Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

eplaces language, where language becomes experience. For Bataille, this horizon is
situated in “Eroticism,” at the point of fusion between pleasure and pain. By borrowing a
parallel image from the “most violent of poets,” Arthur Rimbaud, 4 he argues that these
limitless possibilities, which are attainable only through eroticism, are also reachable
through literature:
Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism—to the
blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it
leads us to death, and through death and continuity. Poetry is
eternity; the sun matched with the sea. (Erotism 25)
This notion of fusion between two opposing forces—the sun and the sea, or more
specifically in the writings of Bataille, death and sexuality—echoes the notion of
transgression as blurring traditionally accepted distinctions between the high and the low,
the denotative and connotative modes of language, object and subject, and the signifier
and signified, whose final aim is the rapprochement between a philosophy of life and the
act of writing as experienced through creation and Eroticism.
As mentioned at the beginning of this study, transgressions of various sorts have
always formed part of the western tradition: from antiquity (in the plays of Aristophanes
and Ovidius) through biblical stories, medieval romances, and Renaissance Theater, to
the increasing inclusion of “pornography” in high art in the eighteenth century and
various forms of implicit exploitative sexuality and explicit graphic violence in
contemporary novels, yet one may wonder what motivates transgression and how it has
influenced the arts. When Julius quotes St. Paul in Romans 4:15, “where no law is, there
is no transgression,” he implies that transgressions of the law-breaking variety are an
4 Elle est retrouvée/Quoi? L’eternité./C’est la mer allée/Avec le soleil (qtd. in Bataille Erotism 25).
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