erotism (1)

談玉儀 1112/04/18 Teresa Yuh-yi Tan 談玉儀 1

Georges Bataille’s Erotism ( 一 )Part One: Taboo and Transgression (Chapter VI-XIII)

Teresa Yuh-yi Tan 談玉儀

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Chapter VI Murder, Hunting and War

• Taboo– Freud’s interpretation

• “On the primal necessity of erecting a protective barrier against excessive desires bearing upon object of obvious frailty” (Erotism 71)

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•

TransgressionThe forbidden

DeathSacrifice in Religious

cannibalism

TabooA barrier against desire

Eroticism

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• Duel, Feuds and War– An analogy

• Taboo on murder – “Thou shalt not kill”

• Taboo on sexual act– “Thou shalt not perform the carnal act

except in matrimony alone.” (Erotism 72)

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• The Hunt and the Expiation of the Animal’s Death– The taboo on hunting

• “The act of killing invested the killer, hunter or warrior, with a sacramental character.” (Erotism 74)

– Religious nature of transgression• Lascaux pit painting

– Invested the hunt with significance

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• The Earliest Record of War– “Towards the end of the Upper Paleolithic

ten or fifteen thousand years ago, the transgression of the taboo forbidding originally the killing of animals, considered as essentially the same as man, and then the killing man himself, became formalised in war.” (Erotism 75)

– “Primitive war is rather like a holiday, a feast day” (Erotism 75)

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• The Distinction between Ritual and Calculated Forms of War– War as an outlet of “ceremonial rites”

(Erotism 77)• A challenge in the war of feudal China and the

notion of dying heroically• Archaic aspect of the Homeric wars is to treat a

war as a game.

– 2 opposite schools (Erotism 77)

• Chivalry Tradition • The act of violence

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• Cruelty and Organised War– “Violence, not cruel in itself, is essentially

something organised in the transgression of taboos. Cruelty is one of its forms; it is not necessarily erotic but it may veer towards other forms of violence organised by transgression. Eroticism, like cruelty, is premeditated. Cruelty and Eroticism are conscious intentions in a mind which has resolved to trespass into a forbidden field of behaviour.” (Erotism 79)

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Chapter VII Murder and Sacrifice

• An Animal Sacrifice – “But primitive man saw the animals as no different

from himself except that, as creatures not subject to the dictates of taboos, they were orginally regarded as more sacred, more god-like than man. “ (Erotism 81)

• The Sacramental Element– “. . . Divine continuity is linked with the

transgression of the law on which the order of discontinuous beings is built. Men as discontinuous beings try to maintain their separate existences, but death, or lat least the contemplation of death, brings them back to continuity.“ (Erotism 83)

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Chapter VII Murder and Sacrifice

• Beyond Anguish– The anguish in the face of death

• “Following upon religion, literature is in fact religion’s heir. A sacrifice is a novel, a story, illustrated in a bloody fashion.“ (Erotism 87)

• “The greatest anguish, the anguish in the face of death, is what men desire in order to transcend it beyond death and ruination.” (Erotism 87)

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Chapter VIII From Religious Sacrifice to

Eroticism• Christianity, and the Sacred Nature of

Transgression Misunderstood

– “Misunderstanding the sanctity of transgression is one of the foundations of Christianity, even if at its peaks men under vows reach the unthinkable paradoxes that set them free, that over-reach all bounds. ”(Erotism 87)

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Eroticism• The Flesh in Sacrifice and in Love

– “It is the common business of sacrifice to bring life and death into harmony, to give death the upsurge of life, life the momentousness and the vertigo of death opening on to the unknown. Here life is mingled with death, but simultaneously death is a sign of life, a way into the infinite.” (Erotism 91)

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Eroticism• The Flesh as a Sign of Freedom

– “Flesh is the extravagance within us set up against the law of decency. Flesh is the born enemy of people haunted by Christian taboos, but if as I believe an indefinite and general taboo does exist, opposed to sexual liberty in ways depending on the time and the place, the flesh signifies a return to this threatening freedom.” (Erotism 91)

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Eroticism• The Flesh, Decency and the Taboo on Sexual Freedom

– “… I shall try to get at the fundamental inner experience transcending the flesh. I want first to turn your attention to the inner experience of the plethora which I said was revealed in the death of the sacrificial victim. Underlying eroticism is the feeling of something bursting, of the violence accompanying an explosion.” (Erotism 93)

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Chapter IX Sexual Plethora and Death

• Death and Continuity

– “The plethora of the cell ends in creative death, in the solution of the crisis in which appears the continuity of the new beings (aa and aaa), originally one and the same and now escaping into their final separation from each other.” (Erotism 93)

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Chapter IX Sexual Plethora and Death

• The Subjective Experience of Eroticism

– “Erotic activity is not always as overtly sinister as this, it is not always a crack in the system; but secretly and at the deepest level the crack belongs intimately to human sensuality and is the mainspring of pleasure. Fear of dying makes us catch our breath and in the same way we suffocate at the moment of crisis.” (Erotism 105)

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Chapter X Transgression in Marriage and in

Orgy – The sacred and the profane– “But the sacred world is only the

natural world in one sense. In another it transcends the earlier world made up of work and taboos. In this sense the sacred world is a denial of the profane, yet it also owes its character to the profane world it denies.” (Erotism 115)

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Chapter XI Christianity

– 2 ways • “The first responds to the desire to find

that lost continuity which we are stubbornly convinced is the essence of being. With the second, mankind tries to avoid the terms set to individual discontinuity, death, and invents a discontinuity unassaiable by death—that is the immortality of discontinuous beings.” (Erotism 119)

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Chapter XI Christianity

– Witche’s Sabbaths • “Eroticism fell within the bounds of the

profane and was at the same time condemned out of hand. The development of eroticism is parallel with that of uncleanness. Sacredness misunderstood is readily identified with Evil.” . (Erotism 119)

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Chapter XII The Object of Desire: Prostitution

– “The final aim of eroticism is fusion, all barriers gone, but its first stirrings are characterized by the presence of a desirable object .” (Erotism 129-130)

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Chapter XIII Beauty

– “Beauty has a cardinal importance, for ugliness cannot be spoiled, and to despoil is the essence of eroticism. Humanity implies the taboos, and in eroticism it and they are transgressed…. The greater the beauty, the more it is befouled.” (Erotism 145)

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