Resisting Nudities

This provocative book re-conceives the erotic and its imaginative manifestations as an aesthetic ultimately driven by the disruption of desire. Critical, philosophical, and erotic texts construct a framework for understanding the aesthetics of eroticism including a «resisting nude» grounded in a theory of absence and the psychosocial dynamic of physical and mental surveillance. Resisting Nudities offers a necessary link between the poetry of jouissance and the revolt of body and mind intrinsic to the erotic, at a key moment in our contemporary cultural landscape. Written through a poetic lens, it is a creative new analysis of what George Bataille called the most intense of human moments.
In Literature and Evil, Georges Bataille wrote that the base of the erotic instinct could only form itself in the inhuman conditions of a prison; therefore, Marquis de Sade was able to write Les Cent Vingt Journées de Sodome (One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodomy) locked up in the Bastille. This base of eroticism for Bataille and others who followed in his thinking issued forth from a clear and distinct consciousness. In this work, I attempt to reconceive the erotic, its imaginative manifestations and an aesthetic which is ultimately brought about through desire’s disruption.