Philosophy of Play (3): Bataille and Eroticism

Eroticism is play in the specific sense that Bataille gives to excess. It is an assent to life that spends more than usefulness demands. It is a consent to risk that seeks an intensity which cannot be recovered as profit or lesson. It is a movement toward a summit where the ordinary measures fall away. To present this clearly I will introduce the main ideas from Bataille’s book on eroticism. 

Bataille begins with a sentence that is both definition and provocation. "Eroticism is assenting to life up to the point of death." This statement sets the tone. It does not define eroticism as pleasure. It defines it by proximity to a limit. The limit is death. The assent is a consent to keep moving toward intensity even as one senses that the line between self and loss is near. In standard English translations this sentence appears at the start of the book and is repeated in commentaries because it compresses the whole argument into a single movement. It also immediately separates eroticism from a narrow account of sex. Sex as reproduction belongs to the cycle of life that serves the restricted economy of species survival. Eroticism as Bataille uses the word names a human practice that is not reducible to the reproductive function. It is a psychological and spiritual quest that uses the body and the imagination to touch what he calls continuity. 

Continuity and discontinuity are the basic coordinates in Bataille’s map. A living person is a discontinuous being. I am this body, bounded by skin, bounded by memory, bounded by name. I am separate from every other person and from every other thing. That separateness is useful. It allows work and calculation. It allows a household to be run and a career to be built. Yet the same separateness is also a wound. It isolates. It is what makes death feel like an absolute break. Against this stands the idea of continuity. Continuity is the impersonal flow of being in which separation is suspended. A person tastes it in trances, in feasts, in collective rapture, in the mystic’s union, in laughter that dissolves position, in tears that undo pride, in an erotic climax that for a moment silences the pronoun and the plan. Eroticism belongs to this second register. It is the set of human practices that aim to cross from discontinuity toward continuity while still in life. It is not a theory of fusion. It is a disciplined way of naming the many moments when a person chooses to risk separation in order to enter a more intense community with others or with the world. Reproduction marks discontinuity since one being becomes two, and that the drama of continuity is glimpsed precisely where a life risks its boundary. 

Taboo and transgression are the next pair of terms Bataille uses. A taboo marks off a domain as forbidden. It protects the sacred by excluding it from everyday use. It also charges the forbidden with a peculiar attraction. The longer the prohibition holds, the more the object or act becomes luminous in the imagination. Transgression is the crossing of the line. In Bataille’s account the two terms are complementary. The transgression does not deny the taboo. It completes it. The taboo in turn holds the transgression in shape. Without the taboo there is no line to cross and therefore no intensity in the crossing. With only transgression the crossing loses meaning and sinks into repetition. He presents this complementarity as a structural truth rather than as a slogan. He learned part of it in the anthropological tradition, including the work of Mauss on gift and sacrifice. He sharpened it by pointing to the way religious systems first produce interdictions and then invent controlled festivals in which the interdiction is temporarily lifted. The reason for this  is simple. A community needs both order and release. The forbidden holds continuity in reserve. The feast and the rite spend a portion of that reserve. Eroticism is located in the zone of such controlled expenditure. It is play in the precise sense that the community shapes a time and a place where the rules are loosened so that surplus can be consumed without disintegrating the group. 

A reader who has not studied anthropology will still recognise the pattern in ordinary life. There are rooms where one keeps one’s voice low. There are hours when liquor is shared without measuring. Both rules and exemptions come from a tacit sense that life has more in it than use can absorb. The question is where and how that surplus will be spent. Bataille often calls the surplus "the accursed share", meaning that what cannot be used productively must be disposed of in other ways. There are benign ways to spend it and there are destructive ways. A stadium and a potlatch and a cathedral and a solemn erotic rite are benign because they organise play in a form that binds those present more strongly. War and pogrom and massacre are destructive because they spend the surplus in a frenzy that dissolves bonds and leaves only ruin. Eroticism is listed among the benign forms because, when it is lucid, it accepts the necessity of waste and gives that necessity a body and a time and a set of gestures that lift rather than crush. This economic background runs quietly through the book and is explicit in Bataille’s wider work on general economy and expenditure. 

The book then turns from structure to varieties of erotic practice. It distinguishes three broad domains. There is the eroticism of bodies, there is the eroticism of hearts, and there is the eroticism that borders on the sacred and the religious. The first is the most direct. It concerns nakedness, caress and climax. The second is the realm of lovers and their fidelity to a bond. The third is the terrain where an erotic act becomes a rite and opens onto sanctity or outrage. Bataille insists that all three share the same logic. Each is a way of moving from separation toward a taste of continuity. Each depends on taboo and transgression. Each risks shame and dissolves a measure of self possession. Each touches the nearness of death because each accepts loss. When he writes that the domain of eroticism is that of the transgression of taboos he is not being scandalous for its own sake. He is analysing the grammar of experiences and he is stating that their power comes from the way they cross a line that ordinary time must keep. 

Death enters the account as more than a metaphor. Bataille says that eroticism and death are linked by their relation to continuity. Death dissolves the discontinuous being absolutely. It returns the separate life to the undifferentiated flow. Eroticism attempts something of that return within life. It does so through little deaths. It does so by staging a passage in which the person who was guarded lets go and consents to a loss. The famous formula that poetry and eroticism lead to the same place makes sense here. They both work by weakening the walls of the self. They both risk a joyful destruction. Commentators summarise this as a journey through death to continuity. The point for our present argument is that this journey is a form of play. Not childish play. Serious play. The kind that a community authorises in designated times and places. The kind that a pair of lovers invent when they promise to meet at the edge without harm. The kind that a monk practises when he fasts and sings and sees the face of God where usually there is only habit. All of these are uses of surplus. All expend power that cannot be stored. All look death in the eye and continue. 

Nakedness is a key example because it shows the passage from taboo to transgression with clarity. Clothes protect the social person. They carry rank. They hold the body in a form that can be presented at work and in public. Nakedness throws off those protections. It exposes the body to a gaze that is no longer supervised by the same rules. The first feeling is often shame. Shame is the skin’s memory of the taboo. The next feeling is often laughter or trembling or a curious pride. Those feelings belong to the transgression. They signal that the person has entered the zone of continuity. When two people strip together with consent the play becomes reciprocal. Each crosses with the other. Each serves as the other’s passage. Bataille treats this without either coyness or aggression. He says it allows a person to experience the relief and fear and joy of being less separate without dying. The same analysis is extended to the shared rituals of communities. Festivals in which masks are worn and rules are inverted function in a parallel way. They offer an authorised time for the loosening of position. They spend a town’s surplus in a form that the town can survive.

Sacrifice is the most demanding example. It concerns the intentional destruction of a valued thing or life for the sake of a higher intensity. In archaic settings animals or even people were killed at an altar. The community consented to the loss. The act released fear and gratitude and continuity. In modern settings the literal form is largely abolished. Yet the logic remains. A soldier who gives his life in a battle that his country counts as just is treated as a sacrifice. A saint who wastes a fortune to care for the dying is treated as a sacrifice. A person who chooses to forgo status and comfort in order to live in a way that honours a vow is treated as a sacrifice. Eroticism shares the sacrificial structure because it spends strength for intensity. It accepts loss as the price for a state that cannot be bought. It lifts the participants out of calculation. If it is lucid it binds rather than harms. Bataille does not praise cruelty. He analyses the shape of acts that create a community around intensity. He knows how dangerous that intensity can be. He asks that it be handled with knowledge rather than denial.

Work and play in this frame are not moral opposites. They are economic modes. Work conserves and increases what can be used. Play spends what cannot be used. A life that only works becomes narrow and hard. A life that only plays becomes chaotic and thin. A culture trains its people in both. It assigns hours and teaches craft. It also builds arenas and theatres and altars. Eroticism is one of the arts of play. It has its own craft. It has its own precautions. It shapes settings where consent is possible. It teaches what is permitted and what must be refused. It asks for courage and gentleness. It asks that the persons involved remember that the goal is not acquisition but intensity. Bataille refuses to celebrate transgression as fashion. Rather he says it exists to think a human necessity through to its end.

Bataille links eroticism to language because language is an instrument by which we extend our lives beyond non-linguistic animal impulse. In particular, language is the instrument by which we invent taboos. A being that can promise is a being that can forbid. A being that can tell a story is a being that can imagine rules. Once rules exist the longing for the feast is born. They are not enemies. They are a pair. Bataille takes pains to show that the erotic act is not a simple discharge. It is a form of meaning. Lovers talk. They make oaths. They agree on times and signs. They set scenes. Even when they seek wordless abandon they arrive there by following a script. That script is a map through taboo to transgression and back again. The return is as important as the crossing. Without a return there is only loss. With a return there is knowledge. The knowledge is that one can go to the edge and come back alive. That one can rehearse death and carry some of its light into the day.

Religion appears in Bataile not as a set of dogmas but as a family of practices that manage taboo and transgression in public. Bataille reads religious history as a long series of attempts to handle the sacred. Sometimes religion has protected the sacred by walling it up. Sometimes it has kept it alive by inventing feasts that undid the wall for a time. Christianity and its emphasis on an incarnate God allows him to explore the mixture of flesh and spirit in a way that agrees with his thesis. A God who eats and bleeds and dies brings continuity into time in a form that his readers know. A mass that uses bread and wine as signs of the body and blood provides a direct comparison with the language of erotic communion. A festival that overturns rank and allows masks to mock kings provides a direct comparison with the way lovers play at being other. These resemblances are not proofs. They are reminders that cultures have always put their best efforts into making play both powerful and survivable.

I'm arguing that eroticism is play. To justify that equation I will line up the properties that the book assigns to eroticism and compare them with the properties of play as a serious human practice. Eroticism spends surplus energy. Play spends surplus energy. Eroticism requires rules in order to give transgression meaning. Play requires rules in order to give movement shape. Eroticism uses consent to protect those involved while allowing risk. Play uses consent to allow the game to continue without harm. Eroticism aims at a summit where ordinary measures do not hold. Play aims at a peak where the clock and the ledger play no part. Eroticism is a rehearsal of death in life. Play is a rehearsal of death in life because it suspends the profile of the worker and the citizen and permits a temporary loss. Eroticism returns its participants to ordinary time with a memory of intensity. Play returns its participants to ordinary time with the same memory. The match is complete because both are forms of sovereignty. Sovereignty here does not mean domination. It means the right to spend without return. To say that eroticism is play is therefore to say that it belongs to the class of actions by which a person experiences freedom as expenditure.

Three kinds of examples make this concrete. The first concerns nakedness. If two people decide to strip and they agree to be seen, they have instituted a small rite. The taboo of clothes is suspended. The transgression is authorised. The risk is accepted. The event consumes shame and fear. It produces laughter and trembling and care. It is play because it is framed, and because the frame can be closed. The second concerns language. If two people invent names and scenes and scripts for pleasure they are playing in a literal sense. They test what it means to accept roles. They discover the relief of losing the singular pronoun. They taste continuity by becoming for a moment less attached to title and posture. The third concerns mourning. If a group keeps vigil with a body and includes song and touch within limits, they are playing in a severe key. They reaffirm that life is more than work. They spend time and tears that no one can repay. They come back to day with a straighter back because the night was honest. Bataille’s book prepares us to see these things without romanticising them. It asks for truthfulness and for rigour in the conduct of play.

The entanglement of eroticism and death is the reason that play is essential. To face death well a person needs practices that make loss bearable. Work cannot do that job by itself. Work builds and repairs. It does not overwhelm with intensity. That surplus, that intensity, must be found elsewhere. In song. In dance. In sport. In prayer. In laughter. In erotic communion. The purpose of such acts is not distraction. It is concentration. They draw a circle and gather all attention inside that circle. They teach the body how to be present and how to consent. They give a community a memory it can use when the worst happens. Bataille on eroticism argues that sex is just one such circle when it is approached lucidly. It is a school for consent to loss that does not annihilate. It is a passage to continuity that does not destroy the person. It establishes a bond that is more than contract. It trains the nerves in generosity. It teaches that embarrassment is not the enemy. It is the blush on the face of truth.

The last matter is the question of danger. Bataille never denies that eroticism can wound. He writes about cruelty and crime with a steady eye. He describes acts that readers may find unbearable. Sadism, torture and domination, Hence he keeps bringing the analysis back to consent and to the structure of taboo and transgression. The danger begins when the pair is broken. When a taboo is abolished, transgression loses its meaning and the appetite dulls or becomes predatory. When transgression is banned entirely, the appetite builds to a pressure that seeks relief in violence. The way through is not moral panic. It is education in play. The practical content of that education can be stated simply. Teach rules that can be lifted under agreed conditions. Teach how to read embarrassment as a signal that a threshold is near. Teach how to return. Teach that the end of the rite is not a fixed moral. It is the quiet in which the memory of intensity becomes gratitude rather than claim.

I bring these threads together in the same form that I used at the start. Eroticism is play because it is a lucid spending of surplus that seeks continuity and accepts loss. Bataille provides a framework for this because he defines eroticism as assent to life up to death, and gives us the tools of continuity and discontinuity, because he insists on the complementarity of taboo and transgression, and because he situates erotic acts inside the larger economy of festival and sacrifice. To learn to see with these tools is to recognise erotic play in modest life scenes as well as in extraordinary ones. A hand held in a hospital corridor can be an erotic act in this sense. It crosses a line. It consents to loss. It spends without price. A kiss given at a threshold can be erotic in this sense. A vigil in which stories and tears are shared is erotic in this sense. The form is constant. The pitch varies.

I conclude by restating the main contentions in a few sentences. Life produces more energy and meaning than use and work can absorb. Cultures that endure invent forms of play that spend the surplus in ways that bind rather than destroy. Eroticism is one of those forms. In Bataille’s language it is the movement from discontinuity toward continuity under the sign of taboo and transgression, and with the summit of death in view. It is play because it is framed, because it is consented to, because it expends rather than accumulates, because it adds nothing to the store of goods while adding everything to the store of courage. A playful attitude to death in this sense is not light-minded. It is severe and kind. It stays near the body. It welcomes embarrassment as a true sign. It gives without bargain. It accepts trance when it arrives. It lets dawn be dawn. It remembers the intensity without demanding a prize. Anyone can begin to practise it. Sit with a friend who grieves and do not explain. Share what cannot be repaid. Keep silence when words would only fetch the day back too soon. Know that the point of such hours is not improvement. The point is assent. It is the approval of life to the edge of life. It is the knowledge that when the time comes to cross for good, one will have rehearsed the step in scenes of play that were holy because they wasted and because they bound. These are the terms in which Bataille asks to be read. They are also the terms in which eroticism becomes clear as play.