Man's World Issue 1 SFW Version

The fact that I am obsessed with 'the beauty of feelings', as you put it, may be related to
eroticism. In 1955 I met Georges Bataille. I think he is the European thinker with whom I
have felt the most affinity. I find Bataille’s formulation of the intimate relationship
between death and eroticism of great interest, as well as his notions of 'prohibition' and
of the 'routine liberated by prohibition'. In Japanese ethnology we distinguish between
the concepts of ‘purity’ and ‘impurity’, which, in my opinion, correspond perfectly to
Bataille’s two notions. In this way, just as without purity there is no impurity, and vice
versa, without prohibition there is no routine liberated by it. Now, as current life, affected
by the relativism of our beliefs, has stopped experiencing absolute purity, he knows only
'impurity', that is, routine or everyday life. Nothing absolute can come from the relativism
that affects our society. And as long as there are no absolutes, eroticism cannot exist.
According to Bataille, eroticism only shows its true face when it makes contact with the
absolute.
In your case, Mr. Mishima, it seems that the absolute immediately makes contact with the image of the
emperor. For this reason, eroticism in your case is stripped of sex and ends up flying to the level of abstract
concepts. But, if I remember correctly, Bataille developed this strange theory of his during the anti-fascist
struggle, which was nothing more than the concrete activity of a routine.
In my case, I have been enlightened by Bataille, but I
am not Bataille. Inside me, beauty, eroticism and death
are in the same line. Then there is cruelty, which is an
objective and concrete reality, or at least that’s how it
is considered. By the way, Bataille, however, does not
treat cruelty as something objective and concrete. I
think you would have seen it too: in a Bataille work
there is a photograph of criminals subjected to
whipping to extract a confession. In some it is seen how
the meat of the thorax has been torn away exposing
the ribs; others have had their knee tendons severed.
Now these tortured ones are laughing, and they do it
not because of the pain, of course, but because they
have been drugged with opium. Bataille comments
that in these images of torture is the climax of
eroticism. In other words, this French writer has truly
endeavored to find the maximum of the absolute in
cruelty to an equally maximum degree. And that
because he was convinced that the human being of
today can only be saved if he recovers the totality of
his life by virtue of the performance of acts like these. I
agree with Bataille. By the way, you think that the
immaculate white that I use in my works is an abstract
idea, while the cruelty is something objective and
concrete, right?
...Well, I don’t think so. If white is an abstract idea,
then cruelty is too. If the target is objective and
concrete, then the cruelty is equally objective and
concrete. I cannot imagine the two things in the same
dimension. Someone with malice might think: 'He who
does not know adversity, does not know war, does not
know misery, by force has to see things superficially.'
If white is an
abstract idea
then cruelty
is too
MAN'S WORLD