Eroticism
As erotism (from French érotisme ) is generally used to describe an overemphasis on the erotic. In philosophical usage (especially in France) it is understood to mean modern approaches that examine and emphasize the importance of eroticism in individual and social life, in particular the theory of eroticism by Georges Bataille .
philosophy
In the second half of the 20th century, the French intellectuals in particular discussed various facets of erotism in art, as well as its position in cultural-literary currents, political-moral doctrines and religious approaches. The surrealist André Breton and the existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre took different positions. Marcel Duchamp used erotism as a theoretical guiding concept, with it he would like to achieve something similar in art to what Georges Bataille describes as transgression . Bataille spoke of an anxiety neurosis as the breeding ground for all other great emotions, the extreme extent of which he understood as divine, as necessary for the experience of any ecstasy. The mystical experience in love, ecstatic love, is accessible to everyone, so that erotism appears as a side branch of mysticism . Michel Foucault wrote about Bataille's studies on eroticism: And if it were necessary to give erotism - as opposed to sexuality - a precise meaning, then it would certainly be this: an experience of sexuality that, for its own sake, crosses boundaries with the Death of God connects.
The existentialists had dedicated themselves to the zeitgeist ideal of the pointlessly thrown into life. It was necessary to come to terms with this pointlessness. It was absolutely real and could only be impaired with realistic means, such as political agitation. The need for a Marxist revolution would have made all matters of Eros seem entirely unimportant. Simone de Beauvoir speaks out against eroticism as the basis for a long-term relationship: in reality, physical love can neither be treated as an absolute end nor as a simple means. It cannot justify an existence. But neither does it allow any other justification. That means that it would have to play an episodic and autonomous role in every human life; above all, it would have to be free . If the erotic becomes "free", there is no need to sublimate. Ultimately, this knowledge also resulted in the lived connection between Beauvoir and Sartre.
The surrealists considered realism to be a mistake. The separation of (erotic) desire and reality was processed differently than with Sartre. One tried to portray the unconscious by fusing dream and reality. The surrealist movement looked for human reality in the unconscious and used intoxication and dream experiences as a source of artistic inspiration. Efforts were made to expand awareness and reality globally and to overturn all valid values. With the postulate to express the repressed, with their belief in the power that determines people - the omnipotence of desire - they are regarded as pioneers for liberal modernity and the so-called sexual liberation of Western society. In the surrealist dialectic of the "cadavre exquis" woman is a key figure. The surrealists use their erotic and phantasmatic body as an indispensable avant-garde instrument to break with conventional forms of perception and representation: it appears in the surrealist staging in a double function. On the one hand it represents a destructive force (an apparent aesthetic risk for a work of art), but on the other hand it is also the material pictorial body (on which the destructive effect of this risk is dealt with).
The pessimists of culture are skeptical of erotism, such as Julius Evola , who believes that his investigation of the metaphysics of sex believes that the sexual openness of the contemporary Western world , its erotic liberalism , its pornography, are a manifestation of sexual decay, the symptom a desexualized society, a sexual decline and not the expression of increased eroticism, youth and purity. The externalization of the erotic type, the transition from the sphere of the concrete sexual act to that of mental images, to pornographic culture, the eroticized public, adornment, etc. testifies to a sexual entropy according to Evola . Statistics from France and the United States show that society's tolerance of the pornography of culture leads to a decrease in real sexual acts, a demographic crash and a real "de-sexualization" of specific people. In the sexual revolution , Evola does not see the salvation of sex , but the salvation from sex , in the sense that the externalization of the sexual drive is based on the need to relieve the inner tension not through sexual expansion , through orgasmic exhaustion of the normal sexual one Act, but through a slow and gradual entropy, a permanent outflow of sexual energy.
literature
- Gérard Durozoi: Erotisme . In: Encyclopédie philosophique universelle , Volume 2: Les notions philosophiques. Dictionnaire , Part 1: philosophy occidentale: A-L . Presses universitaires de France, Paris 1990, ISBN 2-13-041-442-7 , pp. 831-833 (overview)
- Georges Bataille: The erotic . Matthes & Seitz, Munich 1994, ISBN 3-88221-253-5 (translation of L'érotisme , first published by Editions de Minuit, Paris 1957)
- Francesco Alberoni: Erotic: female erotic, male erotic - what is it? Weyarn, Seehamer-Verlag 1999, ISBN 3-929626-05-5
- Heribert Becker: The hot predator love: eroticism and surrealism . Prestel, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-791-31783-0
- Simone de Beauvoir: Should you burn de Sade? Three essays on the morality of existentialism . Rowohlt, Reinbek 1991, ISBN 3-499-15174-X
- Julius Evola: Metaphysics of Sex . Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-548-39063-3