"The response to erotic desire is, on the contrary, an end.” -- Bataille

Most discussions of desire end here -- especially those on the internet or late night TV.
Bataille goes further, and his meditation is even and unflinching:

The essence of man as given in sexuality — which is his origin and beginning — poses a problem for him that has no other outcome than wild turmoil. This turmoil is given in the little death. How can I fully live the little death if not as a foretaste of the final death. (Bataille, The Tears of Eros)

We all know the meaning of the ‘little death’ (elsewhere writing on sculpture and the sublime in Nietzsche I associate this with the “little god” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra threatens to chastise before the dancing girls who shrink at his approach — exhibitionism alive and well in the 19th century world), and Bataille insists on reminding us that the ‘little death’ and death as such go together. Of course, death is symbolized, literally enough, as death seducing a woman.







Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1510






In addition to Nietzsche, in addition to Sade, Gilles de Rais and other names that are less well known, there is also the influence of Heidegger and due to the background Hegelian sensibility given to them as to so many others in this cultural Parisian milieu by way of Kojève, there is the echo of Lacan:

You will hear, coming from within, a voice that leads to your destiny. It is the voice of desire and not that any desirable being. (Lacan, quotation in de Luca’s introduction The Tears of Eros)

The project here undertakes a review of Bataille’s discussion of Nietzsche with specific reference to desire.

And commentators like to cite Nietzsche where he writes,

“The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reaches up to the nature of his spirit." (BGE § 75)

As is patent here, what is at stake is already a matter of representation, not feeling, not real desire.

If Bataille can rightly be named the philosopher of the Real as he is (speaking of Lacan’s Real rather than Baudrillard’s), it is also important to add contra Lacan that Bataille’s Real is very much an imaginary or representational affair: profiles in pornography, less a matter of metaphorical than phenomenological profiling.

Even before the internet, the specular project of collective desire as it may be regarded and like Malraux’s Les Voix du Silence [Voices of Silence], Bataille’s Tears of Eros offers an illustration of erotic desire both graphically throughout history but also quite philosophically expressed (provided one can read Nietzsche, and this more of an undertaking than most readers imagine).


That said, Bataille’s Tears of Eros is a serious, scholarly book, an art book, archival book, anthropological resource, philosophical reflection, economy, as much as it is anything else:

Beyond calculated means, we look for the end — or the ends — of these means. … The quest for wealth — sometimes the wealth of egoistic individuals, sometimes wealth held in common — is obviously only a means. Work is only a means. … The response to erotic desire is, on the contrary, an end. (Bataille, The Tears of Eros)