Friday, July 27, 2007

Bataille's longing for the death of self and continuity

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

The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so that the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of the erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity

it is paving the way for a fusion where both are mingled, attaining at length the same degree of dissolution. The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.

Eroticism always entails a breaking down of established patterns, the patterns, I repeat, of the regulated social order basic to our discontinuous mode of existence as defined and separate individuals

Erotic activity, by dissolving the separate beings that participate in it, reveals their fundamental continuity, like the waves of a stormy sea. In sacrifice the victim is divested not only of clothes but of life (or is destroyed in some way if it is an inanimate object). The victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals. This is what religious historians call the element of sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.

mystical experience, as far as our strength allows us to break off our own discontinuity, confers on us a sense of continuity.

And then, beyond the intoxication of youth, 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 itGeorges Bataille/Erotism introduction

Bataille glimpsed the world of continuities in eroticism.
I would rather say eroticism lives through your body.It moves you passionately and perceive itself through you body:it is the ultimate self that is continuous with you. Discontinuous existence is just the state of its declining.

No comments: