Nancy - Sexistence

nothing so much as this the more we enjoy it the more concupiscence becomes our fate

Fatality?

Every genre of sex has its preliminaries: one approaches, one considers, one scents, one lets oneself be approached, brushed, and stroked in the various senses of that word. There is a word in Classical Latin, blandiri, that the Latinate languages long retained, in which the caress mixes with speech, each changing place with the other and sinuously looking to merge in the silence of a kiss. Montaigne speaks of the seductive blandishments of immoderate pleasure. It happens that things progress and then without notice or precaution one goes right for the goal, albeit not without this transgression itself constituting a defiant approach, a superb manner of declaring that one can and will pass on the preliminaries. One thereby designates the threshold even more clearly. Because liminaries pertain to the threshold, they happen on the threshold, and what precedes them must arrange and ready access to the threshold. Blandishments and kisses not only open access, they already engage it, experience it, and anticipate it.

The preliminaries, too, are already part of what they precede, prepare, hold up, and overtake at the same time. This is the case, at least, with sexual preliminaries; but we should also examine whether it holds true for all preliminaries, and whether it is always the modulation of a characteristic that most properly emerges in sex: an anticipation that does not merely project but precedes or assumes the precocious character of a premature enjoyment with regard to a fulfilled coitus.

But what precisely is the fulfillment in question? The possibility of fertilization? A sharing of enjoyment? In what order of finality, destination, disorientation, or confusion do we find ourselves?

In truth, we have arrived at the crux of what is called sex: neither sexual difference, nor different sexualities, but sex itselfsex as an act and not an organ or function. To the extent that it happensno matter how, as relation or as anticipation, as enjoyment or as disappointment. To the extent that it demands to happen, that it demands to be had not as a need must be satisfied but as a pressure exerts itself, as an excitation excites itself [sexcite], exalts itself [sexalte], exasperates itself [sexaspre], and in sum perhaps to say nothing furtherexists itself [sexiste]: it arises and propels itself into existence, which is, at least, one of its most energetic mainspringsalbeit, as well, the least necessary, or the most excessive [excdent] (if not actually maddening [excdant]).

The organ thus welcomes the difference of the stranger into my body: it is always the organ of my ruin, and this truth is so original that neither the heart, the centralorgan of life, nor the sex, the first organ of life, can escape it A true man has no sex for he must be his sex. As soon as the sex becomes an organ, it becomes foreign to me, abandons me, acquiring thereby the arrogant autonomy of a swollen object full of itself. This swelling of the sex become a separate object is a kind of castration The organ: place of loss because its center always has the form of an orifice. The organ always functions as an embouchure.

The crux is indeed this: that sex is an exigency and an excess; that its demand never quenched because it was never destined to be is announced in the difficulty of the word dira as Lucretius employs it: a term of augury, designating a deathly presage but also the power of a furor. A furor itself both bright and dark, an augury of both favor and fright be-causeas Lucretius developswhat appeases it unleashes it anew and it always finds itself on its own threshold. Such is its fatality:

Craving for water or for bread is easily satisfied.

But of a human faces bloom and beauty, what comes in

For the body to enjoy? Just images, flimsy and thin,

And the wind often snatches even this scrap of hope away.

As in a dream, when a man drinks, trying to allay

His thirst, but gets no real liquid to douse his bodys fire,

And struggles pointlessly after mere images of water,

And though he gulps and gulps from a gushing stream, his throat is dry,

So Venus teases with images lovers cant satisfy

The flesh however they devour each other with the eye,

Nor with hungry hands roving the body can they reap

Anything from the supple limbs that they can take and keep.

Lastly, when their limbs are tangled, and they pluck youths bloom,

And bodies have a foretaste of the pleasures that now loom,

And Venus is about to sow the womans field with seed,

They grasp each other and mix the moisture of their mouths in greed,

And panting heavily, press teeth in lips, but all in vain

Theres nothing of the other they can rub off and retain.

Nor can one body wholly enter the other and pass away

What Bataille will designate much later as erotic comedy is already staged here, staged as the drama that, in reality, this comedy designates for Bataille himselfthe drama or perhaps, well try to return this, tragedy in the most powerful sense of the term: that of sense fulfilling itself in the passage to the limit of sense itself, in accord with its ownmost fatality.

This passage, when it is not the passing away of death, is that of sexor that of language. For, the latter exposes what sex without language is content to impose: an interminable pursuit, running that chases its own course.

This course, ever again, thrusts and urges itself forth because it has no end: it does not pass anywhere but proves and approves itself in its very passage. Lucretius clearly discerns what happens: he pursues, with a prosodic haste or rush that seems itself to lose breath before or in what it says: