This little but beautiful last text of Georges Bataille is, as he said, an effort of the thinker to expose as simply as possible his human ontology. Aesthetics, Eroticism and Sacredness are conceived by the author as the principal features of heterological activities of human being. Luxury, Play, Sexual Pleasure and Poetry become the road of heterological wisdom. Art, Religion and Sex are so linked in ancient great civilizations: goddess of fertility, ancient worships as Shivaism or Dionysism. Historically there has been characters, in fiction as in reality, emancipated from the rational chains of traditional paradigms: Heliogabalaus of Rome, Sade, Gilles de Rais... who could follow the list?


Key book to access Bataille's thinking. Interesting as it explains the phenomenology of Eros. That is to say, life needs death to be, cells divide themselves to keep life alive. Sexual reproduction functions in a similar way. Orgasmic little death is seen by Bataille as a simulacrum of the great dead. Boundlessness, great pleasure instant of conciousness lost. Mysticism as well has something to do with great Eros focused on God. Budism is closer of a mystical atheism in daily life. No trascendental gods, only heroes of Musement as film actors, politicians, Rugbymen, etc.