Since I began my study of Georges Bataille, and particularly since I began reading Erotism: Death and Sensuality, I knew (or at least suspected) that I would find something about his treatment of eroticism that would connect to BDSM, or at least as I relate to it. As I composed my notes on Georges Bataille’s work and on Erotism in particular I wanted to see how I would end up interpreting it, and I think that some of the notes that I have gathered may have allowed me to sketch out a way of perceiving BDSM in terms of Bataillean eroticism as an erotic ritualism through which a kind of eroto-mystical power may be cultivated by practitioners, in addition to being the source of libidinal pleasure that some of us (myself included) feel. Obviously this is also surely a matter of weaving some part of myself with philosophy, but then again there is equally surely room for grounding interpretative possibilities relevant at least to the particular zeitgeist of the Left Hand Path, which has always favoured eroticism as a path to spiritual attainment.
However, I must admit that I will come at this from a limited perspective. I see myself as a dominant in the BDSM dynamic, and I don’t see myself as being submissive or masochistic. As such, I like to think of myself as quite good at talking about sadism, and quite capable of talking about the dominant side of that spectrum, but very limited in discussing and appreciating masochism, and limited in discussing submission. I say this for the purpose of disclosure, in the hope that I don’t blindside anyone into thinking I represent the totality of the experience of BDSM. I am simply proceeding from that which resonates with and activates me personally, from the standpoint of my own taste as much as my own thought.
With that having been established, I suppose it’s worth saying that much of this is going to come from my own reading of Erotism: Death and Sensuality. As his study of eroticism par excellence, it only makes sense that one could derive kinky insights from that text.
Indeed, it’s possible to derive something relevant to the BDSM dynamic very early on in Erotism, as pertains to the distinction between the active and passive partner, even to the extent that dissolution is the aim for both. Domination, represented in the active partner, and submission, represented in the passive partner, in their own way enact either different processes of dissolution or different pathways to the same form of erotic dissolution. Dissolution can take on multiple meanings. Eroticism always entails the breaking down of certain patterns, for Bataille that is the familiar patterns of civilised society that we script ourselves in, and the rites of domination, submission, bondage, discipline, in their own way still taunt and live outside the norms of society even with the apparent tolerance and understanding of the present, while breaking down the norms of its participants. But in another way, the submissive hopes to be dissolved in the power of the dominant partner, in a way that O in The Story of O compares to being caught and trapped in the hands of God, and the dominant partner also means to dissolve by way of their domination, even if like the alchemist forming the philosopher’s stone.
As a child, O had read a Biblical text in red letters on the white wall of a room in Wales where she had lived for two months, a text such as the Protestants often inscribe in their houses:
IT IS A FEARFUL THING TO FALL INTO THE HANDS OF THE LIVING GOD
No, O told herself now, that isn’t true. What is fearful is to be cast out at the hands of the living God.
Pauline Réage, The Story of O
Perhaps the alchemist is in fact being changed by the process of the Magnum Opus.
In Erotism, Bataille explicitly links sexual penetration to ritual sacrifice and to the transgression that links them.
The act of violence that deprives the creature of its limited particularity and bestows on it the limitless, infinite nature of sacred things is with its profound logic an intentional one. It is intentional like the act of the man who lays bare, desires and wants to penetrate his victim. The lover strips the beloved of her identity no less than the blood-stained priest his human or animal victim. The woman in the hands of her assailant is despoiled of her being. With her modesty she loses the firm barrier that once separated her from others and made her inpenetrable. She is brusquely laid open to the violence of the sexual urges set loose in the organs of reproduction; she is laid open to the impersonal violence that overwhelms her from without.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (page 90)
As regards BDSM, let’s provisionally link domination with penetration and submission with the act of being penetrated. It’s not strictly 1:1 like that, in that there are situations where submission can still giving rather than receiving penetration, but in many cases domination involves penetration in the sense of giving rather than receiving and submission involves receiving rather than giving penetration. Anyway, the lover who penetrates strips the other of more than their clothes: they strip them of their barriers, of whatever Bataille thinks is their identity, no less than the priest of a sacrificial ritual takes away the like of the sacrificed person or animal. The lover who is penetrated loses themselves completely in being penetrated, losing the barriers that separated them from everything else, and is laid open to the impersonal “violence” of sexual desire that overwhelms her. Bataille interprets sacrifice, in the “primitive” sense, as a violent means for coming to know (or attempting to know) the secrets of existence through ritual means. In this interpretation, that applies to eroticism, in that eroticism implies the act of penetration as a transformative act involving the discovery of continuity between lovers, one that must be experienced and revealed in a manner not far removed from “violence”.
The sacrificial aspect of sex and eroticism has some worthwhile considerations regarding the appreciation of BDSM, and in this sense the appreciation of BDSM on mystical and vaguely religious terms. Entering into it can mean thinking of a rite where one is the sacrificed, the other is the sacrificer. But sometimes people alternate between sacrificer and sacrificed, thus “switches”. It’s a flawed analogy, really, but not an unworkable one. More important is what that sacrifice means for the sacrificer and the sacrificed. For both it’s a sort of dissolution through which a revelation that transforms both may occur. It can be seen as a kind of mystical sensation that can be intimately linked with certain sexual desires, but also emotional desires. In a word: eroticism. Thus are the rites of domination and submission.
There’s another aspect of the sacrificial throughline that we can see in Bataille’s posthumous Theory of Religion. This throughline comes down to the principle of sacrifice itself.
The sacrificer declares: “Intimately, I belong to the sovereign world of the gods and the myths, to the world of violent and uncalculated generosity, just as my wife belongs to my desires. I withdraw you, victim, from the world in which you were and could only be reduced to the condition of a thing, having a meaning that was foreign to your intimate nature. I call you back to the intimacy of the divine world, of the profound immanence of all that is.”
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion (page 44)
The sacrificer identifies themselves with the divine world in the act of sacrifice, which they identify with the act of returning discontinuous being to the continuity of being embodied by the divine world. That divine world is defined by sovereignty, which in this sense might denote lack of purpose beyond itself and its existence beyond appropriation and beyond the possibility of recuperation, though no doubt also implies the power of its own exuberance. There is also a violence to the divine world, no doubt implicitly connected to death, but also here actually denoting the fundamental excess of the continuity of existence. There is, of course, an immanence to this world, in which subject and object are not separate, being is not identified as thing, and everything is fully intimate. Sacrifice destroys the boundaries set by separation and by subordination to work, but it also elevates the sacrificer. The sacrificer takes on divine identity and, for the purpose of ritual, makes themselves sovereign. They are the power that, by destroying, restores or reveals the continuity of the victim, and they, beforehand, ritually wed themselves to the sovereign power that destroys in order to grant second birth to everything, and themselves.
I find it easy to identify this with part of the BDSM dynamic, more particularly the dynamic of domination. In this sense the sadist and the dominant strive to assert if not create the sense of sovereign exuberance. As previously explored in the discussion of sadism relevant to Erotism, the sadist/dominant strives to create their own sovereignty. But in these terms, they bring the submissive to the same realm of sovereignty. The sadist/dominant invokes for themselves the sovereign passion of sadism or domination, which is necessarily akin to sacrifice. In the confines of sexual ritual (and within the boundaries of consent of course), the sadist or dominant represents the power to dissolve the personal discontinuity of the submissive, and ultimately the walls of their own persona. It is a movement of sovereignty that breaks everything down as it creates a kind of power between them. The sadist/dominant is enacting an erotic movement that creates by destroying, and overmastering like the Sun, and in so doing this process works upon the sadist/dominant in their very desire to create sovereignty almost as much as it works upon the submissive who endures the incessant exuberance visited upon them.
But, in sacrifice, the victim has no idea of the dialogue that Bataille has in mind, and neither can they reply to it. Sacrifice essentially turns its back on “real”, perhaps meaning “normal”, relations, otherwise it would deny its own nature. This is because its nature is opposes to the world of things on which “distinct reality” is founded. When an animal, person, or object is destroyed in sacrifice, sacrifice necessarily destroys the objective reality of the victim, and this gives the world of sacrifice the appearance of violent or “puerile” gratuity. That gratuity consists of a beclouding of consciousness, or rather an unconsciousness, because that’s what the return to the intimacy of immanence implies. That unconsciousness even goes so far that killing appears as a way of redressing a wrong done to the animal. The main point for Bataille is that the greatest negation of “the real order” is that most favourable to the appearance of “the mythical order” – in other words, the highest form of negation, in that context, is that which supports the sovereign world of the gods, the world of the divine. For Bataille, sacrifice also resolves the painful antinomy of life and death through reversal. In Bataille’s concept of immanence, death is nothing, but, because death is nothing, beings are not separated from death. In that setting, death has no meaning, because there is no difference between death and life, and there is neither fear of death nor defence against it. Death thus invades without giving rise to any resistance.
Sacrifice in this interpretation is a kind of fundamental transgression, one that nonetheless upholds a sacred world by destroying the “real” or non-sacred world. For “objective” reality, thus, sacrifice is inversion. Kink can also be seen as an inversion of the “normal” relationships that human beings operate in. The sadist/dominant desires such an inversion capable of creating a sovereign world of themselves, and to demonstrate exactly their power to alter the world around them, and to some extent themselves, through the power that generates forth in the experience. In that sense, the inversion follows Geoffrey Gorer’s definition of sadism.
Sadism, as described by its analyst, I would define as the pleasure felt from the observed modifications on the external world produced by the will of the observer. This is a universal instinct and very strong, only following the instinct for self-preservation, and the sex instincts, of which it is a manifestation and which are a manifestation of it. It might also be defined as ‘pleasure in the ego’s modifications of the external world’, but I think the first definition is clearer.
Geoffrey Gorer, The Life and Ideas of Marquis De Sade (page 156)
It must be understood that Gorer’s defintion of sadism concerns an ambivalent if not amoral pleasure which can be present in an enormous and diverse range of human activities.
It will be seen that this definition is extremely wide and covers; an enormous range of human activity from the creation of works of art to the blowing up of bridges, from making little girls happy by giving them sweets to making them cry by slapping them. It would be incorrect however to say that it covers all human activities for there are two essential clauses: there must be sensible modificaitions of the external world, and they must be the willed production of the agent. That is to say that there can be Sadistic satisfaction in painting a picture, but not in painting a house under another person’s orders and following another person’s taste; there can be Sadistic pleasure in killing a person, but not if that killing is ordered and independent of the killer.
Geoffrey Gorer, The Life and Ideas of Marquis De Sade (page 156)
Sadism centers around a kind of amoral creativity whose chief concern is the autonomous and willing transformation of the external world. The basic Crowleyan premise of magic that we take for granted is essentially an expression of that creativity, hence the Sadean quality of solar myth. This form of creative will or pleasure cannot be subordinate to the goals of the superego or any kind of order or rationalisation, because then it would not be. At base, it is accountable to no specific purpose, no ideological apparatus, no institutions, or even to any god in particular, and is motivated by nothing other than its own creative will or desire. In Nick Land’s terms it can be thought of as libido, or an impersonal creativity that recurrs constantly, which can therefore be brought to no end that is compatible with authority.
There is the idea that kink is a way of making divine love and power tangible in our world. To a certain extent, I’m inclined to share that idea. Following the understanding of sadism specifically, one can take a certain practice of kink and kinky sex as a way of manifestating a primary process of creativity, to which we are brought into proximity by our activity, by which we break down the ordered world of the “moral ego”. Solar alchemy as a theurgical process by we collapse the boundaries that order the world and the normative personality (between discontinuity and the libido of continuity and divine creativity), which allows us to access to our own transformations proceeding into the production of mystic or erotic sovereignty.
Throughout my study of Erotism I have been very tempted to discuss the humanistic treatment of sadomasochism of sadomascohism by Susan Sontag, who attempted to associate it with fascism. The effort is certainly worthy of ridicule and deserving of excoriation, but in light of Bataille’s discussion of eroticism in association with death, and especially my notes on Sadean sadism, perhaps there is much more depth to add to this excoriation, which thus makes for a deeper indictment of Sontag’s humanistic morality.
In Fascinating Fascism, Sontag attempts to link sadomasochism with fascism on aesthetic grounds. She says that both sadomasochism and fascism are theatre, which is to say an aesthetic spectacle, and the spectacle is both extravagant and forbidden to ordinary people. She also claims that sadomasochism is the furthest reach of sexual experience in that it is when sex is most purely sexual, severed from personhood, relationships, and love, and that this explains the alleged involvement of Nazi symbolism in sadomasochistic eroticism of the time, since she takes it as an aestheticized form of the relation of master and slave. And of course, the fantasy, according to Sontag, is death. There is something clearly ridiculous about that whole prejudice, especially with regards to the implication that there is no love involved – save, perhaps, that sadomasochistic relationships do not follow the given notion of love that Sontag might lean on. But the way Sontag links sadomasochism to death is also something linked to the moral assignment of fascism on the plane of death, as though being the ideology of death, without much mind to the political systems that paved the way for its creation. Fascism is death, but the democracies that created fascism are not, for Sontag surely values democracy too much to make that judgement. Sontag cites Bataille but only to say that the aim of sexual activity is blasphemy, not that Bataille also means that erotic activity means congress with death. That omission is significant, since it means citing Bataille’s philosophy of eroticism while boxing out the centre of Bataille’s concept of eroticism. Or perhaps Sontag dare not say that to place violence at the basis of sexual life is a fascist premise. But then again she might as well have, since her idea is that the fantasy and aesthetic and death is a fascist sexuality, in that it is an impersonal spectacle of violent subjection. This does well only to show Sontag’s own morality, and the limits that it imposes on how we understand eroticism. The death drive must be designated as the purview of fascism in order for liberal or humanistic consciousness to dismiss it, and so, by extension, it can do so for sadomasochism.
The erotic “death” for Bataille is, anyway, somewhat multifaceted in its meaning. Human beings do not typically die as a result of sexual activity, and so death must have some other significance in relation to eroticism, and for Bataille there are multiple meanings to consider. In one sense, continuity does denote and imply death, insofar as discontinuity implies the individual existence of the creature. But insofar as death links continuity to violence, and in this context violence means something that transgresses the boundaries of discontinuous being, which is ultimately the essential point of eroticism. But discontinuity also connects fundamentally to the condition of humanity, and the whole world of world and reason that defines it, while discontinuity connects to the animal world, and the violent sacred world that it represents, which in some ways connects us to what we really are. Something dies, and that death is the discontinuity of human being, but since death is the youth of life, and the erotic “death” we embrace we do so in order to assent to a new life, in the sense that we must “die in order to live”, the death of that discontinuity meant a life unfettered from its limits. In another way, there is a “dying to oneself” that is the source of mystical sovereignty, and sadism presents a movement of development towards that sovereignty. At base, there is the “death” of ordinary life for those who undertake the erotic pathways, and, as such, sadomasochism. That death needs to be boxed out, excluded, and denied in order to preserve the morality of humanity from its doom, and keep the walls of humanity in place. What Sontag presents us with is just an excuse to keep the night outside of our heads.
Carolyn Elliott talks about the night-time world of the unconscious ruling both our dreams and our waking patterns as part of a broader discussion within Existential Kink. Being kinky is all about our own acquaintance with the unconscious energy that seems to actually animate us. That represents part of the immensity of the animal world, the immensity of all of life. The sovereignty of sadism is also a part of that, it is after all a movement of sovereign passions. Actually, there is a sense in which, insofar as the exuberant passions of kink are all sovereign, in the sense of having no use or need apart from itself as Bataille sets out, and in that they cannot be appropriated as such. Yet no wonder Sontag feels the need to refer to a mystery theatre forbidden to ordinary people. It’s not only that ordinary people don’t understand the passions even when they have the passions themselves, it’s that someone actually seeking the depths of sadomasochistic pleasure inevitably set themselves apart from ordinary people, and strive for their own sovereign pleasure and will in exactly the unconscious animal world it connects to.
If BDSM presents us with a ritual environment in which to safely explore the world of our desires and their intercourse between life and death, or pleasure and pain, there is inevitably a connection to ritual, or even festival, at large. There is often a want among humans to explore chaotic forces within a safe enough environment. In Japan, the festivals, or matsuri, were, on the one hand, solemn rites of purification meant to pacify the araburu-no-kami (the “wild” or “rough” aspects of the kami), but on the other hand they were also raucous forms of sacred disinhibition. Authority figures would shed their solemnity, drunk off their asses, and give way to an ecstatic uproar, thereby unleashing a passion that changes the soul from being passive to being wild. In such settings, humans could access the ara-mitama by breaking down the normal social rules. But the more salient point is the kind of communion with the animal world speculated to have been represented at Gobekli Tepe, probably the oldest religious structure in the world. The images of predatory and aggressive animals adorning the Gobekli Tepe complex must have allowed human beings to safely interact with the spirts of these very same animals, and thus bring them into communion with exactly this animal world, and the sacred world they represent. It is possible to interpret rituals such as those practiced by the Berserker or Ulfhednar, or the koryos bands, in a similar light, or for that matter the mysteries of Dionysus. BDSM as an erotic movement is also a ritual movement, whereby those who practice it access not only satisfaction but also a presence analogous to the wild and transgressive sacred. In this sense, the Left Hand Path could not be more appropriate.
We can perhaps also make room for the subject of the left hand path as the “lightning path” in relation to Bataille’s God and BDSM through Carolyn Elliott’s concept of Existential Kink. The demonic offers what God offers, and for Bataille this seems to involve lightning and vertigo, something that jolts people away from all the concerns of the world of work that form the structures of normative consciousness. The Left Hand Path that Elliott explores involves precisely jolting oneself out of that world, and getting in congress with the dark, kinky world of one’s shadows, and in so doing turning the world you find yourself in topsy turvy – inverting it, as such. What is destroy in the “lightning path” is the limited image of what we think we are, and what we think we are capable of.
God-for me–means the lightning flash which exalts the creature above the concern to protect or increase his wealth in the dimension of time. Men of religion will say that I am leaving out the most important thing, that in temptation one of two conflicting forces ought to be loved and the other ought· to be abhorred. That is not so, or at least only superficially. I must stress the following fundamental principle.
In temptation there is only an object of attraction of a sexual nature; the . mystical element which restrains the tempted man has now no “immediate force”; its power derives from the fact that the religious, faithful to his decisions, prefers the safeguard of the equilibrium acquired through the mystical llfe to the delirium into which temptation would have him slide.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (page 236)
I have seen some people refer to the Left Hand Path as the “lightning path”, in the sense of it being the “direct” path to spiritual enlightenment. But as far as I know, it was Tani Jantsang who established (or rather invented) this terminology, by which she equates Vajrayana Buddhism as a whole to the Left Hand Path in the context of Tantric Buddhism. Carolyn Elliott, in her book, Existential Kink also uses the term “lightning path” as a reference to the Left Hand Path, so as to mean a “direct path”, and it sounds a lot like Tani Jantsang’s ideas, but then Elliott doesn’t reference Jantsang anywhere in her book. That’s a little suspicious in hindsight. In any case, in Elliott’s terminology, the “lightning path” to refer to her own concept of Existential Kink, which she identifies with the Left Hand Path within Hindu Tantra, because it is supposed to quickly wake you up to your own sexual unconsciousness and quickly destroy normative self-consciousness, as in quick as lightning. It seems to be in the same way that Bataille’s lightning god shakes someone out of all concern for profit.
In the same page Bataille also seems to present the notion or aspect of the divine that he calls “the demoniac-divine”, or “divine-demoniac”. Why demoniac, as in demonic? This is where the divine is directly accessible on the sexual plane, rather than the ascetic religious plane, because of the progress of temptation. It is this aspect that offers what God offers, only more compellingly, because the Christian would rather die than give into temptation.
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. The divine is at that moment directly accessible on the sexual plane, the demoniac plane, as it were; this demoniac-divine or divine-demoniac offers what God himself, as he is discovered through major mystical experience, offers, and offers it more compellingly since the religious would choose physical death to a lapse into temptation.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (page 236)
But what does God offer? If Bataille is right, God offers a vertigo that leads human beings away from the concerns of their worldly selves. The lightning flash exalts humans above their concern for profit, and above the world of work. In that understanding the demoniac-divine offers exactly this, and it does through temptation. Involvement with the demonic in this sense elevates humans above the world they live in. As this is connected to the sexual plane, it is tantamount to saying that eroticism does exactly this, and thus eroticism is linked to the demonic, representing a demonic aspect of the divine.
Even the negative motion of Sadean sovereignty forms the motion of a kind of carnal alchemy, which for BDSM would concern the transformation of everyone involved, not only the submissive party but also the dominant party: the dominant, one way or the other, slowly works to perfect the lead of their own soul into the gold of sovereignty. This is a path in which one passes through Bataille’s underworld, through the beast, and through heroic insensibility, to become gold – black, ruinous, joyous, and exuberant gold. Perhaps this is also a gold that conducts the power to transform the objective world, or perhaps it is that very power. And of course, if we are talking about sovereignty, we are in a sense also talking about divine identification, aren’t we? And in a very heroic sense, perhaps befitting ancient and ecstatic mysteries.
The mystical sovereignty of eroticism has nothing to do with what the “real” sovereignty of political authority. Such “sovereignty” for Bataille, is not what it claims to be, because it is concerned with practical political power, and that concern has a habit of rendering historical sovereignty more flexible that it may appear. By contrast, Bataille says that real sovereignty is never anything more than the effort to free human existence from the bonds of necessity, which the historical sovereigns did achieve to some extent with the help of their faithful subjects. I might hazard the suggestion that, for the master, or one aspiring to be one, that might be enough. It is already difficult for humans to break free from that necessity. But one who is free from necessity (in Bataille’s terms) is perhaps also one who cannot be subordinated. In practice, it is more like the dominant and the submissive parties supports the growth of each other’s sovereignty exactly through the ritualistic eroticism we participate in.
I could go into the presentation of Sadean sovereignty by Bataille and Blanchot, but as I wrote this I found it difficult to weave the full extent of that discussion into the scope of this article. So instead I will leave links to my previous discussions of that sovereignty, and then skip straight to the subject of love.
On the one hand the love of the sexual partner (a variant of marriage as inserted into the order of active society and often coinciding with it) changes sexuality into tenderness; tenderness attenuates the violence of nocturnal pleasures, and sadistic actions are here more common than might be supposed; it is possible for tenderness to take on a balanced form. On the other hand the fundamental violence that makes us lose control always tends to disturb a relationship of tenderness-to make us find in that relationship that death is near, and death is the symbol of all sensuality, even that modified by tenderness. Here is the violence of lovemaking without which sexual love could not have lent its vocabulary as it has done to describe the ecstasies of the mystics.
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death and Sensuality (pages 242-243)
Even love itself in all its delirium has a certain sadistic aspect. Love is linked to the sovereignty of passion, and the mingling of that sovereign passion with the purchase of ironmongery is ridiculous in Bataille’s eyes. The implication is that sovereignty, here, connects to passion, in the sense of passion that is not recuperated by the working consciousness of the everyday world, and that is exactly the passion that the Sadean sovereign is concerned with. There is thus, in this sense, a link between sadistic pleasure, the sovereignty that sadism moves to create, and the death drive implied by eroticism – which, in the end, is simply the drive of life not to preserve itself but to grow into its ultimate stage in its exuberance, and then gain knowledge of its own immensity. Sadism is as much tied to the erotic death drive as masochism is, but then how should it not be, since it is an erotic tendency? The love of a sexual partner turns sexuality into tenderness. Tenderness in turn accentuates the violence of nocturnal pleasures, and thus sadistic actions are more common than they are often thought to be.
So, having gone through about as much as I can of the extent of my notes on Bataille that even slightly relate to any kind of discussion of kink, what can we say from here. How I summarise what I have thus far presented? I suppose it’s fitting enough to return to theme of kink as making divine love and power tangible. There’s always something ritualistic about kinky sex, or at least I seem to have the sense of it. In fact, the inner ritualism of kink is so strong that the religious itself seems to cross seamlessly into kink, to the point that there is actually such a thing as religious roleplay. In religious roleplay you can not only take on the role of a nun, priest, angel, or demon, but even gods and goddesses themselves, and you can even enact virulent blasphemies as erotic rites. Could there be any more vivid an illustration of erotic theurgy? Could there be any more blatant a demonstration of the ritual aspect of BDSM?
When Bataille discusses sacrifice, he is discussing it as the production of the sacred. The sacred in this sense is the appearance of continuity, and also, in a certain sense, sovereignty. That which is sovereign is that which answers to nothing, that which operates, that whose appearance transgresses the order of the world of work, and that whose manifestation may constitute the assertion of freedom. From that perspective at least, the ritual of BDSM can be seen as a libidinal manifestation of what Bataille took to be the production of the sacred. That one can roleplay as gods and goddesses in the world of kink would really seem to be the apogee of the erotic manifestation of the sovereignty that Bataille associates so clearly with the sacred. The libidinal play of kink transforms us as we partake of it. We make a whole play of libidinal creativity tangible to us, and the play we engage with allows us to cultivate a power that seems inaccessible to us in the everyday world of work, norms, and repression. With sadism in particular it’s as if we’re destroying that world in order to assert the eroto-mystical sovereignty that we are capable of. But the important thing is that we really are talking ritual, with rules of engagement conducive to a safe environment basically founded on consent, essential to its very fulfillment. It’s in this environment exactly that we produce the sovereignty that we desire.
Like I said before, this is still a somewhat limited discussion, because I can barely speak of masochism, mostly because I can barely speak of surrender. And yet, Bataille has something to say about surrender as well, in that he interprets even surrender in a way that implies an assertion of freedom, at least in the sense that, in Inner Experience for instance, surrender takes a meaning completely different from the commonly accepted one: something closer to “denuement”, as in the total discarding of means and therefore necessity (which is meant to be understood as a kind of loss). Nick Land went even further with Bataille’s interpretation of surrender: he actually interprets it as an aggressive abandonment of the self and duty, in contrast to docility before the law.
Docility in respect of the law is quite different from a surrender, in exactly the way that moralists are different from mystics. Surrender is a deeper evil than any possible action. The very principle of action is an acceptance of justice and responsibility, and any act is – as such – an amelioration of crime, expressing defiance within the syntax of redemption. In stark comparison with action, surrender gnaws away the conditions for salvation. Giving itself up to a wave of erasure, the agent dies into the cosmic reservoir of crime. Beyond the (agentic) pact with Satan lies an irreparable dissolution into forces of darkness, apart from which there is no ecstasy. Surrender is not a submission to an alien agency (devotion to God), but a surrender of agency in general, it is not any kind of consigning of oneself over to another (return to the father) , but utter abandonment of self; a dereliction of duty which aggresses against one’s birth.
Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (page 73)
There is a certain futility to the way Land links surrender with evil, especially the framing of evil as basically non-agentic, but the point for him is that even surrender constitutes aggression against the regime of law. I suspect that from that perspective it is possible to elaborate a specific form of jouissance and even sovereignty from masochism. But, I find it best to let someone masochistic and submissive run away with that and take over from that discussion, or at least read Revolutionary Demonology for its masochism, and let them cultivate their own insights through their own nature. Like I say, I’m not one for surrender.
Some of my previous discussions of Sadean eroto-mystical sovereignty:
The Path of Destruction: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2024/01/31/the-path-of-destruction/
The black flame of active nihilism: https://mythoughtsbornfromfire.wordpress.com/2024/02/06/the-black-flame-of-active-nihilism-an-addendum-to-the-path-of-destruction/
Aleph's Heretical Domain 