Georges Bataille

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

Death and Sensuality

Erotism

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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.

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.

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

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?

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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