![]() (Violence, in this case, is synonymous with ferocious passion.) For Bataille, an experience of the sacred is simultaneously “divine ecstasy and extreme horror” ( Ecce Monostrum, Jeremy Biles, 2007, p.8). Thus an experience of the sacred occurs through a violent rupture of boundaries that releases one into a state of simultaneous ecstasy and anguish. Moreover, Bataille defines the sacred as the “prodigious effervescence of life that, for the sake of duration, the order of things holds in check, and that this holding changes into a breaking loose, that is, into violence.” ( Theory of Religion, p.52). Eroticism abolishes our established human confines and transports us to an entirely other realm. This to Bataille is ultimate freedom – which brings us back to eroticism, since the “whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives” ( Eroticism, p.4). ![]() Instead sacrifice “destroys an object’s real ties of subordination it draws the victim out of the world of utility and restores it to that of unintelligible caprice” ( ibid, p.43). Sacrifice involves destruction, but it is not annihilation. This naturally brings us to Bataille’s concept of sacrifice. Here death is associated with intimacy, since intimacy is the “absence of individuality”. When Bataille talks of death here, he is primarily alluding not to bodily death, but to death of the ego, and the death of prohibitions. On the other hand, Bataille equates death to “continuity of being” (p.2), because death “jerks us out of a tenacious obsession with the lastingness of our discontinuous being” (p.4). According to Bataille, our sense of individuality stems from our use of tools – the literal separation of us from objects. There is a void, a gulf, a discontinuity, between people. To Bataille, discontinuity is part of our experience of normal, everyday life. Paradoxically, though, the “fundamental meaning of reproduction is … the key to eroticism,” since reproduction implies the existence of “discontinuous beings” (p.2). Unlike regular sex, eroticism is a ‘psychological quest’ independent of the natural goal of reproduction. Georges Batailleīataille defines ‘eroticism’ as “assenting to life up to the point of death” ( Eroticism: Death & Sensuality, 1957, p.1). To Bataille and Klein, pure experience is the void, and the void is utter freedom through transformative sacrificial practices we are able to experience a continuity comparable only to that of death, and for a moment become unrestricted: limitless, and without reservation. ![]() Both thinkers investigated the concept of ‘the void’, and were devoted to the notion of self-destruction as a psychological quest toward the realization of the purest experience. Although they frequently portrayed their viewpoints in unique and novel ways, their underlying philosophies were substantially similar. In this essay, I propose that they had similarly poignant views regarding the numinous, or experience of the sacred, focusing on specific ideas pertaining to sacrifice, death, and eroticism. Yves Klein, the so-called ‘minimalist’ performance artist and monochromatic painter was equally controversial, and eloquently communicated his ideas about the connection between eroticism and the sanctified. Bataille, a fluent and often controversially graphic philosopher, related the erotic to the sacred through the imminence of death. SUBSCRIBE NOW Modern French Philosophy Ecstasy Through Self-Destruction Danelle Gallo compares the ecstacies of Georges Bataille and Yves Klein.įrench philosopher Georges Bataille (1897-1962) and French artist Yves Klein (1928-1962) were passionately fascinated with death, eroticism, the sacred, and sacrifice.
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