Eroticizing Aesthetics

Bringing together Bataille with Lacan and Nietzsche, Tim Themi examines the role of aesthetics implicit in each and how this invokes an erotic process celebrating the real of what is usually excluded from articulation. Bataille came to deem eroticism as the standpoint from which to grasp humanity as a whole, based on his understanding of our transition to humanity being founded on a series of taboos placed on inner animality. An erotic outlet for the latter was historically the aesthetic dimensions of our religions, but Batailles view of how this was gradually diminished has much in keeping with Nietzsches critique of Christian-Platonic dualism and Lacans of the desexualised Good of Western metaphysics. Building from these often surprising proximities, Themi closely examines Batailles many interventions into the history of aesthetics from his confrontations with Bretons surrealism to his own novels and encounter with the animal cave paintings of Lascaux radically re-illuminating the corollary phenomena of Dionysos in Nietzsches philosophy and the jouissance [enjoyment] of transgression in the psychoanalysis of Lacan. A new ethical criterion for aesthetic works and creations on this basis becomes possible.