Introduction

Anaïs Nin’s short story ‘The Woman on the Dunes’ culminates in an episode in

which a woman narrates the experience of witnessing a hanging whilst

simultaneously engaging in sexual relations with a stranger from the crowd

gathered to watch the man’s execution. Whilst the man is being hung: ‘flung into

space and death’ she is stricken with fear at the spectacle before her. It is at this

point that she is penetrated, feeling the penis ‘gushing out its warm life’. The

sensation this provokes, the simplicity of its pleasure, is experienced as both

comforting and life affirming, something ‘wonderful to hold on to, life, life to hold

while death was passing’. During this experience, she notes, despite the

apparent polarity of the phenomena encountered, the synonymous nature of the

fear and desire she experiences. At the culmination of this intense ambivalence,

pleasure begins to override fear, seemingly unable to account for or accept this

shift she faints and the story comes to an end.1

This passage should not be interpreted as an experience centred on a paraphilic

fascination with death; despite the disturbingly voyeuristic nature of observing

an execution. In fact, the narrator makes great effort to distance the pleasure

she feels from the scene before her, experiencing it as a form of escape from the

macabre, due to its metaphoric embodiment of life. The establishment of such a

dichotomy between death and sexuality circumvents the suspicion that the

narrator is experiencing a purely erotic fixation on the man’s death. However,

this binary is dissolved by the culminating orgasmic petite mort at the end of the

scene, in which the man’s death becomes an object of her pleasure: ‘wild

pleasure at feeling life while a man was dying’.2

1
Nin, A. Little Birds. London: Penguin Classics, 2002. P14 - 16
2
Ibid. P16
Is it possible to account for this apparent unison of sensations provoked by the

death / sexuality binary operative throughout the scene, whilst maintaining the

assertion that they are not the result of a paraphilic tendency? In order to do so

it is necessary to locate another source of unity between the divided phenomena

present in Nin’s work, to ask what do death and sexuality have in common?

Georges Bataille was a figure whose work addresses such questions via an

exploration of experiences beyond the limits of everyday subjectivity. This

entails a fascination with what ‘exists between the utmost in pleasure and the

utmost in pain: the identity between being and non-being, between the living

and the death-stricken being’.3 Bataille examines the presence of such an

identity in a number of registers, from mysticism to eroticism, locating it at the

juncture at which conceptions of the self cease to function as a result of

encountering an experience which transports them to their upmost limits.

Sexuality and death are amongst a number of themes Bataille explores to

uncover these moments at which subjectivity becomes untenable. Drawing a link

between eroticism, which refers to sexuality beyond its reproductive function,

and death, which includes its associated horrors of sacrifice and terror, Bataille

notes that it is within these moments that the limit of the subject is

encountered; the point at which identity is destroyed. In terms of death this not

only entails a corporeal undoing, but also as a result of its symbolism, intense

horror. And regarding eroticism this involves an intense jouissance brought

about by the physical expression and satiation of one’s sexual desire.4

3
Bataille, G. Madame Edwarda. In: Botting, F. and Wilson, S. Editors. The Bataille Reader. Oxford: Blackwell,
1998. P225.
4
Botting, F. and Wilson, S. Introduction: From Experience to Economy. In: The Bataille Reader. Oxford:
Blackwell, 1998. P1 - 34
It is possible to view Nin’s story as a ‘limit-experience’, one which through the

double action of both the motifs of death and eroticism at work within the scene,

dissolves the protagonists sense of identity via a properly traumatic emergence

of something beyond sensibility. Such a reading allows for the maintenance of

the distinction stressed by Nin, that between the pleasure felt by the protagonist

and the scene before her, whilst accounting for the unification of sensations that

occurs and ultimately results in not only a loss of consciousness, but also, of

subjectivity itself.

This essay elaborates a definition of limit-experiences, demonstrating the

theoretical parameters of the concept via an analysis of its deployment in theory

and literature. It finds the genesis of the concept in the work of Bataille and

extracts from his erotic exposition ‘Madame Edwarda’ the foundations for a more

codified articulation of the idea. It then builds upon these foundations by

engaging with the work of Michel Foucault. It proceeds to explore the

intersections between the work of Bataille and Foucault, finding a continuity

between their works in a number of spheres, which suggests the feasibility of a

synthesis of their ideas. It then utilises the work of Foucault to provide a more

detailed concept of a limit-experience.

Bataille’s Madame Edwarda

In order to appraise the contours of a limit-experience and define its dimensions,

this section focusses on the work of Georges Bataille providing an overview of

Bataille’s ‘Madame Edwarda’ which highlights the elements of a limit-experience

that are present within the narrative. Bataille’s work on eroticism serves as an

ideal starting point for an exploration of limit-experiences, particularly due to its

tendency to highlight sexuality’s ability to reduce the subject to its abjected

corporal foundations whilst allowing it to encounter a totality that lies beyond

itself. For Bataille the ability of eroticism to reconnect with these forms of

existence hinges on its transgressive nature. Eroticism is transgressive because

it involves the pursuit of sexuality beyond the limits of a (re)productive economy

that inscribes the subject with cultural notions of prohibition and taboo aimed at

limiting sexuality to a purely instrumental function. Such cultural prohibitions

define the limits of modern subjectivity for Bataille, limits which eroticism has

the ability to transcend via a pursuit of pleasure that exceeds the reproductive

impetus. It is in this pursuit that the subject encounters an ineffable identity

beyond itself; an existence that cannot be captured by language and can only be

approached via lived experience.5

It is perhaps the un-articulatable nature of what is encountered in a limit-

experience that informs Bataille’s method of surveying the subject; a more

literary, descriptive approach as opposed to a rigorous theoretical schema.

Bataille himself affirms the impossibility of capturing such an experience in a

rational discourse, stating in ‘The Torment’ that he ‘Lives by tangible experience

and not by logical explanation’.6

‘Madame Edwarda’ is an indicative example of an exposition of such a tangible

experience. In it Bataille describes a man’s visit to a brothel, where he

encounters the story’s namesake Madame Edwarda and a seemingly lurid

incident ensues. However, in typical Bataille fashion, underneath the semi-

pornographic façade lies an erudite statement on the subversive nature of the

erotic and its consequential effects on subjectivity. The tale begins with the

protagonist feeling an intense and somewhat sickening feeling of arousal laced

5
Op Cit. P 11 - 14
6
Bataille, G. The Torment. In: Botting, F. and Wilson, S. Editors. The Bataille Reader. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
P64
anguish. He feels compelled to either ‘heave [him]self dry’ or ‘make [him]self

naked’. Such contradictory impulses are indicative of a Limit Experience for

Bataille, demonstrating the emergence of a totalised identity beyond the

extremities of lived experience. The protagonist however retreats from its

emergence in the scene and instead chooses to embark on an Absinthe fuelled

binge in attempted to assuage such a disruption.7

The attempt fails and eventually in a moment of acquiescence the protagonist

visits the ‘Mirrors’, a brothel in which he encounters the story’s muse Madame

Edwarda. A fairly confounding figure, Madame Edwarda embodies the complexity

of feminine sexuality, a characteristic which appears to disturb the protagonist

throughout the story. After their initial encounter, they embrace and it is

suggested that this is the result of the protagonist’s agency and that Madame

Edwarda merely consents to his advances, rather than taking an active role in

the scene herself. However, this is soon revealed as a misperception when

Madame Edwarda asserts her own sexuality unashamedly and establishes her

dominance over the protagonist by encouraging him to perform cunnilingus in a

busy room.8

After retiring to a bedroom to conclude their engagement in private, Madame

Edwarda conceals her face with a mask and they both journey out into the dark

night. Madame Edwarda walks ahead and the protagonist, fearful of losing her,

feels an intense fear descend on him; he is scared of her. Driven by curiosity, he

stalks her through the empty streets of Paris. After briefly losing her, he catches

up, finding her in the midst of a respiratory fit, writhing on the pavement. He

tends to her helplessly as the gravity of the situation suddenly grasps him:

7
Bataille, G. Madame Edwarda. In: Botting, F. and Wilson, S. Editors. The Bataille Reader. Oxford: Blackwell,
1998. P228.
8
Ibid. 229 - 230
‘Edwarda’s convulsions snatched me away from my own self, they cast my life

into a desert waste ‘beyond’, they cast it there carelessly, callously, the way one

flings a living body to the hangman.’ Such a feeling of losing one’s self is the

essence of a limit-experience, as is the perception of an identity beyond lived

experience. In his description of such an event, Bataille is laying the framework

for the contours of a limit-experience, however the fact that it occurs at the very

extremity of experience, existing ‘beyond’ both language and subjectivity, makes

extrapolating a codified descriptive schema difficult.9

It is here that Bataille reintroduces the theme of Edwarda’s sexuality and its

disturbing effect on the protagonists view on his own and the opposite gender’s

sexual identity. At this juncture, with Edwarda lay lifeless, the protagonist is in a

position of power; that of her rescuer. He is able to finally recast himself in

reflection of Edwarda’s passivity as the strong, dominant male, lifting and

carrying her to a nearby taxi. However, upon entering the Taxi the fragility of

the protagonists self ascribed identity is revealed and his perception of

Edwarda’s helplessness, her imagined conformality to a submissive gender role,

is shattered. Once inside Edwarda propositions the driver, who consents to her

advances stoically and allows himself to be straddled. Herein the story

culminates with Edwarda in a position of supremacy, she has asserted her sexual

agency over both men: the driver sits subject to her embrace and the

protagonist sits lifelessly watching, reduced to the role of voyeur.10 He observes:

9
Ibid. 230 - 233
10
Ibid. P233 - 235
 ‘Her body, her face swept in ecstasy were abandoned to the unspeakable coursing

and ebbing, in her sweetness there hovered a crooked smile: she saw me to the

bottom of my dryness, from the bottom of my desolation I sensed her joy’s torrent

run free. My anguish resisted the pleasure I ought to have sought. Edwarda’s pain-

wrung pleasure filled me with the exhausting impression of bearing witness to a

miracle.’11

By projecting Edwarda to goddess-like proportions in this culminating scene

Bataille is able to demonstrate the effect of her candid pursuit of pleasure on the

protagonist’s own self-image and understanding of feminine sexuality. At the

beginning of the narrative he is presented with the intensity of his own desires,

desires that he cannot embrace and flees from. He eventually relents and

attempts to fulfil them; succeeding, apparently, by visiting a brothel and

sleeping with a prostitute. However, this is an artificial success as he is unable to

integrate this eruption of desire, an element of it escapes his subjectivity which

is located in a heteronormative sexual identity. His interaction with Madame

Edwarda disrupts such a perspective by bringing him into contact with another

who is more at ease with her sexuality and has more successfully integrated her

desires into her identity. The encounter is properly traumatic to the protagonist,

he is stripped of his own identity and reduced, in the final scene, to a spectator

of Edwarda’s pleasure. This new-found perspective leads him in the last instance

to lament his inability to seek pleasure in such an intense form, to pursue it

further than the limit of his own subjectivity.

It is possible to locate Madame Edwarda in a purely pornographic register, it has

all the ingredients; an overly sexualised female lead, a cuckolded, sexually

11
Ibid. P235
repressed male protagonist and, on the surface, a debauched tale of carnal

pursuits. However, there is a more subtle and profound reading available, one

from which it is possible to extract a more precise definition of the dimensions of

a limit-experience. Firstly, it affirms the location of such an experience at the

limit of subjectivity, often accessed via experiencing an intensity of pain,

pleasure or both. Secondly it posits the existence of an identity that lies beyond

everyday experience and subjectivity, an identity that remains undefined and

cannot be captured by rational disputation. And thirdly a shift in subjectivity and

a profound disruption of one’s sense of self. The result of this process has what

Michel Foucault terms ‘the function of wrenching the subject from itself’12

Bataille and Foucault: Establishing a Continuity

There are a number of fascinating intersections between the works of Bataille

and Foucault; a mutual interest in transgression, atypical interpretations of

Nietzsche and critical work on the nature of sexuality. Whilst the latter is

perhaps the most obviously pertinent to this study, the former two are also

relevant when organised under the central rubric of this analysis: limit-

experiences. For example, as the above studies of Nin’s ‘The Woman on the

Dunes’ and Bataille’s ‘Madame Edwarda’ demonstrate that sexuality, when

articulated as eroticism and pursued to its utmost intensity, becomes

transgressive in the form of a Limit Experience. Furthermore, Nietzsche is a

figure whose work haunts both figures conception of the self, particularly

Foucault’s who claimed that encountering it alongside the work of Bataille and

Maurice Blanchot led to:

12
Foucault, M. Interview with Michel Foucault. In: Faubian, J. D. Editor. Power. Vol 3. New York: The New
Press, 1997. P241
 ‘First, an invitation to call into question the category of the subject, its supremacy,

its foundational function. Second, the conviction that such an operation would be

meaningless if it remained limited to speculation. Calling the subject in question

meant that one would have to experience something leading to its actual

destruction, its decomposition, its explosion, its conversion into something else.’13

This indicates a continuity between the works of Bataille and Foucault,

particularly when considering their shared interest in experiences that challenge

the foundational subject via an intensity that allows an individual to stray from

themselves. Additionally, it is also possible to interpret Foucault’s encounter

with the work of Bataille as something resembling a limit-experience itself, since

it allowed him to stray, theoretically, from the hegemonic philosophical

paradigms prevalent during his university education, namely Hegelianism and

Phenomenology. Foucault found these approaches problematic due to their

apriori acceptance of a foundational subject, a view that he found difficult to

sustain after his encounter with Bataille. This eschewal of the dominant

theoretical trends was not only an intellectual concern for Foucault, it also

impacted his political practice in the form of his membership to the French

Communist Party; something which his transfigured philosophical perspective

made untenable.14

This plurality of connections between the two thinkers indicates that within the

work of Foucault there is likely to be a number of studies, ideas and concepts

with which to illustrate in greater detail the broad outline of limit-experiences

13
Ibid. P247
14
Nigro, R. Experiences of the Self Between Limit, Transgression and the Explosion of the Dialectical System.
Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2005: 31. P650 - 653
provided by Bataille. By focussing on the sphere of sexuality common to both

this section of the study aims to address the questions prompted by Bataille’s

account:

- What constitutes the limit at which Limit Experiences occur?

- What is the identity that exists beyond everyday subjectivity?

- What consequences does this process have in relation to the subject, what

conclusions can be drawn?

The Limit and The Will to Knowledge

In the first volume of his study of sexuality ‘The History of Sexuality: The Will to

Knowledge’ Foucault demarcates what can be considered the limit of the sexual

experience: the subject. Here the sexual subject is a by-product of the intensive

discourses articulated upon the body and its sexual conduct. Such discourses

emanate from a variety of points, from the analysts couch to the eroticist’s pen.

They work to partially define identities, outline possibilities and determine proper

conduct.15

Foucault charts the emergence of a plethora of discourses on sexuality from the

seventeenth century onwards, seeking to problematise what is known as the

Repressive Hypothesis. This argument states that during the rise of the Victorian

era and its associated austere morality, sexuality, that is its practice and its

discussion, was severely repressed. According to this maxim, sexuality was

confined to the bedrooms of heterosexual monogamous couples and was

conducted singularly for the utilitarian purpose of reproduction. Practises that fall

15
Foucault, M. The History of Sexuality Vol 1: The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin, 1998. P17 - 49
outside of these confines were forbidden and there was a general injunction on

the discussion of them; discourse on ‘abnormal’ sex was silenced.16

This perspective gained traction according to Foucault because it allowed sexual

repression to be linked to the development of capitalism and the systematic

exploitation of labour. This connection gave rise to the observation that since

labour power was crucial to the development of industry and levels of production

were intensive, the workforce could not be allowed to expend much needed

energy on the pursuit of trivial pleasures. Furthermore, in making this argument

it creates what Foucault terms a ‘speakers benefit’, the tendency to imbue any

discussion of sexuality that falls outside the sanctioned discourse with a

subversive character and therefore provide the speaker with a form of

revolutionary prestige.17

Accepting the premises of the repressive hypothesis would make locating the

limit at which Limit Experiences occur a relatively simple task. It would be a

simple boundary surrounding the bedrooms of married couples, acting as

prohibitory structure regulating the reproductive potentials of heterosexual

relations. Every sexual act that falls beyond this narrow confinement of

sexualities, even the slightest caress, would be a transgression of immense

proportion. Limit-experiences would be a near universal phenomena, with every

sexually active individual experiencing the most profound shift in subjectivity,

perhaps on a daily basis. Such a vision is an amusing, but clearly inadequate,

representation of the contours of a limit-experience.

Part of the inadequacy of this definition of the limit is rooted in its conception of

power. Foucault explains in a later chapter ‘The Deployment of Sexuality’ that

16
Ibid. P1 - 5
17
Ibid. P5 - 8
such an analysis is based upon a ‘juridico-discursive’ understanding of power. An

understanding that conceives of power as having a purely negative relation with

its object, operating via a legal structure which is either preventative in relation

to sex, or when implemented via a psychoanalytic framework, induces a lack

within the subject that predicates an insatiable desire. For Foucault, this is a far

too reductive narrative which cannot fully appraise the myriad dispersion and

functioning of power across the sexual sphere. For this to be achieve a more

nuances and complex appraisal of power is necessary.18

Foucault qualifies the narrative of sexual repression and claims that rather than

witnessing a silencing of discussion on sex, this period gave birth to a veritable

plethora of discourses and sex became the focus of intense and focussed

analysis, it became an ‘object of knowledge’. Furthermore, neither was this

discourse confined to the bedrooms of married couples, but rather it colonised a

plethora of heterogeneous sexualities in all-encompassing search for the ‘truth’

of sex.19

This ubiquitous attempt to discover this this truth engendered the deployment of

a variety of mechanisms which functioned to record, analyse and ultimately

pathologize a diversity of sexual practices. Foucault highlights the development

of a ‘Scientia Sexualis’ created to function as the methodology of this process.

This method adopted a variety of instruments to fulfil its function, central to

which was the incitement to speak of one’s sex; an incitement Foucault tracks

from the confessional booths of the church to the practices of modern

psychiatry.20

18
Ibid. P81 – 91.
19
Ibid. P36 – 49.
20
Ibid. P53 - 73
The result of this incitement was the generation of a variety of discourses

concerning sex and a production of a typology of myriad sexualities which

codified and trapped sexualities into categories of identity; into subjectivities.

Foucault summarises:

‘We must therefore abandon the hypothesis that modern industrial societies

ushered in an age of increased sexual repression. We have not only witnessed a

visible explosion of unorthodox sexualities; but – and this is the most important

point – a deployment quite different from the law, even if it is locally dependent on

procedures of prohibition, has ensured through a network of interconnecting

mechanisms, the proliferation of specific pleasures and the multiplication of

disparate sexualities.’21

If one is to abandon the repressive hypothesis it is also necessary to leave

behind the purely negative conception of power that sustains it. In its place,

Foucault formulates a vision of power that supports the generative nature of the

above deployment of sexuality, a vision which better explains the production of a

variety of subjectivities. For Foucault power is not held, acquired or utilised by a

minority of hegemonic social agencies. Rather it is immanent within the social

field and exercised from a variety of locations. Power is understood in opposition

to its negative conception, it is a productive force that in relation to sexuality

multiplies, rather than represses, assorted sexualities and their associated

subjectivities.22

But what concern is this to a discussion of limit-experiences? It is here that the

elements of a more precise definition of the limit are to be found in Foucault’s

21
Ibid. P49
22
Ibid. P92 - 102
work. Firstly, it negates the image of a static, universally experienced limit which

permeates all sexual experiences, such as that implicit in the repressive

hypothesis. It rather posits an individuated limit that is unique to each subject,

dependent on the identity conferred upon it by discourses driven by a

multifaceted power structure. As suspected, the limit remains subjectivity itself,

but not a foundational subjectivity inherent to everyone, rather a contingent

subjectivity dependent on the operations of discourse and an underlying network

of power relations. What remains to be asked is what is the foundation of this

subjectivity? What is the underlying identity that sustains it?

The Body: Force and Capacity

If for Foucault, the subject is merely a form conferred upon us via the operations

of discourse and power, what is the substance upon which it is implemented?

And is this material synonymous with the identity that Bataille posits as existing

beyond subjectivity? This section of the analysis aims to address these questions

by discovering within the work of Foucault a vision of this substratum: the

body.23

This answer is not as straightforward as it first appears, its simplicity is

deceptive as it seems to point towards a biological understanding of the self; a

prospect not unproblematic from a Foucauldian perspective. Throughout his

work, Foucault continuously problematises the status of the natural sciences and

their claim on objective knowledge. Notably in the ‘Order of Things’ he

demonstrates that contemporary scientific knowledge on human beings was

dependent upon an epistemic shift under which the conditions for a biological

understanding of humans came to be. This entailed a move from the classical

23
O’ Leary, T. Foucault and the Art of Ethics. London: Continuum, 2002. P117 - 120
episteme, an era in which knowledge was sought through the ordering and

categorising of its objects, towards the modern episteme in which knowledge is

sought via an enjoinment of three dimensions of enquiry: the mathematical, the

scientific and the philosophic. What Foucault suggests here is not that these

epistemes gain no purchase on the truth of the human, but rather that they

generate partial truths which are subject to the interplay and continuous flux of

knowledges.24

Such an appraisal of the human sciences makes grounding the subject in a

biological understanding of the body untenable, since that biological ground

offers only a partially realised understanding of the body and its capacities. What

is needed then is not a retreat to a universal mode of understanding the body,

since it is the presence of this universalism within science that Foucault finds

problematic. What is more appropriate is a vision of the body which speaks of

capacities without relating them to either an underlying causality or a specific

teleology, a vision which holds the body in relation to an open field of

possibilities.

From a Foucauldian perspective then the body can be understood as an object

composed of forces and imbued capacities. It is an object that possess and

generates power, not the power that represses, but the power that multiples and

produces; making subjectivity possible. It is through this generative form of

power that the body holds the capacity for relating to and adopting the

subjectivity conferred upon it by the regimes of power and discourse it is

beholden to.25

24
Foucault, M. The Order of Things. New York: Pantheon Books, 1970. P344 - 355
25
Patton, P. Foucault’s Subject of Power. Political Theory News Letter, 1994: 6. P60 - 71
This capacity is enacted via a process of subjectivation, an ethical action which

Foucault elaborates in the second book of the History of Sexuality: ‘The Use of

Pleasure’. Subjectivation involves three steps: firstly, identification of an ethical

substance: the capacity of the body that is the concern of the subjectivity it

pertains to. Secondly, it involves the establishment of a mode of subjection;

one’s relation to and identification with a subjectivity. Thirdly, it involves the

implementation of ethical work; the practices one implements on the body and

its capacities in order to adopt such a subjectivity.26

In his study of Foucault, Gilles Deleuze conceptualises this process in terms of a

force that folds back on itself. The body possesses a generative force, which its

brings to bear on itself through the process of subjectivation. Deleuze does not

provide a specified description of this force, preferring to leave the concept open

and generative, however he does affirm its role in the construction of an

interiority which can be considered a synonym for subjectivity. This interiority is

the result of a process of ‘doubling back’ an exteriority defined by the complex

network of power Foucault’s work surveys. Deleuze summarises: ‘The most

general formula of the relation is the affect of self by self, or folded force.

Subjectivation is created by folding.’27

Here it is possible to identify within Foucault’s work a grounding for subjectivity

which avoids the determinism of hegemonic conceptions of the self, such as the

inherently rational subject affirmed by the liberal tradition. Instead Foucault

provides the figure of the body as the material foundation underlying the

subject. And whilst this is perhaps the most essentialist element of Foucault’s

work, in that it claims some form of capacity inherent to the body, it avoids

26
Foucault M. The History of Sexuality Vol 2: The Use of Pleasure. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. P25 - 32
27
Deleuze, G. Foucault. London: Bloomsbury, 2012. P78 - 101
proffering a universal reading of the subject since that subject is contingent on a

process of subjectivation. This process is merely one capacity of the body and its

result, the subject, is one amongst many possible configurations made possible

by this capacity.

Furthermore, by speaking in terms of forces and capacities, and leaving these

concepts open and flexible, Foucault is able to further avoid an essentialist

position; maintaining a holistic vision of the body and its attributes. Such a

vision allows for a dynamic concept of the subjectivity that holds the self in

relation to an open field of possible configurations.

What remains to be discussed is the extent to which the body, as conceived by

Foucault, can be considered homologous to the identity Bataille claims exists

beyond intelligibility? One possible, but somewhat tautological, response is that

since the preceding discussion of the limit found it to be synonymous with

Foucault’s subject, it would logically follow that the identity beyond the limit

would be the only object existing outside of subjectivity in Foucault’s work: the

body. If this connection seems un-rigorous another justification for this position

is as follows: such a reading allows for the subjective shift indicative of a limit-

experience in that it is through encountering the body that one is able to stand

outside of subjectivity. Viewing subjectivity from the perspective of the body

allows us to appraise its contingent nature; highlighting the potential for new

subjective assemblages.

Conclusion

This essay began with a question prompted by an encounter with the erotic work

of Anais Nin, an author who not only rises to the amicable task of making

literature arousing, but also highlights a variety of interesting themes

underpinning that arousal. In ‘The Woman on The Dunes’ a theme emerges that

at first appears disconcerting: the connection between death and sexuality.

In an attempt to understand this connection and find some form of causality

underpinning it, the work of Bataille was appraised. Within his work the genesis

of a concept was uncovered, the limit-experience, which gestured towards a

possible explanation of Nin’s observations. This explanation hinged on the ability

of both death and sexuality to disrupt identity and transport an individual to the

limits of their subjectivity.

Although illuminating the sex / death association operative within Nin’s narrative

the idea of a limit-experience remained esoteric and elusive. In order to better

define it, Bataille’s ‘Madame Edwarda’ was interpreted in light of the concept.

This interpretation wrought a description of a number of parameters that are

indicative of a limit-experience: the experience’s location at the limit of

subjectivity, the perception of an identity beyond subjectivity and some form of

transformative effect on subjectivity. These parameters formed an adequate

foundation for a more rigorous conception of a limit-experience, serving as an

ideal starting point for a more rigorous articulation.

In order to provide a detailed overview of the idea, and to address some of the

questions prompted by Bataille’s work, the analysis turned to the work of Michel

Foucault, particularly his later work on sexuality, power, ethics and the body.

Through a detailed reading of these areas of Foucauldian scholarship a more in-

depth understanding of limit-experiences was gained. Firstly, Foucault provides

an erudite explanation of what constitutes the limit of a limit-experience: the

subject. Here, contrary to a number of philosophical traditions, the subject was

not found to be a foundational, universal phenomenon. Rather Foucault

demonstrates that the subject is the result of a complex interplay of power-

relations and discourse, and is rather dependent on the internalisation of those

discourses via an ethical process of subjectivation. Secondly it was also possible

to locate within Foucault’s scholarship a more precise definition of the identity

underlying subjectivity: the body. Here the body is understood as an object that

possesses a number of capacities and forces. Primary, in relation to the subject,

the capacity for the process of subjectivation.

What remains to be ascertained is the effect of this understanding of a limit-

experience entail? What is the function and utility of the concept? The answer is

simple, an understanding of limit-experiences demonstrates the contingent

nature of subjectivity and disrupts the image of an essentialist, foundational

subject. Such a realisation allows for a radical reappraisal of one’s identity,

sense of self and perspective through demonstrating that these are not fixed,

essential aspects of human experience but rather contingent on a complex but

arbitrary processes. Such a realisation provides a sense of freedom, holding the

self in relation to an open field of possible configurations and providing us with

the ability to escape from ourselves.

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