Elmer, Simon James; (2002) The colour of the sacred: Georges Bataille and the image of sacrifice. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

Each of us has his own meditative practices, his own path to what Bataille called 'inner experience'; but among them the most widespread, the most well-trodden, are the comedies we construct to reach erotic effusion. Subject as these are to interdictions in a more or less direct correspondence to their proximity to the heart of our being, the conjuring up of the god of eroticism constitutes our fundamental, and perhaps our only remaining religious activity. The image of this god, to whom we sacrifice ourselves in the expenditure of the petite mort, is our earliest intimation of that unreality onto which death (that absolute expenditure) opens. Man is never so alone as when he comes: when the universe, under a terrible muscular contraction, shrinks to the borders of his own body, from whose limits, at the sovereign moment, he dissolves into ecstasy...at which point he loses himself - is lost in his orgasm. This point of ecstasy marks the limit of human experience: when consciousness, no longer able to distinguish itself from the universe that bore it, is lost in the night. It is the dreadful plenitude of this moment that tears itself away from and confounds the unfathomable movements of the heart we call love, which never fails to take almost all our breath away, but in whose violent consummation, it need hardly be added, resides our only hope of communication.

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