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firstwords 's review for:
Erotism: Death and Sensuality
by Georges Bataille
1.5 stars. Below is part of a correspondence I had with a group of friends when we were discussing the book:
Gotta be honest, really trying to get through this one, I keep putting it down. I think he fetishizes the church - and I dont mean that sexually, but in the actual traditional definition. It speaks so powerfully to him, and perhaps was such a large part of his life - and the community he was in, although he was of course seen as deviant and a pervert - that much of his theorem just isn't important to me.
The comment about how there is nothing worse than an ugly woman that [Redacted] and I were discussing was really funny when we were in our early 20s and probably (on my part) at bit more mysoginystic than now. I still find it funny, and I can see the "truth" of it for portions of the population, but I have moved away from it. And since I dont give two shits about the interplay between sex and the church/morality/avoidance of death (I'm not scared of death, so I dont see sex as a foil that GB does), to me it reads more (at this age and stage) like an essay on the church and death than it is a salacious exploration of sensuality. I dont give a shit about the church or death.
He does a lot of begging the question by stating something controversal or unproven as fact and just presenting it as the truth. He does make arguments and explanations of other statements, and maybe he was just writing in his environment. Literally the first para of the foreword (by him) lays down a bunch of basic facts...that I entirely disagree with. The paragraph would be true in a lot of nun porn, probably, or for a gay guy raised in the catholic church (to pick two random examples), but if you are pretty much OK with yourself and largely live outside the mores and institutions that repress thought and action (everyone on this email), his basic premise does not hold, see below:
"The human spirit is prey to the most astounding impulses. Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him. The saint turns from the voluptuary in alarm; she does not know that his unacknowledgeable passions and her own are really one."
Gotta be honest, really trying to get through this one, I keep putting it down. I think he fetishizes the church - and I dont mean that sexually, but in the actual traditional definition. It speaks so powerfully to him, and perhaps was such a large part of his life - and the community he was in, although he was of course seen as deviant and a pervert - that much of his theorem just isn't important to me.
The comment about how there is nothing worse than an ugly woman that [Redacted] and I were discussing was really funny when we were in our early 20s and probably (on my part) at bit more mysoginystic than now. I still find it funny, and I can see the "truth" of it for portions of the population, but I have moved away from it. And since I dont give two shits about the interplay between sex and the church/morality/avoidance of death (I'm not scared of death, so I dont see sex as a foil that GB does), to me it reads more (at this age and stage) like an essay on the church and death than it is a salacious exploration of sensuality. I dont give a shit about the church or death.
He does a lot of begging the question by stating something controversal or unproven as fact and just presenting it as the truth. He does make arguments and explanations of other statements, and maybe he was just writing in his environment. Literally the first para of the foreword (by him) lays down a bunch of basic facts...that I entirely disagree with. The paragraph would be true in a lot of nun porn, probably, or for a gay guy raised in the catholic church (to pick two random examples), but if you are pretty much OK with yourself and largely live outside the mores and institutions that repress thought and action (everyone on this email), his basic premise does not hold, see below:
"The human spirit is prey to the most astounding impulses. Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him. The saint turns from the voluptuary in alarm; she does not know that his unacknowledgeable passions and her own are really one."