BATAILLE AND THE EROTICS OF THE REAL (original) (raw)

2015, Parrhesia 24 · 2015 · 312-335

In this article I consider how the erotics of the real, of Bataille, might contribute to the ethics of the real, of Lacan, and also to the genealogy of morals disclosed by Nietzsche. Bataille was a key intellectual figure in twentieth-century Paris, closely associated with the initial inspiration of French Nietzscheanism and personally connected with Lacan, the “French Freud.” Bataille’s work can even be viewed as a unique synthesis of the Dionysian wisdom of Nietzsche’s philosophy and the growing awareness of the sexual real made possible by the pioneering works of Freud. Combining Bataille’s anthropological understanding of a taboo-transgression correlation with Lacan’s analytic episteme of the real, symbolic, and imaginary, I trace a recessive loss of the erotic function of religion, ethics, and the sacred through the Platonic, Christian, and Modern Science epochs that Nietzsche’s revaluations of the Good also tend to centre on. I suggest that an ethics of the real, of unconscious desire as a configuration of the drives, can be better served by restoring a living openness to the originary erotics observable in the culture of pre-Platonic Greeks. This erotics manifests most famously perhaps in their polymorphous libidinal structures, their stories of the gods, and the festivals of Dionysos to host the works of their greatest tragic poets. What emerges from this extended genealogical analysis is an understanding of why the brothels of Paris, for instance, can become for Bataille true churches again.