DOI: https://doi.org/10.17072/2078-7898/2020-3-375-383

Human corporeality in Georges Bataille’s heterology

Svetlana A. Gorchakova
Ph.D. in Philosophy, Associate Professor
of the Department of Sociology

Kursk State University,
33, Radishchev st., Kursk, 305000, Russia;
e-mail: gorchackova.svet@yandex.ru
ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6668-7958

In the heterology of G. Bataille, a person appears as a being doomed to death and revealing gaps in the depths of himself. That is why the idea of human corporeality turns out to be connected with the idea of inner experience, which represents a movement to the «edge of the possible» and through which death is revealed. It is death and the ability to discover it that makes a person who he is, affirming the transgressiveness of the human body and human being. Death, being absolutely heterogeneous, constitutes a person as a self-that-dies, revealing the gap that comprises its nature. Awareness of death leads to a feeling of eroticism, which contains the simultaneous affirmation of life in combination with the acceptance of death. Moreover, death is the semantic core of eroticism. The human is a «gaping hole» opening wide to the other, and all his being presupposes discontinuity and ecstasy, which means that only excess puts a man on the edge, allowing him to transcend all boundaries. In this case, the inner experience turns out to be in many ways a body experience, because the heterogeneous is constantly manifested in the ultimate experiences of the body and the ultimate manifestations of the human corporeality, where horror and lust, attractiveness and disgust are fused together. Human experience is the experience of the limits and gaps in which a person seeks to get beyond his limits, to surpass his anthropomorphic and body boundaries in an act of self-waste. Thus, being on the extreme edge, the human discovers death through transgression, but exactly in the understanding and acceptance of death he acquires true being and overcomes his own corporeality.

Keywords: heterology, heterogeneous, transgression, corporeality, transgressive body, eroticism, death.

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Received 31.07.2020

For citation:

Gorchakova S.A. [Human corporeality in Georges Bataille’s heterology]. Vestnik Permskogo universiteta. Filosofia. Psihologia. Sociologia [Perm University Herald. Philosophy. Psychology. Sociology], 2020, issue 3, pp. 375–383 (in Russian). DOI: https://doi.org/10.17072/2078-7898/2020-3-375-383