I'm trying to reconnect with my previous posting of Bataille.

For all his innovative linking of the sexual, the violent, and the sacred, Bataille's understanding of sexuality is an old one. He associates sexual shame with original sin (or evil). It's basically a Christian conception.

With a difference.

Sex leads to excess; sexual desire is linked with death. The erotic is the loss of one’s individual being. When you have sexual intercourse, it's something like a little death; when you have an orgasm, it's a point at which you're in some fundamental way no longer yourself. It's a state of ecstasy and a little death.

The same thing happens in experiences of sacrifice. So religion---the sacred--- is eroticism, sacrifice, and excess.

Alva Bernadine The Shrine

The sacred, when associated with excess, is that which exceeds the social and cultural structures that have been constructed to contain it. The sacred is associated with what Nietzsche called the Dionysian. The profane is what he calls the world of work and distinction, the world of utility, or purposefulness, whereas the sacred for him is always associated with that excess which disrupts or transgresses utility, use, purpose, reason, meaning.

Transgressing meaning means stepping into meaninglessness, or "excess" or "transgression". For Bataille our lives our grounded in and surrounded by sets of taboos. These taboos generally surround the two extreme limit points of our life, namely birth and death, or sexuality and death. The states of excess or transgression are those experience of going beyond our mode of being autonomous, isolated individuals. This happens when we transgress those taboos that normally surround our lives. At that moment we live with a sense of meaninglessness.

Most of the time we habitually live within a world of meaning where we push away that meaninglessness that lies at the boundaries of our everyday lives. But to have meaning in our lives we need to experience the states of excess.

This is a reworking of Nietzsche in terms of sexuality. Christian culture has been traditionally concerned with the excess of sexuality. It has built around sexuality many taboos and it keeps sexuality confined to a monogamous heterosexual marriage relationship. It says that, since sex and eroticism are dangerous, they need to be circumscribed with taboos to make sex acceptable within the realm of everyday life.