Negative Ecstasies by Biles Jeremy;Brintnall Kent L.;

Author:Biles, Jeremy;Brintnall, Kent L.; [Biles, Jeremy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780823265190
Publisher: Fordham UP
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Bataille is especially sophisticated here, for he does not imagine one set of poles without the other. In a word, his thought is rigorously dialectical. He invokes Hegel to acknowledge this, and it is clear that, as William James had earlier intuited of Hegel (in a state induced by nitrous oxide), Bataille sees the Hegelian dialectic as essentially mystical in structure and intent.15 And why not? According to Bataille, Hegel drew his knowledge of the dialectic from figures like Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme.16 Hence lines like this one: “We are faced with the paradox of an object which implies the abolition of the limits of all objects, of an erotic object.”17

In this same dialectical spirit, Bataille observes that transgression derives its power from the taboo; that the transgression does not remove the taboo but suspends, completes, and transcends it; and that taboos were put in place very early in the development of human society in order to enable work and the construction of a social order.18 Humanity, in fact, begins for Bataille in the act of saying “No” to the superabundance, violence, and nonrational, nonpragmatic nature of the real.19 Similarly, sexual taboos must not be misunderstood as simple superstitions. We cannot get rid of them, as our humanity depends on them.20 In a similar spirit again, he is also constantly reminding his readers that the dynamics of sexual arousal and desire depend on the taboo, on the forbidden and the hidden.

Once these dialectical binaries are set up, the question immediately arises how an individual or community might attempt to pass from the list on the left to the list on the right. We can isolate at least four basic answers to this question: one metaphysical, one sexual, one spiritual, and one ritual—that is, death, eroticism, mysticism, and sacrifice.

Death. For Bataille, death is quite simply the return of a discontinuous being back into the continuity of being, which remains completely unaffected by the death of individuals.21 We come and go. Reality remains what it is, always and everywhere.

Eroticism. Sexuality mirrors or replicates this death-as-continuity both biologically and psychologically. Biologically speaking, sexuality is clearly aimed at reproduction, and reproduction is the flipside of death (since without death there would be no need to reproduce). So sexuality brings more discontinuous beings into existence even as it arises from the fact that all of these beings will be absorbed back into continuity (the dialectic again). Psychologically speaking, sexuality is not eroticism. Eroticism is a much more complex and fundamentally human phenomenon for Bataille to the extent that it secretly seeks a temporary dissolution of those human constructions we call selfhood and society. This desire for continuity is signaled in the “decisive act” of stripping naked and the “obscene” intuition of “a sense of a state of continuity beyond individuality,” but it finds its fullest expression in the sexual ecstasy of orgasm—that “little death” of which the French so accurately speak.22 (English speakers, we might answer back with a grin, possess their own linguistic intuitions, with a more theological ejaculation: “Oh God, oh God, oh God!”)

Mysticism.

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