Banca de DEFESA: MARIA AUGUSTA MARTINS GONCALVES DIAS

POETICS OF THE UNKNOWABLE: EROTICISM, THE SACRED, AND LITERATURE IN G. BATAILLE AND M. LEIRIS

Keywords: Georges Bataille; Michel Leiris; eroticism; sacred; poetry.

Georges Bataille (1897–1962) and Michel Leiris (1901–1990), when addressing the realm of life to which eroticism, the sacred, and poetry belong, make epistemological choices that share the primacy given to experience at the expense of a logical scientific approach to facts. That choice is the object of investigation here. The aim is to justify such a choice and to draw out its developments, problematizing the limits of utilitarian reason and its epistemological consequences in the field of aesthetics. Without ignoring the intellectual cooperation between them in the 1930s, we understand that historical-biographical period as the genesis of important theoretical dialogues undertaken in the following decades, which reverberate, we emphasize, from Mirror of Tauromachy (1938) to Eroticism (1957). In Bataille, unproductive expenditures, such as erotic and sacred operations, point to an unknowable domain that escapes homogeneity and its forms of knowledge production. In Leiris, this ungraspable, given in the experience of the sacred, was circumscribed from the idea of revelation. Tauromachy, in its sacred, erotic, and aesthetic aspects, becomes a privileged object of analysis as a revealing activity. Returning to the sources of both — such as Sade and Nietzsche, Nicolau de Cusa and Alfred Jarry — we find interpretive keys to understand how the unknowable of human experience is circumscribed by each philosopher’s thought, the points of convergence and divergence between Bataille’s and Leiris’s ideas. Fron this point of tangency, we investigate the possibility of communicating the unfathomable in the field of aesthetics and the arts, especially in literature. From autobiographical and confessional writing, in Leiris, to sovereign poetic language as the sacrifice of words, in Bataille, there emerges the unease in expressing that which is elided by discourse: the accursed part, the abyssal life, the continuity, the not-knowing. that contact translates into what we here call “poetics of the unknowable,” aesthetic creations that start from the idea of a profaned and convulsive beauty, tauromachic and luciferian, as thought, respectively, by Bataille and Leiris.