The Dissolution of the Self

By Hernán B. Aliaga

Georges Battaille viewed the everyday self, i.e. the ego, as a discontinuous entity, isolated by logic, morality and utility. The dissolution of this self —often termed “self-loss” or “desubjectivation”—allows us for a momentary and ecstatic reunion with the totality of being. This search for reintegration into a whole is what Bataille calls eroticism 

What if I told you that the instant when you completely lose yourself in someone’s eyes during love, or when at a concert of your favorite band you sing until you are without voice, or you go to the pogo as if the body was no longer yours, you’re not just “enjoying”, but trying to break an invisible border that separates you from others and the world…

That is what Georges Bataille, in his book L’Erotisme, calls the search for continuity: the desire to dissolve, even for an instant, the radical loneliness of the separated individual. Unlike animals -who live closer to this continuity because they are not represented as autonomous entities in time, lack reflexivity and a symbolic order that separates them from the real- we live in discontinuity: we are separate bodies and consciences, aware of our death, isolated by our identity and our history. And yet, deep down, we wish to reconnect with something greater, return to that “unity” which, according to the author, we fully experience only in death, as a reintegration with the totality: the dissolution of the self.

This search for reintegration into a whole, this ontological need for fusion, albeit momentary, is what Bataille calls eroticism. It is not only physical sex, nor a simple game of bodies, enjoyment or pleasure: it is an act of transgression, communion and overflow. One of the most practiced forms of this act is, of course, sex, but so are mystical experiences and, in certain contexts, ritual violence.

To them we can add, in a broad sense, any experience where we try to break the border of discontinuity: the pogo, the trance of music, the vertigo of a limit experience, even the consumption of substances that seek to suspend the ordinary structure of consciousness. They are, in a way, bait thrown to the desire of eroticism. All share a common impulse: to break the “I” bubble and merge with something that exceeds us.

Sex, like any erotic experience, involves a forbidden moment, the crossing of a taboo. It is loaded -and must be recognized as loaded- with danger. Mixture of attraction and horror. And so it should be. Eroticism is always a liminal experience: it fascinates and terrifies at the same time, or fascinates precisely because it terrifies, because it brings us closer to the momentary dissolution of what we are. If there is no such tremor, this threat of being lost, it is a mere imposture, a sham.

Imagine that ordinary life is like walking the safe bank of a cliff, with the sea breaking down. Eroticism -in the broad sense of Bataille- is the instant when, by an irrepressible impulse, you take a step until you feel the emptiness under your feet. You don’t fall, but you know that you could. And in that vertigo you recognize something deep: that that abyss, dark and immense, is also your home.

That’s why Bataille says eroticism is “the approval of life even in death”. At bottom, it is nothing more than that human impulse to be part of the whole again, even for a second, and even if we have to touch what society forbids or fears. And in this sense, the “mystical fusion with the whole” sought by monks in prayer or poets in aesthetic ecstasy is not so far from what we feel in the vertigo of a limit experience, in the consumption of some substance, in the trance of a ritual, or in an orgasm -the not casually called small death-: it is the same jump, the same risk, the same search for continuity.

Hernán B. Aliaga is a writer and a social philosopher. He is a former lecturer at Pontificia Universidad Católica, Peru. He has been educated between Lima and Berlin where he now lives and is working on his doctoral thesis on social theory. He is an active commentator on social media. This is the first of a series of articles on social philosophy for Perro Negro in English. Most have already posted in Spanish in his Instagram page. You can also follow him on https://hernanbaliaga.substack.com/ and TikTok