George Bataille:Une volupté qui m'excède, de la douleur finale et d'une insupportable joie !

watercolor by marguerita

Le sens de ce livre est, en un premier pas, d'ouvrir la conscience à l'identité de la "petite mort" et d'une mort définitive. De la volupté, du délire à l'horreur sans limites. C'est le premier pas nous menant à l'oubli des enfantillages de la raison !

De la raison qui jamais ne sut mesurer ses limites. Ces limites sont données dans le fait qu'inévitablement la fin de la raison, qui excède la raison, n'est pas contraire au dépassement de la raison ! Par la violence du dépassement, je saisis, dans le désordre de mes rires et de mes sanglots, dans l'excès des transports qui me brisent, la similitude de l'horreur et d'une volupté qui m'excède, de la douleur finale et d'une insupportable joie !
Georges Bataille

The exhibition takes its name from Les Larmes d'Éros (1961), Georges Bataille's last book before his death and his final contribution on a theme he had researched in depth in Eroticism (1957): the intimate relationship between Eros and Thanatos, between sex drive and death instinct. Bataille took as his starting point the certainty that in the petite mortof the orgasm we experience an avant-goût - a foretaste - of death. Using images of agony to express sexual climax and the language of ecstasy to depict death was of course not an invention of Bataille's: we find it in Wagner, in Romantic poetry, in Bernini and Michelangelo, in the Spanish mystics and in ancient Greek poetry. Bataille believed he had found a basis for the connection between Eros and Thanatos: both in death and erotic fulfilment we return, from the discontinuity of individual life to the original continuity of being.

For Bataille connections between Eros and Thanatos only made sense within the context of an experiencing of the sacred.

Eroticism is a subject of taboo, a prohibition (interdit) which illuminates the forbidden "with a light both sinister and divine: in a word, it illuminates it with a religious light". In eroticism, as in the sacred, prohibition does not exist without transgression. Prohibition excludes the natural, animal impulses, in order to establish the dominion of the cultural. But from the very moment it is formulated, prohibition triggers the return of the excluded, of what had previously been rejected with horror. Animal impulses return in religious sacrifice, during which violence is moulded like some precious yet dangerous material. For Bataille sacrifice is the ultimate stage for eroticism.

To explore the intimate relationship between Eros and Thanatos, the mythological figures are set out in an almost narrative sequence, moving forward from innocence to temptation, from temptation to the torment of passion, and ending in atonement and death.