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Erotic play and the sublime/horrific void: a somacentric exploration of Georges Bataille’s frame-cracking erotic space

Version 2 2017-05-17, 01:39
Version 1 2017-02-08, 04:53
thesis
posted on 2017-05-17, 01:39 authored by Crees, Mark John
300 le petit morts : An apoapsis 1 :: Utilising a poetic register, with attendant experimental writing that places the author, reader and thesis (body) at risk, this thesis explores a somacentric (body-centered) ‘inhabiting’ of Georges Bataille’s eroticism approached obliquely through an atheological nonknowledge and the breaches/tears that found(er) the space that opens through such an investigation, rooting the argument in bodies, expanding the erotic breach as a topos of play and refusing a thermospasmic entropic nihilism that freezes Bataille — interrupting the ‘rigorous critical analysis’ with disreputable thinly-veiled autobiography and other ‘fictions’ — in three Acts, I (yes I) :: open erotic space explore erotic space (Void) embody erotic space (somacentric life), : sex a ‘getting lost’ in ‘getting lost in pleasure,’ bodies conjoined; knowledge confounded; opening to … : This ‘play’ will begin with an exploration of eroticism throughout Bataille’s oeuvre before tarrying with a Hegelian negative with a le petit detour underneath Kafka’s untier (in Žižekean parallactic style) and then refusing closure, giving way to somacentric flows and intensities so that while blind, this text requires itself to be ‘written on the body’ as Jeanette Winterson might gesture, and that we all might enjoy a good fuck. : 1 An abstract is a ‘point of entry’ to a thesis (required by dictate not my design), hence this is my apoapsis, my point of entry :: and like astronomical space, this entry point is that at which the orbiting object is farthest away from the body it is orbiting —and—according to Kepler’s law of planetary motion, it is at this point that the object is at the lowest velocity :: so we slow down, almost stop, caught in the gravitational pull of the thesis proper (whatever that is) and attempt to ‘capture’ what is to come – but it is always already premature and we end up with cum-stained hands, Psyche’s tears notwithstanding.

History

Principal supervisor

Roland Boer

Year of Award

2010

Department, School or Centre

Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies

Course

Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Type

DOCTORATE

Faculty

Faculty of Arts