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Suzanne Kite Sex Writing December 10th, 2013

Sex as Access to the Inaccessible

The void, a place both intangible and immaterial, exists at once as the vacant space between bodies, permitting their displacement, and as interstitial space mingled with things themselves... Ray Brassier

Orgasm is the point of the death of the ego, where the self dissolves into nothing, not the dissolving of the self into another person, but dissolving into the space of the unknown, the unknowable, the void. This is an indescribable space, one that is only experienced, and not represented through writing, film, or any other medium. The loss of the self can occur through physical contact, be it comforting touch of the mother or lover, but the height of this sensuality is found in the orgasm, the height of repetitive touch, the peak of physical tension, dissolving physically and mentally into a torrent of chemical release. Batailles Story of the Eye follows two teenagers as they disassociate into a surrealist reality through sexual acts. The multiple deaths that occur in the storys surreal landscape point towards the characters slow deaths as they commit lewder and more intense acts. Deleuze calls dying an individuation, a protest by the individual

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who has never recognized himself within the limits of the Self and I, even when these are universal. The height of sex is the point that represents a break of the Self, a moment where the Self is no longer most present in reality, but something beyond the Self, emerges as the Self dissolves. The moment of emergence & dissolution in Story of the Eye occurs most intensely when their lover and playmate Marcelle, hangs herself. Nothing about her death could be measured by a common standard, and the contradictory impulses overtaking us in this circumstance neutralized one another, leaving us blind and, as it were, very remote from anything we touched, in a world where gestures have no carrying power, like voices in a space that is absolutely soundless. (Bataille 24) A symptom of this ego-reducing experience is the feeling of complete disconnection during the come-down of the sexual high. Part of this is at once feeling disconnected from oneself and others post-coitus, which the characters in this book take further and use to disassociate from the pain of death of Marcelles death, and later the suicide attempts of the mother. In the characters reality, they associate their insanity with their sexual acts, and fetishize the fall into absurdity. Marcelles insanity, and even her hanging herself, is dreamt of, fetishized, and foreshadowed before it occurs. While their sexual acts free them from their societal and psychological bonds, Marcelle did not ask to be freed, and instead drowns in her own sex-induced insanity. They were nearly motionless, and tense, and their eyes gaped with unrestrained joy. But soon, some invisible monstrosity

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appeared to be pulling Marcelle away from the bars, though her left hand clutched them with all her might. We saw her tumble back into her delirium. (Bataille 15) When the lewdness reaches a fever pitch, the teenagers seek the most lewd, most vulgar acts to give them pleasure. They seek a satisfaction that is only possible through complete disassociation from the structures of society and the mind. They seduce, murder, mutilate, and have sex with the corpse of a priest, at the height of their sexual destruction. I stretch out at her side to rape and fuck her in turn, but all I could do was squeeze her in my arms and kiss her mouth, because of a strange inward paralysis ultimately caused by my love for the girl and the death of the unspeakable creature. I have never been so content (Bataille 38). Their sexual destruction of the priest, and of Marcelle, is the sexual murder of their own mental confines, through which it is possible for them to seek satisfaction, but possibly never reach it. The main character ends the book, by addressing his emotional pain. There was no way I could restore them to life except by transforming them and making them unrecognizable, at first glance, to my eyes, solely because during that deformation they acquired the lewdest of meanings. (Bataille 44) Only through creating lewdest, and destroying the emotional content, is the character capable of processing the emotional response he feels about the suicide attempts of his mother. He continues his life on a surreal plane, separate from that which will cause him pain. Preferring, instead, to reject his ego in exchange for the sexual high of lewdness and destruction. The transcendent high of sexual intercourse is the same high described in the book Acid Temple Ball. It is a high that is chased after by humans through sex, drugs,

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and almost any other of our addictions. It is an endless cycle of seeking that which will dissolve our self-consciousness, our consciousness, and therefore dissolve that which harms us. In Acid Temple Ball, the character feeds her happiness, her sadness, her boredom, and her pain with a strong dose of drugs and sex. While, similar to Story of the Eye, she lives in a world where reality never seems to catch up, her world is not nearly as surreal. Her emotions have a space to exist, and she has her tools to react to them. I climb onto his body, spear myself on his hot cock, grind it inside me, infinitely hungry for the taste of his body, the only reassurance that he exists and touches me. (Sativa 303) Her infinite hunger for physical connection through touch is a reflection of her infinite hunger for disconnection through drugs. This connection/disconnection becomes one in the same as an unsatisfiable need to reach something outside the self, be it a drug-induced high or another body. Her sexual experience is vivid and magnificent, leaning into her partners experience as she leaves her own to focus on her flesh. During sex she describes Jesse as not conscious of himself other than as something undergoing change and seeking to minimize pain, he was open to all possibilities. (Sativa 240) For her, those possibilities include pain, but not the kind of pain one commits to in reality. She sobs and mourns Jesse on an emotional level, but the purpose of each sexual act is to minimize pain. The character experiences, on a fictional level, emotional pain and sadness, treated immediately with drugs and sex. I sob and he strokes my back, holds my wet face against his cheek. After a while, my mind begins to blur, my muscles are hit by spasms, my finger and toe muscles contract. Energy forces itself through me, rips

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through me. I rock and cry, the drug flashes in my mind, my belly cramps and relaxes, my thighs tremble. Pleasure roars through me in deep harsh spasms. In less than a paragraph, the character moves through extreme emotional pain, about the loss of her lover, into the complete bodily contraction and pleasure through the drug STP and sex combined. This coping-mechanism to emotional distress allows her consciousness to fall into the background, and let physical sensations take over. I am deeply chilled, deeply empty in myself, I can't talk to him or explain why I am lonely and terrified. He keeps touching me and trying to get through to me, comforting me with his body. (Sativa 289) More than anything, she would like to disappear into her sensations, her highs. It doesnt matter where the high is from, where it is being experienced, as long as it wrenches her away from herself and into the place where she is not quite inside her body and not quite inside her head, but a different space of only chemical and sensual experience. We have no way of knowing how high we are, perhaps we would be lost in our own rooms. Here there is nothing to tie us to society's picture of reality, no signs, no objects, no time We will return, we are eager to return, we are sorry not to have enough acid with us to blow our minds and keep us mad forever in the hills. (Sativa 273) Regardless of quest to float somewhere near her body in ecstasy, the character does not seek to completely disassociate, only to walk the fine line between fantasy and reality. In Story of O, the main character seeks complete identity loss, not through orgasm, but through sexual bondage. As O falls deeper into physical and sexual

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bondage, she experiences a release of her bonds over herself in a reversal of bondage. That she should have been ennobled and gained in dignity through being prostituted was a source of surprise, and yet dignity was indeed from within, and her bearing bespoke calm, while on her face could be detected the serenity and imperceptible smile that one surmises rather than actually sees in the eyes of hermits. (Reage 21) This mystical state functions as a death of the unreal, the mind, leaving only the real, the body. Os peace is found in the deep sense of calm that arises from within herself as her body is beaten and ravaged. Her peace begins at her flesh, but emerges from beyond her emotions, beyond her psyche, and beyond her body. It comes from a vast well of unnameable calm. Beneath the gazes, beneath the hands, beneath the sexes that defiled her, the whips that rent her, she lost herself in a delirious absence from herself which restored her to love and perhaps, brought her to the edge of death. (Reage 19) This is a quest for complete sexual destruction, a destruction akin to ego-death. At the height of orgasm, or in Os case, as her bondage takes her farther from her identity, she is hollowed out, leaving only her body. This space is simultaneously full of emptiness and emptied of Self. Francois Jullien states in his work, The Great Shape Has No Form, that emptiness proceeds by hollowing out fullness, just as fullness, in turn, is opened wide by the void. Far from forming two opposing and separate qualities or states, emptiness and fullness are structurally correlated; each exists only by virtue of the other. (Jullien 48)

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The ego, the Self, contains the source of a troubling human need to escape. The escape from the mind to the body, and from the body to the mind, is a coping mechanism that is only fully realized in its transitional state. This transitional state creates a space of simultaneous emptiness and fullness, where tension and release find each other at the peak of religious ecstasy, death, and orgasm. At this point is where the human reality can access, if only for a moment, the eternal calm and escape from the Self.