Erotica, Sex & Sovereignty
EMARCEA G FOREST
MAR 30, 2025
Nuances of Erotica, Sex Amid the Violence of Nature & the Quest of Sovereignty
especially pertaining to the feminine body as it is rightful to the same pursuit of knowledge and sensuality as any man, notes from Erotism Death & Sensuality by Georges Bataille
Violence of Nature 3.15.25
A woman in flight, a devil that might
caress the virginess of her mighty blood.
A bird that sings, trapped inside of this world that flees
from the evil it does, responsibility or respect. . .
neither present in the age of descent. A quiet revolution.
Violence of nature—howling winds breathing into squelching birds
and their flocks returning from the carnage
of smokey lungs and aching muscles, sore travelers.
Days gone by and nights moving faster than light
soon it is this breach of the wild that should seek to comfort silent words.
A birth of a virgin, from a virgin
might be the sword that swings its violence unto nature
and we would be nothing without it.
Nothing without the swoon of a marbled idea
frozen to the whims of frenzied phonetics and tiresome philosophy.
Provoking the purity of a virgin’s nest between her legs
and the intercourse of continuity that might rape both the man and the woman
deeper she calls, harder he thrusts—
is it these deep roots to where we grow so much attention:
attachment at the base of hips, interlocking fingertips.
And a woman cannot be anything, lest she be locked in a cage
like the bird who longs for traveling days of vernal countenance.
The eons that have taken sweet Sophia’s wisdom by the head
and whipped her around to bend to the will of the dead.
Any object of desire: an apple, a fetus, a leprechaun
mystical beasts of horror and the riffs they sing around ancient aura
the imaginative fantasy of daydreams and ecstasy, but the taste of a woman
the flirt of her decorum and garments and jewels
the way she speaks to God and nature and how the wind howls around her
any man might name her their whore.
But we do not know the sweet taste of her skin and the softness of her lips
nor do we the way she moves under thin sheets and candlelit hips
we only know the calls she makes and the squeaks we hear
between walls and leaves and winds that move through cities of men.
Purity and caste are long gone amid the winds of a modern hen.
(poem written for and featured in an article by Jean Salad)
Nuances of Erotica
Reading the work of Erotism was mostly dreadful; at times I was spurred into the whims of Bataille and his personal variants of erotica and mysticism. However, I am to account for my many personal biases and disagreements towards Bataille and the common opinion of women as objects, the feminine body as a whore and God as a silly and grudging force that casts down upon philosophers who try to approach divinity. To my knowledge Georges Bataille was a French philosopher, an intellectual working in philosophy, literature, anthropology and the history of art. His writings included essays, novels and poetry, exploring realms of eroticism, mysticism, surrealism and transgression. These works are insightful to the thoughts and pursuits during the early to mid 1900s, but they do not account for our modern age. Though it has its own transgressions, and the progression towards sovereignty has become more pressing on the consciousness of us modern philosophers, it is not entirely sinful. Sex, as it exists within the violence of nature, is a beautiful force. And I do not just mean the act of intercourse. What I mean is the continuity between two forces, the connection between men and women and the approach to divinity. Sex is not just an animal activity, nor a spasm of orgasm.
The inner experience of the individual is private and mysterious because of the individuality of the condition. It is only known by two forces, that of the human experiencing the individual as well as its higher self, the animal self and the conscious mind, and that of God. Bataille notes that, “The independence of one man has never ceased to be any more than a boundary to the interdependence of mankind, without which there would be no human life,” (De Sade’s Sovereign Man, pg. 168). There are only links between man if we make it so, but we are universally the same being, connected by this one singular body. Our unique incarnations and experiences allow us the possibilities of solitude and singularity. In essence this allows us to redefine our own selves in a private manner that might expand upon our notions of existence. The collective consciousness might play a role in understanding the bounds and primordial expenditures between individuals, but it is not a certain mode of directing each experience purely because we as human beings no longer know how to communicate telepathically nor do we often have the power to read each other’s minds. With that said, this does not mean the individual's experience may be prayed upon or pried into, it is just that there are many modes of understanding and connecting between each individual experience and many of these modes are unknown and ignored because “without inner experience we could not discuss neither eroticism nor religion,” (Eroticism in Inner Experience, pg. 35). There is no one true way to go about doing or finding these unique experiences, but as intellectuals we have created pathways towards understanding them. The path towards divinity is unique for each human and living soul, but we have created rules and expectations towards walking this road to death. We have created the outlines of what death means, what God means and what it means to be human without really knowing anything about it at all.
In modernity, the erotica that exists within the walls of a church, on the movie screen, in a book or within the parameters of a human mind are vast because we have created so much of it. The plagues of useless sex and mindless orgasm are feeble nuances that exist as a memory of what once was. This deep irony of a pagan-like hunt dying for something more. Within the church there exist members of its cult-like agenda that go about abusing their power for whichever reason they might choose, they put on a facade of their connection to a greater power and sometimes they even flirt with the devil. That is not to say this exists in all churches, but I do speak for the large organisation that is Christianity (mostly because so much of what Bataille said about the Christian religion, and because of my own personal experiences). Within these walls there exist posers and plagiarizers, devil worshippers and the like. They excuse their evil and neurotic behavior by casting it all down the drain to any priest behind the curtain as if it were God himself, as if God himself did not ask for this to be thrown at him, that this forgiveness he gives so willingly is only given by the ‘O.K.’ of an ordained man. On screens and papers there exist the fanatics of vampyres, ghosts, goblins, humans and their perverse mindscapes of murder and sex, dramas of lost worlds and long forgotten moralities. We have become desensitized “in the presence of a corpse horror, [it] is immediate and inevitable and practically impossible to resist.” (The Link Between Taboos and Death, pg. 47 ). Do you know what it is? Have you felt it? Looking out into the vast landscape of a painting like Judith Beheading Holofernes, Rembrandt’s The Blinding of Samson, Ficherelli’s Tarquinio and Lucrezia, at the very least you’ve heard of Francisco Goya’s Saturn Devours His Children; there exists a balance of nature amidst these violent and pressing artifacts of time, and we are only witness to them now. Can we speak for these brutalities? Can we at least acknowledge their pain? Or are you inhuman and willing to resist this truth of life, that there also exists a truth of death. “Nothing can set bounds to licentiousness. . . or rather generally speaking, there is nothing that can conquer violence,” (The Link. . . , Pg. 48). So what of Love? Even a delusion of love might conquer violence, that the heart might have the power to reduce the violent nature of a primal being to nothingness, to only a void or an open and pouring wound of what need be healed by the will of God. But maybe my sacred and spiritual pursuits are too naive, or rather, too expounding for a man like Bataille to understand, or too unabridged for any ignorant man to be aware of.
Before death, there is always a birth. Both are equally violent, but they are also a part of this beautiful cycle: balance. The continuity that exists between these two main events in every life; whether it be human, animal, cell brain or plant does not matter because it simply exists upon all fronts, is a truth to being that we seem to have only begun to understand. Birth may very well be violent in nature, and we may associate blood with carnage and violence, but is this not a necessary means to an end? If we were not to birth, we would be nothing, so any discourse of permitted activity is useless if we do not first birth the idea or the man to provoke it. A denial to this case is futile, and anyway, before there is birth or violence, there is always a love, or at least some kind of perversion of the idea of love, to spark the entire process. Existence is strange and odd, this we can agree to and virtually accept, but it takes a virtuous and righteous mind to accept love into one’s heart. The Christian idea of allowing the Christ Body into oneself is a familiar tone amid our affairs of the current reality, but the irony stands that this kind of deep love and deep connection, or continuity with the divine, is simply out of reach for most of those who put on the white dress and go about parading their love for their savior. Some wear it well and some know the deep roots of the truth of this kind of continuity, but rarely does anyone match the level of a saint. Not to say that we all have to be saints in order to reach a higher level, but it is only of great value to know the history before one dies for a cause they know nothing of. This kind of continuity is steadfast, it reaches from the heart body and the soul, to the inner workings of every nerve ending. It pulls deep inside of the spine, down to the hells of each unique human experience and bursts into the heavens. This connection, whether it be to the Christ Body, the One as nature, the Buddha, the Dalai Lama, whichever guru you might choose to walk with, is extremely intimate. Bearing one’s soul, all of its trespasses and transgressions, all of the mighty and human ways one lives, all the fears and hopes and aspirations, all of the love and the loves lost, the pain, the suffering, the birth and finally the death, all of this is shared between that human and that God. Unless you think yourself an atheist of course, then God help you.
Humanity’s history has been obsessed with death since its birth. The catastrophe of the apple, the beheading of a god to only replace it with that of an elephant, these myths are ingrained within our psyche. Where decay is a saddened thing, “The generative power of corruption is a naive belief responding to the mingled horror and fascination aroused in us by decay,” (Affinities Between Reproduction and Death, pg. 56), a provoking happening that urges the mind toward action; whether it be rightful or vengeful, there exists this obsession. Where we perverse acceptance into corruption and dismay, we have failed to acknowledge our existence. That we may die so that we can one day be reborn. This kind of rebirth on the physical plane is a theory that expands beyond our knowing, or at least the knowing of a common sensed person. We might be reincarnated life after life until that one chance happening that moves us to the next level that drifts us up to the heavens. We might be the reincarnations of our own blood lineages, transforming the ancestral histories to rebirth that history anew. We might just have this one life, a continuity of death and birth cycles that reach into the deepest parts of our souls. All of this might be true where, “Life is a swelling tumult continuously on the verge of explosion,” (Affinities. . . pg. 59). If it is all true, then the same must be said for that of our animal and plant friends, that maybe we were once in their form and have leveled ourselves enough to stand as humans, that we might help them to reach the same fate. As it were in primitive lands, when sacrifice was a commonly laid path for the animal and at times even for the human, there was a layer of respect that has since left our actions of today. We might make sacrifices still, small ones, but they might also be sacreligious or selfish. “We have to imagine a sacrifice as something beyond nausea. . . Cattle being slaughtered or cut up often makes people sick today, but there is nothing in the dishes served at tables to remind them of this,” (From Religious Sacrifice to Eroticism, pg. 92). I find my personal aversion to meat and animal products in this chain of command: thinking about the slaughter. Especially now, where we have animal farms and genetically modified organisms that live between the walls of reality and artificial, there is a kind of energy field that permeates this abuse that has been hacked into every neck of a cow that did not live its life inside of a farmer’s backyard. There was a time when simple urges lead to simple results, but now our obsessions have driven us into the far corridors of compulsion and ignorance, we no longer know the sacrifice that death asks of us, we have ignored her calling to a higher acceptance.
Thus springs a special kind of violent rebirth. These lives go into our collective consciousness, it is easy to feel if you try, and anyway these souls might be rebirthed into our lands, there exists a vengeful life that asks for only violence in return. The pleasure that comes from seeking out such evil is mighty and the foes are plenty. In any human mind, there always exists this temptation, that of the devil or what any demon might ask of our humanity. In this life there are many: demons, temptations, vendettas, these are futile values of the consciousness of a dying man, but there also exist needs and wants and desires. “Physical sexuality, always accompanying eroticism, is to what the brain is to the mind; physiology remains the material basis of thought in just the same way,” (Sexual Plethora and Death, pg. 94). Certain things that keep us alive, the clinging thought of our physical reality, the thought that we might find love and truth one day, that after our vendetta has been completed we can finally relax. However, this paradox is not as simple as it might permit itself to be: the mitigation of relief between the vendetta and its completion is not a fruitful path, it is negligent of acceptance, of any continuity between a man and all his bestial intuitions and the Godhead that he might wish to follow. These transgressions follow us around until we learn to forgive ourselves. “If transgression is not fundamental then sacrifice and the act of love have nothing in common,” (Sexual. . . pg. 96). There is always a sacrifice when it comes to paying a debt to love, or to the act of love. Our animal brains have had the luxury of evolving to a state of being where we have the power to experience love, where we have the possibility of sacrificing our vendettas to the goodwill of forgiveness and to the grace of God.
Sex Amid the Violence of Nature
The erotica of primal things like sexual urges, consuming food, murder, birth and death are all organized in a way where the body knows them well, but the mind can master the ability to forgo them, hence why we have laws and the realm of morality. Guilt is heavy for the mind who tremells in this realm of knowledge, because this mind knows of its primal natures, yet it defers them by way of intellectualizing its own existence. Any lowly man might engage in gluttonous ideology, he might even worship that of which he consumes, in the same way any sex addict or a ravenous killer might worship the body. Most of us worship birth and death, though we might not be aware of this in our attendance of funerals or our celebrations for newborns. This might be an act of respect for the living and the dead, but it is also an act of worship. These cycles that we resist constantly are begging for us to come into continuity with them, to see them and accept them, the worship is rendered useless when this kind of acceptance is present. At times when we are imperfect humans, at best we might be able to grab hold of the intense emotion that aries within the body:
Animal disorder is freely dissipated in untrammelled violence. . . In human life on the other hand, sexual violence causes a wound that rarely heals on its own accord; it has to be closed, and will not even remain closed without constant attention based on anguish (Sexual. . ., pg. 104).
When two souls are lucky enough to coalesce and collide into one another, especially when pertaining to love, there exists an unspoken acceptance of I am willing to allow you to break my heart, but I trust that you won't, and the heart is handed over, sometimes hesitantly, hopefully with ease. Upon the basis of sexual violence, where there exists many fronts of toxic and horrid excuses for living souls, the actions of two people or the one conducting the violence is cast by a shadow that breaks the heart inside of the beast. This transgression of violence is so lowly, where if I were to make a decision of this daemon’s rebirth, I would not, I would cast this soul into the void of nothingness and let it drift there, for at least a few millennia:
Erotic activity is not always as overtly sinister as this, it is not always a crack in the system; but secretly and at the deepest level the crack belongs intimately to human sensuality and is the mainspring of pleasure. Fear of dying makes us catch our breath and in the same way we suffocate at the moment of crisis (Sexual. . ., pg. 105).
This intimacy between two souls is immense, almost as intimate as a communion with God, and to harm this way of intimacy is to harm oneself in unspeakably foul ways. If it were that we could all release ourselves of this primal attraction to procreate and connect in a physical way that reaps the urges of orgasm, then we might all ascend to the heavens, but herein lies this essential balance of nature: we cannot all walk to the heavens. Some live such unclean lives, and have been in every rebirth cycle they walk into, that there is no way for them to reach a higher level of being except to just continue repeating this cycle of vicious carnage; the irony of its own continuity. Some must be dwellers of the bottom of the ocean so that others might rise to see the light that breaks the crest of the sea. “Deep within the significant break there dwells a boundless violence,” (Sexual. . ., pg. 107). I must note that Bataille went on to speak about women who try to reach orgasm, and how thinking of rape is what allows a woman to reach orgasm. If this is true for any woman, I question the validity of where this comes from because it must be something deeper, that this kind of violent thought is so erotically inducing. This is a broad and inconsiderate statement, and it speaks not for the actual horror of those who have experienced this transgression, and it renders consent utterly useless. Where the act of actual rape and wishing to be raped exists upon on one end of the scale and pure continuity with sexual activity exists the other. In the middle of this scale there exists a grey area concerning kinks, pleasure, desire and play. There also exists mindlessness and primal sex, as well as sexual freedom, sacral healing, and a pathway to a higher degree of pleasure, manifestations and desires. Erotica can be a doorway to many things, but wishing for violence by means of this is a surepath to a fiery end. There is a door to rebirth here, as well as actual birth. . .
Eroticism is filled up to the brims with taboos and transgression, but is that all there is? Eroticism might conclude itself to just be that of erotic thought or sexual ideology:
We use the word eroticism every time a human being behaves in a way strongly contrasted with everyday standards and behaviour. Eroticism shows the other side of a facade of unimpeachable propriety. Behind the facade are revealed the feelings, parts of the body and habits we are normally ashamed of. It must be stressed that although this aspect has apparently nothing to do with marriage it has in fact always been present in it (Transgressions in Marriage and in Orgy, pg. 109).
The marriage of souls creates a space where two beings can come together with all that they are and find a place of continuity, and if they are willing, this also expands up to the divine. It seems that under most circumstances, this level in society, where it is seen as a step towards greatness, lacks the bounds of true marriage. Consider divorce rates, marriage for the circumstances of pregnancy, money, arranged marriage; all of this does not even cross the line of truth, and this is a shameful act upon the realm of true marriage, “The sexual relationship in itself is a communication and a movement, it is like a celebration by nature and because it is essentially a communication it provokes an outward movement in the first place, “ (The Enigma of Inscent, pg. 207). That being said, even under the worst circumstances and scenarios, there is always a window to love, even if it might not be true love or a soulmate, there is still a way to acceptance and fruitfulness. Sometimes this leads to stations of erotica as opposed to love, and it might spur up the vendetta again, but the test that beckons one to the test of strength and courage is only bound to make a soul brighter. The eroticism that is present within marriage is not an ugly thing, and I do not think eroticism in general is an ugly thing, but we have thought it out to be so, and we have tied nasty and horrendous ideologies to the loose ends of the argument.
Sexual desire is a simple thing, it does not have to be spurred from murderous thought or evil antiquity, but it can be, and that is what makes it so muddy and neurotic.
Where can we go from here? How might we find the cure to the behavior of shedding oneself as a serpent might to the layers of the humanness that is our existence? For example, Bataille notes that, “Christianity has never relinquished the hope of finally reducing this world of selfish discontinuity to the realm of continuity afire with love,” (Christianity, pg. 118). If hope is all there is, then so be it, but it is a willingness that might survive this, and it takes courage to be human enough to want it. Or to seek it. We must mitigate all the blockades that our society has bestowed upon us, where words are used against us, where we are all but soldiers fighting a war we still know nothing of. “In an entirely profane world nothing would be left but the animal mechanism,” (Christianity, Pg. 128). But we do not live in an entirely profane world, not yet at least:
For the Christian apparently, sacred things are necessarily pure and impurity is profane. But for the pagan sacred things could also be unspeakably foul. And if one takes a closer look one must admit that Satan in Christianity is not so far off from the divine, and even sin could not be regarded as completely foreign to sacredness. Sin was originally a religious taboo, and the religious taboo of paganism is in fact sacred (Mysticism and Sensuality, pg. 223).
To be a sinner is to also be human, and so it is not in these transgressions that we find the fullness of divinity, but there might be echoes and nudges to stir up the batter of a new mindframe, as would a chef in a kitchen accidentally pouring a wrong spice into the mixture. Sometimes God is found by accident.
The Quest of Sovereignty
Insofar as we have all been living together on this planet, we have rarely touched harmony. Where it might have existed in small bits in ancient history as it might exist in small bits in each heart of gold and follower of God that wills itself to greater existence, there still exists this unfairness between the necessary continuity between men and women alike:
Not every woman is a potential prostitute, but prostitution is the logical consequence of the feminine attitude. In so far as she is attractive, a woman is a prey to men’s desire. Unless she refuses completely because she is determined to remain chaste, the question is at what price and under what circumstances will she yield. But if the conditions are fulfilled she always offers herself as an object. Prostitution proper only brings in a commercial element. By the care she lavishes on her toilet, by the concern she has for her beauty set off by her adornment, a woman regards herself as an object always trying to attract men’s attention. Similarly if she strips naked she reveals the object of men’s desire, an individual and particular object to be prized (The Object of Desire: Prostitution, pg. 131).
It is my understanding from the passage that a well-to-do woman cannot achieve anything worthwhile if it is not for her pussy, by means of attracting a successful man. She might not be a whore, but she is the closest thing to the devil. And, to that respect: a whore is such a daemon. I do not blame this man, for it was only the thinking world of his time and culture that surrounded it (and to be fair, women did contribute to this toxicity in ways of adornment), but it should be said: women are not objects. The only reason she might be an object of desire towards the male gaze is because of his own lust. A woman might flirt with the decorum of her garments and jewels, and at times it may be for the onlookers, but generally speaking: she does it for herself and it is hopeful thought to think she might do it for God, or at least some higher power. Purity and chaste are long gone in the wind of modernity. It is only fair to say that not all men contribute to this lusting and desired affection of a prize, of the object of a woman, but this idea has been ingrained into our communion with each other for a long time. ‘The beauty of the desirable woman suggests her private parts, the hairy ones, to be precise, the animal ones. Instinct has made sure that we shall desire these parts,” (Beauty, pg. 143). This primal ideology might be true on some level, but true beauty has always come from within. It is only our duty to remember this truth and to acknowledge that there is more beyond the skin that we wear, that each soul shines its own light, that we are together all living under a familiar circumstance, that we are being asked by the gods above to revolutionize a new stage of enlightenment, a new beginning to circumvent the trials of our current reality. “A gentle light, not the full glare of science, shows us a reality difficult to come to terms with compared with the reality of things; it makes possible a silent awakening,” (Kinsey, the Underworld and Work, pg. 163). There is a task at hand, a working matter, a duty to find the gold in the underbrush and the layers of forgotten mines. This is an unfolding process and all of it, the entirety of this evolution must happen within each body that walks this earth, even the dead ones.
This unfoldment might happen in the simplest of ways, even Bataille notes that, “In any case contemporary psychology has shown us that organic sexual urges are often at the root of a very powerful emotion that spills over through every possible channel,” (Mysticism. . . , pg. 225). So he is not completely void of the possibility that sex has a power to channel modes of higher consciousness and sacred healing. But again he goes on to say that, “Eroticism is a sterile principle representing Evil and the diabolic,” (Mysticism. . . , pg. 230) and “The peculiar quality of temptation is that the divine in its mystical form has ceased to be directly accessible and can only be understood intellectually,” (Mysticism. . . , pg. 236). And this might be an accurate representation, but still eroticism is not only left to the whims of evil, it can also be divine; the paradox of erotica. Also, the divine can be reached by many things. God, rather, is everywhere and all things, it is not a reserved awareness for intellectuals or shamans or priests. This is the magic of God, that he may be reached by everything and everyone, one must only have the desire persay to reach him. A sexual expression is not only primal/an animal function—it can be, but it can also avail itself to so much more, mostly on the basis of intention. In creation, especially within the arts like poetry, there is always a sense of sexual excitement, if it is true and good. This kind of creation is pure and mystical, it often comes from the sacral organs, a connection to God, an ecstasy, if you will. This is something taken out of raw human form and putting it out, or pulling it from the aether. How can anyone say it is naught, or a form of transgression, no less? Creation is a sacred process of continuity, it can be accessed through the transformation of a work of art, by means of the continuity of marriage or sex, by a simple act of resilience to the primal natures and the evil creatures at bay.
In the realm of philosophy, there are many preachers, many of which go about writing in too great of detail of their own transgressions. They write about them in such a way that exalts them, exhausting the principles of morality and being. If it is true that “The true philosopher must devote his life to philosophy,” (Sanctity, Eroticism and Solitude, pg. 253), and that “philosophy is also the death of language. It is also a sacrifice,” (Sanctity. . . pg. 263), then I am but a fish in the ocean, swimming along, and sometimes, when I mean to, I go against the current and I question why we all succumb to archaic habits and habitats. If we are here only to exist and be, then why is it so challenging? There must be something more to existence than humbly accepting the whims of birth and death. This must be why we create, to manifest the God within us, to be able to digest the fruits of such trying and asking labors.
