This piece was originally written for Rehla Magazine, an Arabic literary publication in Beirut. It has been translated by the author and the script adapted to this audio-visual format. I think very differently about this film now.
Alice Harford: The important thing is: we're awake now. And hopefully... for a long time to come.
Dr. Bill Harford: Forever.
Alice Harford: Forever? Hum...
Dr. Bill Harford: Forever!
Alice Harford: Hum... Let's not use that word. You know? It frightens me. But I do love you and you know there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible.
Dr. Bill Harford: What's that? Alice Harford: Fuck.- Stanley Kubrick, Eyes Wide Shut
In the Phoenician Cosmology, attributed to Sanchoniatho and left to us by Philo of Byblos, it is suggested that eroticism, the act of love making, was the first creative act. He tells us that in the beginning, “the principle of the universe was a dark and windy air, or a wind made of a dark air, a turbulent evening Chaos,” and that this air “for a long time had no bound, or figure. But when this wind fell in love with its own principles, a mixture was made, and that mixture was called Desire”.
Just as, to Sanchoniatho, desire is the expression of an assent to life out of boundless darkness, to George Bataille, “eroticism is assenting to life even in death” (11). Bataille’s eroticism is one of pure pleasure, a “psychological quest” intrinsically tied to death. But while erotic activity might be understood as independent from reproduction as its end, “the fundamental meaning of reproduction is none the less the key to eroticism” (12), and it is here, in the fact of our requisite reproductive nature, that our greatest, most tragic human reality lies: discontinuity.
As Bataille puts it, “Reproduction implies the existence of discontinuous beings”.
Khalil Gibran warns parents against looking for themselves in their children, or trying to dominate their existence, reminding them with that ever-famous line: “Your children are not your children” but rather, people of their own. We are born, live, dream, and die alone inside ourselves, and always, “between one being and another, there is a gulf, a discontinuity” (12). The gulf exists between you and the stranger at the next coffee table, between you and your intimate other, and equally, between you and I, reader and writer. “We are attempting to communicate, but no communication between us can abolish our fundamental difference”. All is not lost, however, for Bataille. Yes, the gulf exists. Yes, it may seem like a hopeless barrier, a deep, dizzying untraversable chasm between the “you” and the “I”, but that does not mean we cannot experience its dizziness together.
The gulf, Bataille asserts, is death itself “in one sense, and death is vertiginous, death is hypnotising” (13)—death is our ultimate path to continuity in eternity. But just as Alice is weary of the thought of “forever” at the end of Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut, we too are generally less than enthusiastic about the thought of disappearing into the eternal ethers of darkness, of losing that separate individuality which we have come to identify with so strongly, no matter how we might simultaneously crave existential communion.
It is here that eroticism comes into play, bringing with it a whiff of death, but only a whiff—just violent enough to leave us gasping in its wake, but not so violent as to wrench us from our very being forever. At its peak, in the brief moment of orgasm, eroticism allows us to experience the illusion of death, keeping us, our individuality, intact while violating our very being, “a violation bordering on death”—or what the French call la petite mort, the little death. Eroticism allows us to become involved in an act of partial dissolution, a transition from “the normal state to that of erotic desire,” where the self-contained characters of the participators as they are in their normal lives are destroyed.
In Eyes Wide Shut, Alice and Bill Harford engage in secret, erotic lives in order to escape the stagnant normality of their marriage. While those secret lives offer them that sought after dissolution and new continuity, the lines of communication between them are further and further severed, the chasm between them as a couple growing larger as the movie goes on. As Marquis de Sade puts it, “Secrecy is, alas, only too easy...and there is not a libertine some little way gone in vice, who does not know what a hold murder has on the senses”. Bill and Alice are not ignorant to the death of their own marriage, nor are they oblivious to their own roles in its murder, but they choose the “only too easy” way of secrecy time and again, until the chasm becomes so large, the pervading discontinuity inside their home so blatant, that there is only one way forward: sex.
We are not so far from those innocent creatures who once cowered from God to hide their nakedness. We too are wont to hide our bodies, because revealing them, stripping them naked, means letting go of our imagined self-possession, the perceived possession of a supposedly stable individual. And it is the act of stripping naked itself that is the decisive action, the first step towards a state of continuity, and much courage is required for one to allow the self to be dispossessed.
This is where we are now, long held in the grasp of our perceived self-possession, yet faced so violently, so aggravatingly, with our obvious dispossession. We have lost all control; our collective fate being thrown from palm to palm between a handful of tyrannical individuals like a hot potato behind closed doors. And yet, we cannot merely point our fingers upwards in blame, for in the same way that we, with our own hands, stripped ourselves to them, we were similarly complicit in succumbing to the ease of secrecy.
The other is never in utter distinction to the self, and “they” are merely the product of “us”. So long as we cling to our imagined self-possession, hiding our nakedness beneath the deceptive veils of social reputation, cowering in secrecy, freeing ourselves only in corners where we think no one is watching and yet where we are all together, then that is what we will be faced with. We cannot expect free, honest, communicative leaders to rise from a repressed, deceitful, secretive peoples, just as we do not expect lions to be born of domesticated cats.
More often than not, we are assumed to have our being independently of our passions, but Bataille asserts that in fact, we should never imagine existence except in terms of these passions.
What makes this difficult is the reality that “Man goes constantly in fear of himself. His erotic urges terrify him” (7). Our fear is natural, and we are not to be blamed or ashamed for it, but we are called to rise to the occasion, because our only way of casting light on the things that terrify us is first and foremost to dominate them. With our sexuality being at the core, the essence of our existence, the first movement of creation, it is what must be conquered before all else, and that is why, I think, right now, there is something very important we need to do as soon as possible.
Resources
Bataille, G. Death and Sensuality. Walker and Co. New York, 1962.
Bataille, G. Eroticism. Translated by Mary Dalwood. London, Marion Boyars, 1987.
De Sade, M. 120 Days of Sodom. Wilder Publications, 2015.
Phoenician Cosmogeny of Sanchuniato found in Praeparatio Evangelica of Eusebius of Caesarea c. 314 CE.
