Reviews for Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature

The average rating for Encyclopedia of Erotic Literature based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2019-02-22 00:00:00 Michael Sturnick This book made me wet my panties while still reading the Introduction - and that was just the beginning. In fact I'm still in a state of total elation that makes me utterly unable to jot down an even remotely 'normal' write-up (possibly one of those pitiful one-sentence reviews that look more like epitaphs really.) However, first things first. Most negative reviews on here seem to be biased by an annoyingly simplistic prejudice reducing Georges Bataille's philosophy to this: Eroticism = Violence; Sex = Death; Mysticism = Depravity. No, no, NO!!!!!! NO, you schmucks!!!!!! Did you at least read the book before rating and ranting? Did you read it or you just had a look on Wikipedia and then posted your load of sh.... your ramblings on GR? Bataille's book is the most diabolically sensual essay on the origin, meaning and purpose of eroticism for two excellent reasons: it's rigorously academic and outrageously insane. Or rather, it's the work of a Catholic who really knows what lies beneath the surface... and how we've been doing our dirty business for more than two thousand years. In the first part, the French novelist/philosopher/essayist/pervert draws a very clear line between sex and eroticism by analysing the inner connections linking the latter to the religious (mysticism), psychological (death pulsions), biological and sociological drives that marked the birth of mankind. Basically, sex is what we had been having in common with the other animals until the Homo Sapiens guys realised they weren't monkeys and stopped behaving as such. Eroticism was born the day those brutes found themselves dealing with the complexity their society and individual personality had reached. They weren't exactly well-groomed, but at least they were making the effort. The urge for social control and family planning, the need to limit individual freedom in order to allow the community to survive, not to mention the paralysing fear of their own - as yet unexplored - inner nature forced those wannabe human beings to take and keep a healthy distance between the creatures they hunted and breeded and themselves. Two essential taboos determined the development of our being as a species, two great Unknowns that terrified and attracted the naïve minds of our ancestors: generation and death - the beginning and the end of life. Animals are neither aware of having come into existence nor of their impending doom; on the contrary, we human beings have to deal with the burden of our impermanence - something that scares us out of our wits. All we could do was, some fifrteen thousand years ago, hide those terrors behind the veil of 'religion', a term that in Bataille's work encompasses all the darkest drives of our soul; religion, or rather religiosity, is still the holding cell in which what remains of our beastly origins was locked up for good by those simian but amazingly far-sighted folks. Ever since then, the domains of Eroticism (the irrational, non-utilitarian side of sex) and Work (the organisation of earthly life according to rationality) have always been the two parallel planes of human existence. Except, we are too attracted to our fears to let them rot in the backroom of our psyche. We need to feel their shadow hovering over our heads, day after day. We're also perfectly aware of the despairing conditions of our physical and psychological strength; our weakness is a birthmark we all hide beneath layers and layers of philosophical, theological, ideological clothes. Hence the need to let the darkness leak through the Veil of the Temple once in a while, tamed and bridled, in the forms of rituals and eroticism: in short, transgression. Transgression is not the denial of the law: quite the contrary - it's the acceptance of the rules in order to enjoy their violation. Rituals are the (re)enactment of pulsions that the Neanderthal man (the first who seemed to have a spiritually oriented consciousness: take the practice of burials, for instance) couldn't afford to indulge anymore. Sacrifices, orgies, mysteries were not mere performances: they exorcised those socially destructive pulsions of violence, lust and insanity by letting them take a rigorously controlled shape. A way out, a safety valve that was possibly the ultimate, hopefully irreversible step from animality to humanity; a dimension in which our 2019 AD nature is still able to escape the healthy rules of rationality and self-repression underlying our existence. Such is the link between eroticism and mysticism: they're two sides of the same coin, sometimes indistinguishable, often clashing, always upsetting. Now, a few words to those reviewers who feel the moral duty to point out Bataille's heinous attempt to compare eroticism with death, thus forwarding Sade's philosophy in all its nefariousness. In case you didn't know, we must die. All of us living creatures. Including you... and me, of course (so you'd better get ready, because my ramblings are going to continue - either in Heaven or Hell). As soon as the gametes meet and melt, they die as individual cells in order to form a third organism - the child, the cub, the amoeba, the anthrax virus, whatever. Life starts as the very first result of two deaths, and is nothing but a process leading the new being to its own death. This is not Bataille, it's biology. And biology is Science, or so I've been told at school - although I'm not a highly educated intellectual like you, so please forgive my ignorance. It's a scientific matter of fact that is discussed as part of the theoretical basis of an essay in which the main aspects of eroticism are thoroughly analysed, including this one. The author might have been many things, but he wasn't a lunatic. He never got sex and death mixed up, only a madman or a horror-porn writer would do that, and he was neither. Since I can't believe yours is a deliberate omission, I guess you read an abridged edition of the book, one in which those paragraphs had been cut. Or maybe a bad translation? What? You Enlightened didn't read it in the original French? Oh. I see. The second part is a collection of seven short 'études' relating to some specific aspects of the previous chapters. After an essay on the origins of the prohibition of incest, Bataille introduces the reader to Sade's work and philosophy; he perfectly portrays the man and his time, his inner conflicts and frightening intuitions. These studies though are mostly focussed on the affinity between eroticism and mysticism. Not necessarily seen from a Catholic viewpoint, that is: Bataille makes it clear all throughout the book by comparing the Hindu, Buddhist, pre-historical attitude toward both. There are indeed some explicit but interesting pictures illustrating the paragraphs about the Voodoo and Aztec sacrifices, the depiction of sex scenes on a Hindu temple in Konarak, the Lascaux cave paintings, Bernini's Saint Theresa... one can't honestly accuse the author of being either apologetic or deliberately offensive toward his own Catholic background, that's for sure. I love this book. It drives me wild. Bataille reminds me of the first man who had the unparalleled honour to 'know me biblically', a man almost twenty years older than me with whom I used to have these endless discussions about sex, philosophy, literature... he was a bloated pig and a cold-blooded intellectual. He probably helped me become the person I am now, so be objective and blame it on him. Now, I've tried to give you an idea of what Bataille's essay is about, even if I know that I hardly succeeded; maybe I even discouraged those of you who wanted to give it a go. In that case, please forget this horrible review and have a look at someone else's - only the five-star ratings, of course.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-17 00:00:00 Mandy Perveiler You won't stick your hand down your bathing suit ever again after reading this. Bataille will see to that. And yet this author's misgivings about the erotic seem somehow misplaced. They serve as springboards to jump off on tangents. Our writer throws in a bunch of psychoanalysis, too, but only insofar as it gets us to the religious take on man's psychic esoterica. But first let's look at what Bataille gets right. He starts with "continuity," an aspiration that for humans is the essence of being. It's what we discontinuous beings want from sex, but our primordial emergence from animal to human marks the change from nature to culture. Taboos meant to deny our animal side quarantine both sex and death so that we can get work done. Death, and then sex, become a kind of psychic violence: Either involves a transgression of taboos; either violates the status quo of culture. This transgression generates eroticism. Religion for its part transforms transgression into sin. Thus, the Catholic Church becomes the most able defender of our humanity, preserving eroticism by upholding taboos. At the same time, our need to work turns people into objects for other people, and only our animal nature can stop that. Sexuality, then, is "the greatest barrier to the reduction of a man to the level of a thing." The erotic returns to humans their subjective dignity. So the body becomes poetic and pure, and its erotic defilement is brought on by the sanctioned sin of marriage. Thus, the Church safeguards our dignity through its prohibitions. Got that? Good. I'll buy it. But now Bataille starts to go off track. Eroticism for him applies only to straight, married, pious males. He neither mentions nor acknowledges female sexuality, nor anything outside lawful relations. He wavers as to whether even this constricted eroticism is disgusting or not, but reaches no final verdict. This same waffling permeates most of his conclusions. With sex equal to death, "man must die to live" he keeps telling us. He bases this on the enormous expenditure of energy the sex act requires, energy denied to work. Bataille makes death look good and sex bad -- he might as well be talking about salmon and spiders. He hammers away at the energy wasted by sex, forgetting that intercourse takes just a few minutes, whereas humans usually work all day long. I can't tell what's more in play here, the Church or the vogue of psychoanalysis, but similar flights of fancy come up later in The Denial of Death, a dreadful ripoff of the same theme. Bataille's discursive style gives his thinking a profound Hegelian veneer hinting of intellectual alacrity. But he seems to think Hegel grants us license to say just anything. His concept of eroticism is a floating abstraction backed up by hearsay upon hearsay, evidence like, "There is no reason to believe their [mystics'] experience is not genuine, according to people who know such practitioners." As the book goes on a frank disgust for the erotic emerges. The author uses the better part of one page to denounce obscenity, which he finds to be the creation of a "repugnant" class of people "vomited forth" by society. This bourgeois writer slams the lower classes for letting whores take over the streets, accusing them of intending to destroy society, refusing to work and using the "advantages of insubordination" to slake their lust. Erotic thoughts disturb him. He draws on his Church for support, but I doubt Catholic theology espouses the level of revulsion over eroticism that his writing achieves. Beyond the diatribes the writing is clunky, repetitive, indifferent and archaic ("venereal orgasms"). The psychoanalysis and anthropology are outdated, and the Catholic references are suspect. The truth is, this book has no bearing on anything today. It's hard to believe the author of Blue of Noon also wrote this flapdoodle, but I believe that's why I thought I'd like it. Bataille is good at literature; he's bad at social commentary. I advise readers to skip this one.