Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Tepper
April 27, 2005
we must first note that Bataille stood at the crossroads of the Greco-
Theresa of Avila and Alexandre Kojeve and throughout his writings can
contrary.
the impression that desire is, for him, not only ontological but rather
only is desire for that which is lacking but instead that desire, being
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our lost continuity. We find the state of affairs that binds us
prelapsarian state.
Religion, and The Accursed Share Volume II, we may find explicit
depart from this state of immanence and how we may return to it, in
The Accursed Share Volume II 79-86, Tears of Eros, etc) However, death
itself destroys the self who dies and as such permanently annuls desire
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upon the horizon of death, means by which this desire can be fulfilled
had to be devised. The first and simpler form produced to address this
difficulty constitutes the sacrifice and the second, more complex form
reality.
responds “In relation to this ego, there exists an absence of this ego,
which one might call nothingness if one so desired and toward which
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In a hypothetical first experience of this nothingness we
being.
(46)
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as object. Thus, time without view to future preservation or use
We may now see the first stage in the movement of desire, which
terms of erotic desire this is only the first half). In order to reach
its object desire must cross nothingness to find its negation in some
sin and it is the identification with the object that transforms sin
into ecstasy, carnal eros into divine eros. (Discussion 53). In the
moment, the sacrificer and the spectators identify with the object and
the festival, the subject takes over the nothingness of the world into
itself as guilt and sin. We find the same structure in erotic desire in
the paradigmatic example of sex without love. The subject finds the
juncture, however, they turn away from one another and desire is left
opened onto the void and the self takes on this nothingness in the form
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producing and insisting on the stability and duration of subjects and
object, and then betrays us again by negating ecstasy and the object of
desire.
us, time, like Janus, shows its other face and shows itself to be the
motor driving the dialectic and more generally as that which produces
the lack of desire. And properly Janus-like, time will also show itself
of the beloved. At the first stage the self is not fully lost; ecstasy
Thus, prior anguish is the condition of possible for ecstasy, and the
anguish that initially permits ecstasy in the first form is the horror
desire.
the first instance, here we have two anguished desires, desiring one
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another’s desire. The other chosen here by the self is absolutely
an other and that the other should desire the self is so high as to be
love, chance is first sought out by the lover in the beloved. Though
chance is also given as the two meet. In a sense the love uniting them
exigencies, which are so difficult to satisfy that they lend the loved
one the colors of extreme luck” (VOA 230) The improbability infinitely
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The combination of exceeding love and the desire to lose
CHANCE. (130)
Time brings about the chance appearance of the beloved and permits the
beloved to slip from the world of things into the sacred. Time has
already brought us to anguish and now time brings the object of desire.
within us. By virtue of this prior laceration of our beings the force
beloved at the same moment at which she identifies with me. Since we
totality, in that fusion which takes the place of the subject and
animality… [this] does not repel me… on the contrary, [I] thirst
for it; far from escaping, I may resolutely quench my thirst with
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secret of being. I may say these words in order to cry out the
that both is and is not mine. Our separate existences have temporarily
died in the embrace. Thus the link between death and eroticism here
becomes clear and the moniker ‘la petit mort’ becomes all the more
The world is not immanent to me, but rather I and the world am in
immanence to one another. It is this immanent unity with the world that
Sartre and Hyppolite, the good Hegelians that they are, cannot seem to
wrap their minds around. In the final result, the distinction between
fact that this inner experience of immanence, the totality of the real
that is the object of desire comes only out of the future and through
for my desire that comes about through the whims of heterogeneous time
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