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)