Quote with 315 notes
As erotic language, such as we use in dalliance, is a kind of secretion, a concentrated juice that flows from the lips only in moments of the most intense emotion, of plaint, as this language is, in other words, the essential expression of passion, each pair of lovers has its own peculiar language, a language which has a perfume, an odor sui generis which belongs only to that couple…
Quote reblogged from Poe's Mistress with 181 notes
There is horror in being: this horror is repugnant animality; this does not repel me, on the contrary, I thirst for it; far from escaping, I may resolutely quench my thirst with this horror … for this I have filthy words at my disposal, words that sharpen the feeling I have of touching on the intolerable secret of being … at this moment I no longer doubt that I am embracing the totality without which I was only outside: I reach orgasm.
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share, translation by Rowan G. Tepper
(via frenchtwist)
Quote with 319 notes
Eroticism is one of the basic means of self-knowledge, as indispensable as poetry.
Quote reblogged from To a dusty shelf we aspire. with 531 notes
Poetry leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism—to the blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through death to continuity. Poetry is eternity; the sun matched with the sea.
Georges Bataille, Death and Sensuality
(via indigenousdialogues, heteroglossia)
Source: indigenousdialogues
Quote reblogged from Poe's Mistress with 483 notes
Seduction involves the appeal of destroying that which seduces us.
Georges Bataille, L’érotisme
(via frenchtwist)
Photo with 119 notes
Study for George Bataille’s Histoire de l’oeil by Hans Bellmer, 1946
“Only once woman has reached the peak of her experimental calling, is amenable to permutations and algebraic promises, and is willing to submit to transubstantial whims, only once she is ductile, shrinkable and equipped with an epidermis and joints that are equal to the obvious inconveniences involved in post-hoc assembly or disassembly, only then we will finally be able to clarify the anatomy of desire.”
— Hans Bellmer, L’Anatomie de l’Image (Anatomy of the Image)
Quote with 301 notes
Erotic desire is the desire that triumphs over prohibitions: it assumes the opposition of man to himself.
Quote with 23 notes
Art is in the mind, say its protectors, not in the crotch. Is this sanitizing of art truth or compulsive hand washing?
Quote with 28 notes
Technology is never grasped except in the (automobile) accident, that is to say in the violence done to technology itself and in the violence done to the body. It is the same: any shock, any blow, any impact, all the metallurgy of the accident can be read in the semiurgy of the body - neither an anatomy nor a physiology, but a semiurgy of contusions, scars, mutilations, wounds that are so many new sexual organs opened on the body. In this way, gathering the body as labor in the order of production is opposed to the dispersion of the body as anagram in the order of mutilation. Goodbye “erogeneous zones”: everything becomes a hole to offer itself to the discharge reflex. But above all (as in primitive initiation tortures, which are not ours), the whole body becomes a sign to offer itself to the exchange of bodily signs. Body and technology diffracting their bewildered signs through each other. Carnal abstraction and design.
Quote with 41 notes
Each mark, each trace, each scar left on the body is like an artificial invagination, like the scarifications of savages, which are always a vehement response to the absence of the body. Only the wounded body exists symbolically - for itself and for others - “sexual desire” is never anything but the possiblity bodies have of combining and exchanging their signs. Now, the few natural orifices to which one usually attaches sex and sexual activities are nothing next to all the possible wounds, all the artificial orifices (but why “artificial”?), all the breaches through which the body is reversibilized and, like certain topological spaces, no longer knows either interior nor exterior. Sex as we know it is nothing but a minute and specialized definition of all the symbolic and sacrificial practices to which a body can open itself, no longer through nature, but through artifice, through the simulacrum, through the accident. Sex is nothing but this rarefaction of a drive called desire on previously prepared zones. It is largely overtaken by the fan of symbolic wounds, which is in some sense the ana-grammatization of sex on the whole length of the body - but now precisely, it is no longer sex, it is something else, sex, itself, is nothing but the inscription of a privileged signifier and some secondary marks - nothing next to the exchange of all the signs and wounds of which the body is capable. The savages knew how to use the whole body to this end, in tattooing, torture, initiation - sexuality was only one of the possible metaphors of symbolic exchange, neither the most significant, nor the most prestigious, as it has become for us in its obsessional and realistic reference, thanks to its organic and functional character (including in orgasm).
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