ABSTRACT
The reason that drives one to read Georges Bataille’s definition of eroticism as erotic in itself is what he refers to as “man’s inner experience”, that which attracts a man to a woman and not to another who may be far more beautiful than the first one. Eroticism is possible when the woman offers the man the fantasy that being an erotic object she can be taken then destroyed by him. Bataille draws on Le Marquis de Sade’s idea that death is related to sensuality to build his own idea that sexual excitement is related to death and that the “thought of murder can give rise to a desire for sexual enjoyment, to the neurotic at any rate”. The transition from the normal state to that of the erotic desire presupposes a partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity”. In other words, the “whole business of eroticism” involves some degree of violence.
