Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

epressed instinctual drives stored in the Unconscious may carry implications—some
beneficial—that reach beyond that of simply producing shock.
With regard to taboo prohibitions, both Nietzsche and Bataille reject the over-
emphasis on morality and its prejudices, arguing that there is some tangible value in
exposing (and sometimes indulging in) repressed wishes. As mentioned in the first
chapter, Nietzsche scorns the establishment of boundaries on intellectual freedom by an
institution of morality and reminds us that “truth” is not solely to be found within the
narrow confines of the permissible. Quite on the contrary, he believes that elevation of
spirit can also inhere in the “radical other” of transgression: “severity, violence, slavery,
danger in the street and in the heart, secrecy, stoicism, tempter’s art and devilry of every
kind,—that everything wicked, terrible, tyrannical, predatory, and serpentine in man,
serves as well for the elevation of the human species as its opposite” (31). In “The Use
Value of D.A.F. De Sade,” Bataille speaks of how society, through material progress,
“leads [humanity] to a disagreeable and terminal stagnation” (92) and preaches “revolt”
as a means to bring this to an end. Furthermore, by explaining how the limits imposed on
the Unconscious need to be broken, Bataille also alludes to the Nietzschean concept of a
“herding-animal morality”:
The participation in everything that, among men, is horrible and
allegedly sacred can take place in a limited and unconscious form,
but this limitation and this unconsciousness obviously have only a
provisional value, and nothing can stop the movement that leads
human beings toward an ever more shameless awareness of the
erotic bond that links them to death, to cadavers, and to horrible
physical pain. It is high time that human nature cease being
subjected to the autocrat’s vile repression and to the morality that
authorizes exploitation. Since it is true that one of a man’s
attributes is the derivation of pleasure from the suffering of others,
and the erotic pleasure is not only the negation of an agony that
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