Collaboration: Two Essays On Eroticism?
Audrey 2's "The End Of The Erotic" and Thomas J. Pellarin's "The Other Side Of Eros"
This is a collaboration between The Nostomodern Review by Thomas J. Pellarin and Audrey 2's Little Shop Of Philosophical Horrors by Audrey 2 on the concept of the erotic. You can follow @thenostomodernreview and @x_e_l_a2 on Instagram.
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The End Of The Erotic by Audrey 2
We never grasp the human individual—what he signifies—except in a delusive way: humanity always contradicts itself; it goes suddenly from goodness to base cruelty, from extreme modesty to extreme immodesty, from the most attractive appearance to the most odious. We often speak of the world of humanity, as if it had some unity. In reality, humanity forms worlds, seemingly related but actually alien to one another. Indeed, sometimes an immeasurable distance separates them: thus, the criminal world is, in a sense, farther from a convent of Carmelites than one star is from another.
– Georges Bataille’s The Accursed Share: Volume 2 (1993)
From On The Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche speaks of the way language itself is an effect of power—that the master has the ability to designate what is and what is not; hence, the faculty of judgement is being rendered entirely through power relations (Nietzsche, 2013). This is, of course, how Nietzsche views the creation of moral values: through the conflict between the theoretical master and slave, and that the master is the affirming subject whose values are then negated by the slave. Typical readings of On The Genealogy of Morals privilege the master over the slave—that we have to become the master in order to escape slave morality. All this does however is reproduce the good/evil binary that Nietzsche is trying to overcome; hence, there must be a third option something that goes beyond master/slave, good/evil, true/false, erotic/animal, etcetera.
“Thought itself is libidinal”—Lyotard proclaims—for ultimately, what matters with thought is not how its claims match up to reality, but ultimately its force on the world (Lyotard, 2020). Nietzsche’s master is the libidinal thinker because what it designates as “good” and “evil” does not need to be true in its claims about the world—even presuming if moral claims have aspects of truth to them. Rather, it is by the force of the master that they are able to enforce themselves on the world. Bataille says that man forms worlds—worlds alien from other worlds. One of these worlds being the world of the erotic, but it is this world of the erotic—the world that separates man from animal and from the world of work—that has disappeared along with sexuality.
Man, however, is not reverting to the animal; rather, with the advent of machinic sexuality, he no longer has a need for the erotic. The master’s role in determining the taboos of society has disappeared as they have been liberated, just not how the subject of sexual liberation hoped for. What do good/evil, master/slave, true/false, erotic/animal mean under hyperreality? Nothing. They fold in on themselves—unable to signify an ulterior state of affairs beyond the empty wasteland of the desert of the real. The worlds Bataille speaks of are not alien to one another; rather, they contain and encompass each other just like how the map encompasses the empire’s territory in Borge’s famous fable.
It is J.G Ballard’s novel Crash—and Baudrillard—who show us the world of the disappearance of the erotic: our world. J.G Ballard, in a later introduction, added in 1995, wrote that he wanted Crash to be a warning: “Will modern technology provide us with hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies?” (Ballard, 2004). Crash is supposed to represent the horror that comes with merging sex and technology in a dark neon-lit world.
Internet pornography predates youtube, but is this the hitherto undreamed-of means for tapping our own psychopathologies as Ballard warned us of? No, pornography is only ever empty satisfactions. Even with the rise of VR pornography, it is never the perfect system of untapped desire being pumped into the subject. Ballard has this picture of the world where everyone immediately has access to what they want as if they know what it is that they want—the subject can be satisfied instantly, according to Ballard. It is as if Reich has returned once more as he believed neurosis was caused by the inability to have an orgasm, but if Ballard is right, and the subject does have instant access to satisfaction, then neurosis would be a thing of the past. This is of course, fantasy—the fantasy of sexual liberation. Bataille may be looked upon as a theorist of sexual liberation but this would be completely wrong. If sexuality is to be “liberated”, it must go beyond its current limits implying a transgression of the law; however, from Bataille we learn that the transgression does not abolish the law—rather, it is often an accepted part of the law that tells us what the limits of the law are (Bataille, 2012).
Crash, for Baudrillard however, instead of being a Canutist warning about the coming merger of sex and technology, which will free all our desires, actually represents the hyperreality of sexuality—a sexuality which requires no freeing because it has no referent to free itself from. “After Borges, but in another register, Crash is the first great novel of the universe of simulation”, Baudrillard says (Baudrillard, 2020). For in Crash, the body becomes a substance constantly deconstructed by technology: symbolic wounds replace genital orifices. The entire language of the erotic is replaced with the functional and mechanic. “No ass, no dick, no cunt but: the anus, the rectum, the vulva, the penis, coitus”(Baudrillard, 2020). Sexuality ceases to be about sex but rather production—machines coupling together. For instance, our first description of Vaughn’s sexuality is as follows:
For Vaughn the car-crash and his own sexuality had made their final marriage. I remember him at night with nervous young women in the crushed rear compartments of abandoned cars in breakers’ yards, and their photographs in the postures of uneasy sex acts. Their tight faces and strained thighs were lit by his polaroid flash, like startled survivors of a submarine disaster. These aspiring whores, whom Vaughn met in the all-night cafes and supermarkets of London Airport, were the first cousins of the patients illustrated in his surgical text-books. During his studied courtship of injured women, Vaughn was obsessed with the buboes of gas bacillus infections, by facial injuries and genital wounds.
– J.G Ballard’s Crash (1973)
For Vaughn, his sexual obsession becomes the function of the body and how it operates when confronted with the car crash. But, the unity of sex and death in Crash is not a ritualistic sex act, like the slaughter of the children at the end of Sodom—there is no intimacy to it in Crash. It is not about orgasm but rather simple discharge. For instance, in a video produced by the BBC, for teaching Sex Ed to KS2 pupils, which is children around 7–11 year old, sex is described as the following:
An erection happens when the nerves surrounding the penis become active, causing the muscles to relax and more blood to flow into the penis. This makes it stiff and hard. When a woman is aroused, there is an increase in blood flow to the vagina and vulva, and the clitoris, which is part of the vulva, swells. Fluids are also released into the vagina to make it slippery. To make a baby through sex, when both grown-ups are ready and give consent, the man’s penis goes into the woman’s vagina, and together they move back and forth.
Similarly in Crash, the sexual act remains functional:
Vaugh drew his fingers from the girl’s vulva and anus, rotated his hips and inserted his penis in her vagina. In the chromium ashtray I saw the girl’s left breast and erect nipple. In the vinyl window gutter I saw deformed section of Vaughan’s thighs and her abdomen forming a bizarre anatomical junction. As each one approached his hips kicked into the girl, driving his penis into her vagina, his hands splaying her buttocks to reveal her anus as the yellow light filled the car.
Sexuality turned into a purely functional act; it renders the transgressive acts of eroticism worthless as it becomes about the pure reproduction of sexuality rather than its destruction or the abolition of its taboos. Discharge rather than orgasm; this is the effect of sexual liberation—it ceases to hold any meaning beyond itself as sexual simulacrum. Sexual politics seems to be more prominent than ever before, especially with the map of sexuality being wider than ever before. The popular Queer-theory response is that the expansion of sexual labels does not liberate us from sexuality; rather, it simply reproduces the same subjectivity as other sexual subjects. Ontologically, is there anything different between a demisexual subject and a bisexual subject? Not exactly, as sexuality, of course, manifests at the unconscious level. The separation of sexuality into distinct domains, worlds even, is the pure reproduction of sexuality.
Beyond the technical language of Crash, as you might be aware, there is the replacement of the orifice with the symbolic scar. There is a famous scene in Cronenberg’s film adaptation where our POV-character, James Ballard, precedes to have sex with his wife’s car crash scar, the scar taking the place of the genital orifice. “'[S]exual desire' is never anything but the possibility bodies have of combining and exchanging their signs.” (Baudrillard, 2020), Baudrillard says.
Bodies in Crash have no referent as they find themselves smashed together with cars; instead, they are mere signs to be exchanged with other bodily signs—you must read the signs of the body. But there is no fighting in the sense of a struggle for satisfaction. Take Love Island, for instance. It attempts to be this primitive struggle for kinship; in Episode 2, they introduce Davide, who gets to couple up with any woman of his choice. So now all the men are terrified he might choose their woman. In primitive societies, kinship was this defining feature of social relations: it could be done for economic reasons; in Love Island, this has already disappeared as the competitor does not need their partner in order to succeed economically. If dating apps are the tragedy, then Love Island is the farce. Love Island is Sodom but after the orgy, meaning Love Island takes on the same function as Sodom, but now because the orgy is over, it loses any of the meaning of either Sade’s or Pasolini’s work. You will not have Gemma turn to the camera and proclaim, “we fascists are the only true anarchists.” Or Luca telling her that he “wants to set the world ablaze with crime.” Sodom is a space where the orgy takes place as a transgressive act against the law. Instead, we get this incessant demand for each contestant to articulate their desires with the phrase “so what’s your type?” Answers are usually something empty, like “brunette” or the standard “like big ass.” As if that is all there is to sexuality—this is what happens when sexuality is separated from psychoanalysis.
In the first episode, for instance, there is some drama because one girl asks the guy, who the public decided she would couple up with, “what’s your type?” He responds with something along the lines “I like a girl with a big ass”; but she responds, “I do not have a big ass”. He attempts to explain himself by stating “not like Kim K big but decently sized big—your ass is fine.” This is a paraphrase, but it is the gist of the conversation. It is as if they do not know that love is giving something you do not have to someone who does not want it. This is sexuality liberated—liberated so that it may die—or sexuality without an analyst, so that everyone can go on living their lives because there is nothing wrong with them and everyone must know what they want. Love Island is the death throes of Freud. The sexual no longer needs to be something taboo as it gets churned into an empty positivist mess of basic genital attraction. Hence, Baudrillard says “we are all transsexuals symbolically” (Baudrillard, 2009). Baudrillard spells Transsexuality with two Ss, so it is quite literally Trans Sexuality, because he is not writing about Trans people as we know it or just using the old term, etcetera.
Transsexuality, for Baudrillard, is transcending (i.e. going beyond sexuality). It is about the signs of sex, and for Baudrillard, these signs have found themselves separated from any real reference other than itself, so sexuality loses any meaning. “The myth of sexual liberation is still alive then”, he says, “but at the level of the imaginary it is the transsexual myth with its androgyny that holds sway.” (Baudrillard, 2009). Sexual liberation, by taking on the imagery of androgyny, then leads to the disappearance of sexuality as its substance is replaced with pure reproduction of the concept of sexuality. Obviously, none of this has led to the disappearance of resistance to sexual liberation or the end of conservatism. Baudrillard has this remark in his essay, Transsexuality, that ”after the orgy, then a masked ball.” (Baudrillard, 2009). The signs of the body are their own pure simulacrum. The Scar becomes the vagina but it is neither the scar nor the vagina. The body can be whatever it wants because it is the mass grave of signs, after all.
Plastic surgery, for instance, is the same as Crash; it is the reconstruction of the body-as-sign in order to create a new simulacrum of the body. Baudrillard, who as we all know invented Facebook, takes on the imagery of the body as the central concept to understanding sexuality. Baudrillard, unfortunately, was only alive for a year of Facebook, so he did not get to see his creation truly prosper. RIP Baudrillard you would’ve loved BeReal. BeReal is the Charles Fourier to Facebook’s Stalin. Nick Land, for instance, says his change towards NRx/Dark Enlightenment begins because of what he calls “the Facebook era”. Rather than this mass destruction of subjectivity, it gets captured more effectively than ever before with Facebook and other social media but never perfectly (Vastabrupt, 2018).
Touted as “a new and unique way to discover who your friends really are in their daily life”, BeReal ends up as the same despotic demand from the master that you will be real. Supposedly, it overcomes the problem: with Instagram that everything is fake, premeditated and produced to be perfect. But, the image of social media is not the simulacrum; as Baudrillard wrote more than one book, he has more than one idea. The Ecstasy Of Communication, for instance, is basically about Facebook/Instagram/Snapchat/BeReal/MySpace/Twitter/Google+ and so on but written in 1987. That is always the classic thing with these theorists, whether it is Baudrillard, Adorno or Marx—it is always, wow, they wrote this 40 years ago, isn’t that so insane? It is almost as if they understood how the world works.
The ecstasy of communication is what replaces the drama of alienation and the spectacle. Instead of a state upon which the subject performs their symbolic subjectivity, rather, there is the constant bombardment of information and communication and a lack of any depth to the subject—complete immanence. “Obscene is that which eliminates the gaze, the image and every representation.” (Baudrillard, 2012). Hence, Twitter is still included despite not being dominated by images as much. “Today the scene and the mirror have given way to a screen and a network. There is no longer any transcendence or depth, but only the immanent surface of operations unfolding, the smooth and functional surface of communication.” Baudrillard writes (Baudrillard, 2012).
There is such an inclusion into the world of communication that any outside to it ceases to be real, which is how Baudrillard defines schizophrenia in this short essay. The schizophrenic is not out of touch with reality; rather, he is a pure screen—he possesses an absolute proximity to the world of communication (Baudrillard, 2012). Like Judge Screheber, for instance: the representative of man eternally bound to his symbols (Lacan, 2006). It is much more about the topology of how we understand these structures; alienation, for instance, usually presupposes a sort of outside we can return to—a previous non-alienated subjectivity or even a progressive teleology where alienated subjectivity is overcome.
Baudrillard is quick to throw out the mirror stage, for instance, but I am not too sure as it does not come with those other issues of alienation. There is nothing to return to, other than a stupid child who cannot survive in the world, and as we all know, for Lacan, there is no perfect whole subjectivity who functions without issue, etcetera. Žižek, of course locates the logic of utopian socialism (i.e. Fourier, Owens, Saint-Simon) in this: that it tries to create this society without the symptom.
The way that Baudrillard writes about machinic subjectivity in Crash is perfectly applicable to how Deleuze and Guattari create their machinic unconscious model as a revolutionary theory of subjectivity. Baudrillard does make an explicit reference to them in the opening of his Crash essay. Baudrillard calls the body in Crash a body without organs—its a body without any organising principle, entirely subordinated to the mark; that is, the reworking of the body (Baudrillard, 2020).
Deleuze and Guattari open Anti-Oedipus with the following: “It is at work everywhere, functioning smoothly at times, at other times in fits and starts. It breathes, it heats, it eats. It shits and fucks.” (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009). The subject in Deleuze and Guattari is off-to-the-side they say; it is on the periphery. It is the machines at the centre of analysis, since it is desire that is in the machines and not in the subject. (Deleuze and Guattari, 2009). For Deleuze and Guattari, this is a revolutionary way of understanding desire as it removes all the blockages imposed by psychoanalysis and society like Oedipus. It fits and it starts. The machinic unconscious is constantly reproducing itself and its subject in order to begin over again. The whole cycle stops, everything goes silent and then it begins again.
The whole point of the first half of Dolce and Gabbana's Capitalism And Schizophrenia project is to show how our desires can be the cause of revolutionary action. Importantly not like the Freudo-Marxists—well, not entirely—they want to fix Freudo-Marxism and create the proper combination of psychoanalysis and marxism by theorising this complete “subject” who produces their own desires in such a way that avoids the trappings of fascism—as, of course, fascism for Deleuze and Guattari is caused by the subject's desires. Whether a more Lacanian Guattari is possible is still something that interests me, because in his diary he speaks of going to Lacan and being very cautious and saying oh the objet a is the desiring machine and there will still be room for analysts. Lacan responded to him saying he does not care; he has spent his entire career denouncing analysts (Guattari, 2006). Guattari is arguably the Lacanian of the duo; he is writing about all the stuff Lacan brings into psychoanalysis: language, semiotics—even the return to Freud. Of course, Guattari differs from Lacan’s ideas in all those fields, but it is ultimately the notion of desire as lack which separates them. “Desire does not depend on a lack, to desire is not to be lacking something, and desire does not refer to any law; desire produces.” (Guattari, 2009), Guattari says in an interview about Anti-Oedipus. But it is in his short essay, To Have Done Away With the Massacre of the Body, that we get a proper picture of the function of desire in the revolution. He writes:
“This desire for a fundamental liberation, if it is to be a truly revolutionary action, requires that we move beyond the limits of our “person,” that we overturn the notion of the “individual,” that we transcend our sedentary selves, our “normal social identities,” in order to travel the boundaryless territory of the body, in order to live in the flux of desires that lie beyond sexuality, beyond the territory and the repertories of normality.” (Guattari, 2009).
It is in this that we find Crash. The destruction of our identities within the machinic production of desire in the creation of a boundaryless body is exactly how Baudrillard reads Crash. Not as Ballard’s warns of the merger between technology and desire; rather, the Body becomes a mere sign in the exchange of signs, these signs having nothing at the base of them or any substance but hyperreality. Sexuality becomes the exchange of signs. Not a subject who is free to desire as they please but rather a sign in the exchange of signs. This is not, of course, in the same sense that Baudrillard argued capitalist society had replaced commodity exchange with symbolic exchange in his early writings, but that when liberated of any referent, sexuality becomes a matter of semiotics.
The destruction of subjectivity in the nihilistic vortex of the car crash is almost exactly how Lyotard critiques Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus—that the production of desire across the libidinal band is never separable from the system in which it exists. The libidinal band being a mobius band—one sided but not closed (Lyotard, 2020), meaning that libidinal intensities are never processed outside the system in which they are affirmed. Hence, all libidinal economies are also political economies because the two cannot be separated.
The popular conception of the libidinal economy is the reading spearheaded by the accelerationists both L/acc and Nick Land—that desire cannot be separated from capitalism because the libidinal affirmations produced under capitalism are within capitalism and not an outside force that will cause revolutions. This is how the famous section in Chapter 3, where Lyotard says the proletariat enjoys capitalism is interpreted—the proletariat’s desires are within capitalism and not beyond it (Lyotard, 2020).
Land, of course, then says desire is so mapped onto capitalism that we cannot even discuss whether or not we even want it (Land, 2019). Mark Fisher and the L/acc, however, take Land’s provocation and turn it into a sort of left-wing project, focusing on the idea that we cannot go outside of capitalism instead we must go through and produce postcapitalism from within capital (Fisher, 2019).
In both of these readings, desire still remains at the basis of political praxis whilst I would read Lyotard differently. Desire cannot be part of the political process as Lyotard recognises desire is immediately a part of production within political economy and there is not the region where desire would be free; hence, “there is no subversive region.” (Lyotard, 2020). Although Baudrillard is highly critical of Libidinal Economy, his reading of Crash is present with Lyotard’s account of desire. In Crash there is an absolute immanence between the body and technology; there are not bodies and technology—rather they are conjoined within the car crash in order for the reproduction of sexuality and desire to continue. This is why Baudrillard says “only the wounded body exists symbolically.” (Baudrillard, 2020).
Since the wounded body opens up a near-infinite number of regions to invest libidinally, what is left of eroticism then? Whilst Bataille speaks of the different worlds and the separation between erotic and animal sexuality, an outside and an inside is not what we have. Eroticism is supposed to be the world repressed by taboos, a secretive form of existence that cannot exist at the same time as the world of work. Crash poses the opposite: the car crash circulates along the libidinal band reproducing desires in a nihilistic vortex of machinic production without any depth to the subject, just reproduction. So hang on tight and spit on me.
Citations
Friedrich Nietzsche, On The Genealogy Of Morals (London: Penguin Books, 2013)
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020)
J.G Ballard, Crash (London: Harper Perennial, 2004)
Georges Bataille, Eroticism (London: Penguin Books, 2012)
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2020)
Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London UK: Verso, 2009)
Nick Land, ‘Meltdown’ in (ed.) Robin Mackay & Ray Brassier, Fanged Noumena: Collected Writings 1987-2007 (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019)
Vastabrupt. ‘Ideology, Intelligence, and Capital: An Interview with Nick Land’, Vastabrupt (2018) (https://vastabrupt.com/2018/08/15/ideology-intelligence-and-capital-nick-land/ - accessed 21/07/22)
Jean Baudrillard, The Ecstasy of Communication (California: Semiotext(e), 2012)
Jacques Lacan, Ecrits (USA: Norton & Company: 2006)
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus (London: Penguin Books, 2009)
Félix Guattari ‘Journal 1971, continued’ in (ed.) Stéphane Nadaud, The Anti-Œdipus Papers (California: Semiotext(e), 2006)
Félix Guattari ‘Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ in (ed.) Sylvère Lotringer, Chaosophy: Texts and Interviews (California: Semiotext(e), 2009)
Mark Fisher ‘Terminator Vs Avatar’ in (ed.) Robin Mackay & Armen Avanessian, #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader (Falmouth: Urbanomic, 2019)
Copyright © Audrey 2, 2022. All rights reserved.
The Other Side Of Eros by Thomas J. Pellarin
“During the period in my life when I was most unhappy, I used to frequent—for reasons hard to justify, and without a trace of sexual attraction—a woman whom I only found appealing because of her ridiculous appearance: as though my lot required in these circumstances a bird of ill omen to keep me company.”
In Georges Bataille’s 1947 novella, Blue Of Noon, the unnamed narrator is suffering from depression; his marriage and his children are things he cannot bear to confront, and he spends most of the novel in the company of women who he does not sleep with. Instead, he drinks with them, consoles them, and cries with them, because he despises his life; however, he cannot bring himself to die nor to make things better for himself, and instead feels he must endure, as if his exile from warmth and concreteness is his punishment for destroying the old gentleness of his life, given that he has a wife and two children, and yet which he deprives them because of his weakness and so he deserves the full counterpoint of their loathing—and his own self-hatred—as his sin.
As Bataille writes, in the translation from French by Harry Mathews, “My wife, whom I had shamefully abandoned, had been worried enough to call me up from England; meanwhile, forgetting about her, I had been dragging my stupor and my rottenness from one vile place to the next. I started crying again as hard as I could. My sobbing had no point to it at all. The emptiness was enduring. An idiot who soaks himself in alcohol and weeps—that was what I was ludicrously becoming. To escape the feeling that I was a forgotten outcast, the one cure was to swallow drink after drink. I kept hoping to get the better of my health, perhaps even of a life that had no justification. I had a notion that drink would kill me, but such ideas were vague: I might go on drinking and thus die; or I might stop drinking…For the time being, nothing made any difference.”
This novel is surprising in Bataille’s oeuvre; the transgression is not sexual here but ennui—it is not sensual but depressive. The erotic element—the ugliness—is the sheer bitumen of despair, which the characters partake in without relief, and every attempt to escape from, whether into foreign countries or into drink, becomes inescapably pathetic; nolens volens, they are trapped in a nightmare of their own making, within a transgression otherwise known as their lives, which they teeter close to death but are unable to consciously suicide and thus impotently fail to embrace.
The death drive, as Freud explains, is similar to the popular notion of the call of the void—the urge one feels, when hovering over a tall height, to leap off into oblivion—because it involves the chance of returning to biological zero, to the final origin of life, to dust from dust. If the warmly erotic is a transgression against the impulse of life, then this cold eroticism is a transgression against death: one wishes to die and yet one resists from doing so, only to prolong the agony of this life, which so tortures the erotic like a morose and more-agonising perversion.
Likewise, in Albert Camus’ 1928 novella, A Happy Death, we find a similar protagonist who, having shot and thus inherited the fortune of a wealthy nihilist, spends his newfound wealth on a long-winded attempt to die. In such novels, the erotic and the sexual are reduced to impotence: there is not enough sex in the world to cover the despair of these lives, and so they never indulge in it; and thrown against life, or the other side of eros, in such stories is thanatos—death—which the characters are hopelessly magnetised towards in a ever-slow spiralling of night walks and solemn hermitage.
And Camus’ protagonist spends most of his days alone, recalling memories of other people and life, but he cannot bring himself to participate in them, given his grief and impotence towards the act of living—an act which he nevertheless cannot separate himself from, and so must gradually destroy, by methods of drink, isolation and despair. He instead watches them with a distanced eye, as if he were anything but human, in the throes of a transformation not unlike Kafka’s poor Gregor Samsa, wherefore the previous intimacies of life have begun to lose their colour, so that only forgetfulness and distance remains, and the distances closes to their instincts to naturally close with death.
As Camus writes, in the translation from French by Richard Howard, “It seemed to Mersault that there was something distraught in his eyes. He dismissed the stupid notion that occurred to him. But everything was whirling in his mind. Before ordering anything he jumped up and ran to his hotel, went to his room and threw himself on the bed. Something sharp was throbbing in his temples. His heart empty, his belly tight, Mersault’s rebellion exploded. Images of his life rushed before his eyes. Something inside him clamoured for the gestures of women, for arms that opened, and for warm lips. From the depth of the painful night of Prague, amid smells of vinegar and sentimental tunes, mounted towards him the anguished countenance of the old baroque world which had accompanied his fever. Breathing with difficulty, seeing nothing, moving mechanically, he sat up on his bed.”
However, there are also women in this novel, like Mersault’s wife, Lucienne; their narrative purpose is to prove the futility to Mersault of his rebellion against this drive towards death, to deny the potency of his lack of desire for anything in this world, save for the perverse courtship of a death which must slip in slowly, like a sly lover in a final and desperate passion of an otherwise frigid night.
The man is always single-minded in his drive towards death, and cold in his sad logic, because it begs him to lose himself and he treats it seriously, such that if he were sincerely alone, he would quickly tumble into nothingness in the austere nature of his thoughts; but here, the entrance of one woman or several of them always displaces him enough so that he is taken out of his melancholia and thrusts him, typically as a shock, into a temporary warmth of life by the condition of his concern for her or them—inevitably, it is only a minor comfort.
Their relationship might be summarised in the cliche that if woman did not exist, man would only live to die; the opposite is not true for women, but if men are delusional enough to believe that women might save them, then women are delusional too in going along with it. Mersault dies nonetheless—however, unlike Bataille’s protagonist, he dies happy and naturally, with Lucienne at his side.
“I was obviously sick—sick in an extremely disagreeable way. I sank back into a kind of dreadful sleep: things all started becoming unstuck—dark, hideous, shapeless things that it was absolutely necessary to nail down. There was no way of doing this. My life was falling to pieces like rotten matter…”
In Gabrielle Wittkop’s, 1972 erotic novella, The Necrophiliac, as translated from French by Don Bapst, the demented Luciene is an owner of an antique store, and every few months, he takes to defiling the graves of the recently-deceased, so as to commit acts of passion against them, while they begin to rot and during which he feels, they bring him closest to the bare truth of the eroticism inherent in the transgression of every life against the innate seeds of death.
In his diary entries, spanning across three years, he always notes the scents of bombyx and decay, which pervades his apartment and strengthens with each day a corpse stays there, and he treats each encounter with such corpses, within his coffin-like bed, as a last act of tenderness, or as a penultimate kindness, as if he were liberating the bodies of the deceased one last time of death before their commingling with non-existence—offering them an essence of his life as a gift, for something which they no can longer contain within themselves—and before their final destiny into the obscurity of the Seine, which he disappears them into.
As Luciene explains in a January 7 entry: “Sex is spoken of in all its forms except one. Necrophilia isn’t tolerated by governments nor approved by questioning youth. Necrophiliac love: the only sort that is pure. Because even amor intellectualis—that great white rose—waits to be paid in return. No counterpart for the necrophiliac in love, the gift that he gives of himself awakens no enthusiasm. From time to time—most often after my nocturnal outings—the local press mobilizes an opinion. They go so far as to come up with ridiculous hypotheses, evoking former medical students searching in the Clamart Cemetery for specimens to dissect or Victorian-era resurrectionists. A particularly spirited hack didn’t hesitate to suppurate cannibalistic orgies, something like the amusements of l’ogre Minski.”
Wittkop is only partially-successful in her transgression here; the true necrophiliac novel would not occur between the living and the dead, but two bodies of the dead, with no interference whatsoever with any warmth from the living. A pure and cold eroticism would take place—an ultimate transgression between death and death—as a perverse alteration of the natural order of things, laid bare in the most disturbed way, between two impotent bodies, made twistedly potent by the essence of their unnatural sin.
I do not believe such a novel has been written; and I have no intention to ever write one, but I can observe with indifference the boldness of its premise: Bataille and Camus did not go far enough, and neither did Wittkop, because in all cases, the protagonists of each story are still unable to die unnaturally, and commit their transgressions while still living—the act of sin is never consummated to completion, except, perhaps, indirectly, in the final entries of Wittkop’s Lucien, who incestously mingles the bodies of two siblings together, violated in death because they attempted to save each other from drowning in their final gasps for life. And opposed to the impotency of hot eroticism—as drawn against the impossibility of fulfilling the ultimate and final transgressive act—we enter a scene of cold eroticism in its simplest form: the stillness of death which absolves all previous transgressions. Like the Crucifixion, there is nothing left to comment, when every hand of the living has left them to be, and time erodes the flesh and everything else; in a naturalness against the perverse transgression of life, there is a negation of that little death—or a yin-yang orgasm—which awakens briefly, in contradiction, as that little life.
“Her breath issued from her like a moan, as if she were suddenly beseeching: "I love you." She pressed her cool mouth against mine. I was in a state of intolerable joy. When her tongue licked mine, it was so wonderful I might have wished my life over.”
Every instance of conventional eroticism, no matter how transgressive, is boringly human; if the erotic is a dance between individuals, between groups, it nevertheless adopts and weaves through time with a human shape, such that its most grotesque examples can still be identified with the human, compared with the base and elevated into the high, and one cannot escape the notion of love, even if perverse, which pervades even the slightest sense of the erotic: we are inescapably lulled by the gravity of its desire.
But what of other erotic modes, beyond the hot and impossible eroticism of life and the cold and possible eroticism of death? Can there be a lukewarm eroticism between unhuman things, like stones, mountains and the seas? Is there not, for instance, a transgression of the earth by the roots of every plant, which penetrate into it, and which, are likewise received? Is time not itself a transgression—and if so, could time be erotic if it transgresses the present? Time might stand as a perpetual defilement of things—a destruction of the present for its own sake—which in turns becomes the new present, like a massive orgy in spacetime, and desecrated constantly in its virgin flesh.
If the source of the erotic is thus a matter of perspective, then everything has an erotic element to it; alongside the transcendental faculties of the mind, which log into comprehensibility reality as we understand, then perhaps there is an erotic faculty, which undoubtedly we must possess to even speak of this, under which everything else, no matter how disparate, might too be inundated with reason and become reified by the human mind as a infinite source of transgression. From there, everything else becomes a source of the erotic: a negative and competing source of life.
Copyright © Thomas J. Pellarin, 2022. All rights reserved.