La petite mort
or, Sex and Death
La petite mort, a French phrase meaning “the little death,” is a euphemism for the sensation of orgasm likened to death. It’s certainly easy to see why—orgasm has historically referred to men’s orgasms and orgasmic ejaculation, and therefore as the natural endpoint to carnal relations. Moreover, an orgasm is a brief moment where you lose yourself, a point in time where you cease to exist as a person with an identity, in that instant you are sensational flesh, pure pleasure realized.
French philosopher Georges Bataille had something similar in mind when he writes of eroticism, a kind of sexual activity, as “assenting to life up to the point of death.”1 For Bataille, the great paradox of eroticism is that although erotic activity is “an exuberance of life,” its “psychological quest is not alien to death.”2
Philosophically speaking, Bataille had in mind the idea that we are independent, “discontinuous” beings. Two (or more, if you’re nasty) discrete, separate individuals. But during erotic activity, and especially, orgasm, our individual sense of self is shattered. Psychoanalytically speaking, the ego ceases to be. So, not a literal death, but a metaphorical, or even spiritual, one:
The whole business of eroticism is to strike to the inmost core of the living being, so the heart stands still. The transition from the normal state to that of erotic desire presupposes partial dissolution of the person as he exists in the realm of discontinuity…The whole business of eroticism is to destroy the self-contained character of the participators as they are in their normal lives.3
I think if you’ve had great, absolutely filthy, depraved, mind-blowing sex, you’ll sense some familiarity in Bataille’s comments. Some of the best sex I’ve ever had I could barely remember my own name afterwards.
Karla Schultz defines la petite mort (referencing Bataille) as “the violent transgression against individual boundaries. At least temporarily, the self passes from the discontinuous (individuated) state of life into the continuity of death.”4 Again, the idea that we are independent individuals is temporarily destroyed and offers the opportunity for transcendence, which is why Bataille counsels us that we should not shirk the abyss of eroticism. The erotic, for Bataille, is the abject, the dirty, the filthy underside of our desires. Hence, the narrator in Bataille’s pornographic book, The Story of the Eye, states:
In general, people savor the ‘pleasures of the flesh’ only on the condition that they be insipid. But, as of then, no doubt existed for me: I did not care for what is known as ‘pleasures of the flesh’ because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as ‘dirty.’5
Eroticism, is a kind of anguish, since it involves the loss of self. This is not the kind of reproductive, utilitarian sex advocated by fundamentalist Christians. Nor can it be reduced to the kind of “fun” sex advocated for by sex-positive liberal types. This is the kind of sex that involves the feeling that you no longer exist outside of that moment, that you have moved beyond the physical, that you exist outside your body. Eroticism is complicated, anxiety-inducing, abject, filthy, potentially transcendent. I mean, it’s written all over our faces when we come. A great orgasm makes us look as though we are experiencing the most exquisite agonies.
So let’s get filthy people.
xo,
Veda
Georges Bataille, Erotism. Death and Sensuality, trans. Mary Dalwood (San Francisco: First City Lights, 1986 [1957]), 11.
Bataille, Erotism, 11.
Bataille, Erotism, 17
Karla L. Shultz, “Bataille’s “L’Erotisme” in Light of Recent Love Poetry,” Pacific Coast Philology 22 , no. 1–2 (1987): 78, quoted in Sarah Wingrove, “Beyond ‘la petite mort’ – sex and death in 120 BPM,” Modern and Contemporary France 30, no. 2 (April, 2022): n.p.
Georges Bataille, The Story of the Eye, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1987 [1928]), 49.