Erotism (1)

by Teresa Tan

1. 談玉儀 110/14/11 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

2. 談玉儀 2
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)

3. 談玉儀 3
Chapter VI
Murder, Hunting and War
•
Transgression
The forbidden
Death
Sacrifice in
Religious
cannibalism
Taboo
A barrier
against
desire
Eroticism

4. 談玉儀 4
Chapter VI
Murder, Hunting and War
• 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)

5. 談玉儀 5
Chapter VI
Murder, Hunting and War
•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

6. 談玉儀 6
Chapter VI
Murder, Hunting and War
•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)

7. 談玉儀 7
Chapter VI
Murder, Hunting and War
•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

8. 談玉儀 8
Chapter VI
Murder, Hunting and War
•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)

9. 談玉儀 9
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)

10. 談玉儀 10
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)

11. 談玉儀 11
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)

12. 談玉儀 12
Chapter VIII
From Religious Sacrifice to 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)

13. 談玉儀 13
Chapter VIII
From Religious Sacrifice to 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)

14. 談玉儀 14
Chapter VIII
From Religious Sacrifice to 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)

15. 談玉儀 15
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)

16. 談玉儀 16
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)

17. 談玉儀 17
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)

18. 談玉儀 18
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)

19. 談玉儀 19
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)

20. 談玉儀 20
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)

21. 談玉儀 21
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)