Some mysteries exist undeniably, yet defy full explanation: gravity, consciousness... and eroticism — that magnetic force, at once elusive and unpredictable. Like death, you never quite know when it’ll catch up with you.
The philosopher Georges Bataille defined eroticism not as mere sexuality but as “the approval of life up to the point of death.” For him, eroticism is the intensification of existence through transgression — the moment when boundaries (between self and other, life and death, sacred and profane) blur or momentarily dissolve.
For Bataille, sensual pleasure is the starting point but not the end of eroticism. Sensuality belongs to the realm of the senses, yet by itself remains within comfort and the illusion of safety. Eroticism begins when pleasure becomes conscious of its limits — when desire confronts taboo, loss, and mortality.
He saw sensuality as aesthetic, while eroticism is existential — it questions being itself.
Where sensuality affirms harmony with life, eroticism exposes the fissure that runs through it: the way desire both celebrates and destroys, connects and annihilates. Eroticism is about that dissonance I spoke of in my previous story.
I wish I could time-travel and pick the guy’s brain over espresso at Café de Flore — or better yet, right here under Rodin’s The Thinker. The figure of a man stripped naked, isolated from social roles and possessions, caught in a raw state of existential inquiry. His heavy, slumped posture, the clenched foot, the arched back — all suggesting tension as he contemplates the ultimate questions: meaning, mortality, nothingness... and maybe, eroticism.
Bataille wrote that eroticism is a “psychological quest,” an inner experience that exposes the individual to continuity through the dissolution of individuality. In that sense, eroticism is always shadowed by death — it’s a small annihilation, a “little death” (la petite mort).
Think of an experience where you dissolved — and not only in the arms of a lover. The one that comes to mind for me happened in Japan, when I stepped out of Kennin-ji Temple in Kyoto after lying there for a while, mesmerized by the two dragons that writhe across its ceiling — locked in a dance of cosmic fury and ethereal might. As I wandered down a path of rust-colored leaves, feeling as if the dragons still hovered above me, I passed a burning red maple, half-naked, its last leaves fluttering like silk.
A breeze picked one up and carried it toward me — turning over a new leaf inside my soul. I felt intensely connected — if not one — with the tree and the world, lost in a moment. A thrilling jolt ran up my spine: a flirtation with some inexplicable force that fuels all existence.
That same thrill stirred again in the halls of Rodin’s Museum. Surprisingly, it wasn’t The Kiss that moved me most — it was The Burghers of Calais. Six men, condemned to die to save their city.
The sculpture commemorates a real event from 1347: the city of Calais, besieged and starving, was offered mercy by the English King Edward III — but only if six prominent citizens surrendered themselves for execution.
Rodin captures them in that unbearable moment. I stared into their faces and suddenly felt it all: strength and fragility, anguish and grace, surrender and resistance. The sculpture transported me to that edge between love and annihilation — where I was fully alive and about to disappear.
“Live… and remember death.” The ancient Greek admonition surfaced in my head.
The point isn’t fear. It’s urgency. It’s awe. It’s the rush of being fully here, fully now — a current of erotic energy that pulses right under the shadow of the end, carrying you from the sensory to the sacred, from pleasure to meaning, from the self to its undoing.
Later, back in the courtyard to pay one more nod to The Thinker, I saw a man holding out a roll of toilet paper toward the statue — his hundred-watt smile most likely overexposing his friend’s shot.
Hilarious.
There’s humor in eroticism too. That’s why our relationship with it often feels like a divine comedy as well.
The sad part? These days, we’re so desperate to catch others’ attention — and so quick to squander our own — that those rare moments when the world flirts with us, catches us off guard, and fills us with awe… become rare. And that’s a shame.
A Sphinx has riddles.
So do men.
Where we begin,
we also end —
in the pause
between breaths.
🖤
— Vibe & Verse
From page to thread — a story you can wear
The Sphinx & the Thinker $35.99