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December 13, 2003
In his book Eroticism (in the US the book is entitled Eroticism: Death and Sensuality ) Bataille gives us a different account of eroticism to the one we are used to. The normal understanding of eroticism is that it is an interest in, or pursuit of, sexual sensations. Bataille connects it to extreme states of subjectivity. He says:
"Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death."
He says that the domain of the erotic is the domain of violence. The most violent thing for all of us is death--our separate individuality being snuffed out. This is quite different from the fashionable chic porn.
Bataille then distinquishes between physical, emotional and religious eroticism, with all forms involving a breaking down of established patterns, a dissolution of the person as we exist in our separate separateness and a fusion of beings. Physical eroticism is the fusion of bodies, emotional eroticism is the union of lovers, whilst religious eroticism involves sacrifice. Bataille says:
"Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals the fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea. In sacrifice, the victim is divested not only of clothes but of life....the victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness."
After mentioning that mystical experiences stem from the universal character of religious sacrifice Bataille comes back to life and death. He says:
"Assenting to life even in death is a challenge to death...Life is a door into existence: life may be doomed but the continuity of existence is not.....we achieve the power to look death in the face and to perceive in death the pathway into unknowable and incomprehensible continuity----that path is the secret of eroticism and eroticism alone can reveal it."
Eroticism involves transgression as it is is a conscious refusal to limit ourselves within our individual character or personality.
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