Bataille's Eroticism: Outside From Within the Body

Bataille's Eroticism: Outside From Within the Body

Ervik Cejvan

Bataille's notion of eroticism, an idea of an embodied transcendence, emerges as a fidelity to Nietzsche's insistence on spiritual and ethical transformation in the wake of the death of God. According to Nietzsche, with the transcendent Outside annihilated and the human existence fallen into Void the difference between transcendence and immanence is reduced to bare inexistence. However, I suggest that Bataille's eroticism aims to recreate the lost Outside from within the body; plunging into the Impossible of the Void for a Chance of there being Something rather than Nothing. But, is it possible to recreate the lost Outside from within? If so, it would put the spiritual into a domain of the carnal, which, I think, entails Jacques Lacan's notion of the Real; an ex-sistence which cannot be pronounced or symbolized, only embodied or rather, that which is unconsciously embedded in human existence. If Bataille's eroticism can be recognized as a strategy for production of the Real from within the body, we are perhaps dealing with a certain transcendent domain of meaning of which science knows nothing about. This is effectively what Lacan late in his work in the seventies marked as a limit of any scientific knowledge, including psychoanalysis: the ontological status of the Real. The Real revealed by science thus never abolishes the ethical necessity of the Outside. But, if the Outside, as a condition of human ethical existence is abolished by the death of God, enonunced by Nietzsche, or by another equally disastrous event, if there is no possibility to recreate the Outside, if there is only a being of a bundle of perceptions, then, I argue, we are indeed forced to face Nietzsche's challenge: to deal with the collapse of purely spiritual meaning and existence, while neuroscience and evolutionary biology reveals how much of the spiritual is actually pathological and, ultimately, “organic”. However, the Chance is not abolished nor is the Creation impossible after the death of God; as “spiritual” and “religious” designates a will to transcend the conditioned existence. Or, the human being's will to reach the (Bataillean) impossible is still a possibility – in the words of Montagne, quoted by Foucault in History of Madness: “Reason has taught me that if you condemn in this way anything whatever as definitely false and quite impossible, you are claiming to know the frontier and bounds of the will of God and the power of Nature our Mother; it taught me also that there is nothing in the whole world madder than bringing matters down to the measure of our own capacities and potentialities.” ….