ABSTRACT
Where Breton places Eros under a resolutely ascendant sign, Bataille explores the world of its nether deeps. He himself frequently uses the word amour in a loosely generic sense; his exegetes mostly prefer the term amour noir. His true theme is really eroticism. He aims at elucidating the awesome desirousness of sexuality itself: something which transcends usefulness, pleasure and secure well-being because it engages humankind’s singular awareness of death and the sacred. ‘Essentially, the domain of eroticism is the domain of violence, the domain of violation.’1 His decipherment, we may say, is addressed to the archaic inner ‘god’ perceptible in human sexual nature and re-expressed throughout human culture, prior to - but Bataille will also say beyond - any civilising ‘humanisation’.
