sweet effay

I am not sure whether Mark is correct to claim that Idealization is presupposed in any erotic love relation, but I am certain that it doesn't always function in the way he describes. Whilst agreeing with him and Infinite Thought that the distinction between human and animal sex is based upon the fact that there are no such things as real persons in the former (which is simply to say that the erotic takes precedence over basic biological mechanisms), I cannot agree that all erotic love relationships are based on what is essentially Hegel's master/slave dialectic.

In contradistinction, I would hold up one strand of Bataille's theory of eroticism as an example of a series of practices which, rather than being centred on the worship of one partner, has its focus on excess and reciprocal debasement. Mutually racking up the levels of intensity via forms of consensual perversion is about bonding via complicity in these acts rather than acceding to strictly defined power games. Bataille is surely is correct to link this to taboo, although his focus on wallowing in guilt may say more about his inability to shake off his Catholicism than anything fundamental to the joy of such acts of perversion.

The whole Courtly Love/Glamasochism thing stinks of project with an infinitely deferred goal: 'the act itself is unimportant/boring'. For Bataille, the opposite of project is sacrifice, but this has nothing to do with role-playing to a set of fixed rules. 'Sacrifice falls into the forms of project, but only in appearance (or to the extent of its decadence). A rite is a defining of a hidden necessity (remaining forever obscure). And whereas, in project, the result alone counts, in sacrifice, it is in the act itself that value is concentrated' (Inner Experience, pp. 136-137 my emphasis). Glueboot is spot on when she says that 'sex/fucking/whatever, does not necessarily have to include the actual act of penetration', but it should never be unimportant or boring.

The sexual acts depicted by Bataille in The Story of the Eye and The Blue of Noon have nothing to do with the worship of one partner by a robot. Rather they are the actions of two individuals bound together in a mutual desire to achieve an ever closer relationship via their complicity in progressively more degenerate acts. These acts may include other protagonists, but such people are simply tools for the central couples' ever-growing intimacy on a road of limitless perversion where each act is enjoyed as the pinnacle of their love, but that pinnacle is subsequently topped via further transgression. There is nothing more unnatural and unbiologizing.

I would suggest that most of the problems with Glamasochism (and, indeed, courtly love) stem from the attempt to rationalize (as opposed to merely theorize) the most irrational of acts. It is very easy to do this with Masoch (and Sade) and his obsession with mistresses and contracts. However even the giving and receiving of sexual pain is not necessarily bound up with such things, but can rather be an act of affirmation based solely in the present and focussed on the intensity itself.