Like his reflections on desire, Bataille’s Real occupies the symbolic realm:

the eye, the egg, the testoid oval, the language of the summit, the peak.


And we will always be told that no matter the level of violence/violation there are no crimes at stake. Women when they are not the beloved are prostitutes who exist to be observed, a temporary marriage as Nietzsche once suggested: the bride for the evening, in tatters,
i.e., or otherwise said: she needs the money and can be had.

Bataille collapses whores utterly, reduces them to their being as object for a subject. This even Sartre does not do and Sartre reminds us that public consensus and demand stands on the other side of bad faith. He is at pains to underscore the illusion as a playing at: “the waiter in the cafe plays with his condition in order to realize it. This obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen.” [Sartre, Being and Nothingness]

And here we can add prostitutes to the mix as so many tradeswomen and tradesmen. Far from straining the point, the introduction of sex workers illuminates Sartre’s argument:

Their condition is wholly one of ceremony. The public demands of them that they realize it as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. [Sartre, Being and Nothingness]

A prostitute who dreams or is otherwise distracted is not wholly a prostitute as much as she will seem like the wife or the beloved.

Heaven forbid.


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