.

The inner experience of eroticism demands from the subject a sensitiveness to the anguish at the heart of the taboo no less great than the desire which leads him to infringe it. This is religious sensibility, and it always links desire closely with terror, intense pleasure and angtrish.

...these interminable millenia correspond with man's slow shaking-off of his original animal nature. He emerged from it by working, by understanding his own mortality and by moving imperceptibly from unashamed sexuality to sexuality with shame, which gave birth to eroticism.

Eroticism is one aspect of the inner life of man. We fail to realise this because man is everlastingly in search of an object outside himself but this object answers the innerness of the desire.

What I have been saying enables us to grasp in those words the unity of the domain of eroticism open to us through a conscious refusal to limit ourselves within our individual personalities. Eroticism opens the way to death. Death opens the way to the denial of our individual lives. Without doing violence to our inner selves, are we able to bear a negation that carries us to the farthest bounds of possibility?

The likelihood of suffering is all the greater since suffering alone reveals the total significance of the beloved object. Possession of the beloved object does not imply death, but the idea of death is linked with the urge to possess. If the lover cannot possess the beloved he will sometimes think of killing her; often he would rather kill her than lose her. Or else he may wish to die himself. Behind these frenzied notions is the glimpse of a continuity possible through the beloved. Only the beloved, so it seems to the lover-because of affinities evading definition which match the union of bodies with that of souls-only the beloved can in this world bring about what our human limitations deny, a total blending of two beings, a continuity between two discontinuous creatures.

Passion fulfilled itself provokes such violent agitation that the happiness involved, before being a happiness to be enjoyed, is so great as to be more like its opposite, suffering.

Eroticism, unlike simple sexual activity, is a psychological quest independent of the natural goal: reproduction and the desire for children. From this elementary definition let us now return to the formula I proposed in the first place: eroticism is assenting to life even in death.

Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death.

What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners? — a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?

The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still.

I do not think that man has much chance of throwing light on the things that terrify him before he has dominated them.

The human spirit is prey to the most astounding impulses. Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him. The saint turns from the voluptuary in alarm; she does not know that his unacknowledgeable passions and her own are really one.

SO good. structuralist vibes and kinda dated but the truth in here - and there is plenty - is electrifyingly vertiginous and abyssal. the girls that get it get it

Erotism Death and Sensuality

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