Eroticism

I really like how this thread tries to distinguish the erotic from the merely sexual, especially in the Bataillean sense of breaking boundaries and touching something ineffable. For me, the erotic is more about feeling, tension, and depth than physicality alone — almost like the sublime in Romantic art. On a related note, I came across some peripheral resources like https://hk-escort.com/ that explore how desire and attraction get represented in different cultural spaces, which might add another angle to this conversation.
 
erotic/eroticism to me means unraveling someone or the tension that’s involved in the before, the in between space of what it and what could be. bataille does a wonderful job at reaching into the space and pulling it like a well stretched muscle and turning that intimacy and taboo into something beyond the plane of human form.
 
Indeed! Eroticism, under his pen, has a lot to do with selfhood, and it’s explosion, it’s overflow out of seriousness, into exuberance. Or in his words, “opens to what’s beyond itself.”
 
That's interesting. I've never pondered the nuances between the terms. You've given me something for my mind ruminate on. I need to crystalize my first thoughts and then come back to you.
THE TERMS - SEXUAL, PORNOGRAPHY AND EROTIC. A MUCH TANGLED LOVE TRIANGLE OR COUNTERBALANCING PERSPECTIVE: The mention of sexuality, its equivalency sketch towards pornography and the added term erotic, propels my memory back to my younger days at Schule Schloss Salem and when I first chose to study French instead of English. In my particular circles of French reading the book ’’Tropic of Cancer’’ with its compelling characters became a clandestine must-read. Tropic of Cancer blurted the lines between fiction and memoir and most interesting for me was that the protagonist being the author himself. And in my venal way I am more often than not more interested or fascinated in the lives of the authors rather than the book itself. Because in many ways a book is less important for what it says than for what it makes one think and act upon.

French writer Anaïs Nin was Miller’s lover at the time and she helped him edit the book all while supporting him financially. Nonetheless, Miller’s lifestyle, his love affair with Anais were a whole-hearted demonstration of their feelings and with pornography taking a back-seat over the life of their shared erotic experiences. No doubt Anais profoundly influenced Miller’s writing of the Tropic of Cancer. Both discovering the bliss and nuances of sheer erotica, versus the stark obscenity or the coldness of sheer pornography in action.

The book was banned in the United States for 27 years. In 1964, however, its obscenity charges were overruled by the Supreme Court, whose ruling marking a huge milestone in the U.S. obscenity law. Today I am still at awe beneath Miller’s engrossing prose and his trying to convey certain ideas and themes that I interpreted and actually applied into my own D/s live style. It becoming a central part of my life with a wondrous mix of pure eroticism, emotional dependency, a strong intellectual connection and at times within my introspective journeys with falling in love. Sitting here now I drown myself in one Tom Collins after another. I think of the women in Henry Miller's 'Tropic of Cancer'. All those women were ”fuckable” to him, but the word was a word of love.
 
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