"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)