Mayssa Amri

“Observing her, I saw that she was made up, that she was in an evening gown, that mourning indecently emphasized her beauty.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“...being aware that the sacred quality hidden in the experience of eroticism is something impossible for language to reach (this is also due to the impossibility of experiencing of re-experiencing anything through language), Bataille still expresses it in words. (Mishima on Bataille)”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man

“...out of despair I decided to follow this horror through. I stared down at what I was already grasping in my hand, like an ape; I wrapped myself in the dust and took off my trousers.
Interwoven joy and terror strangled me within. I strangled and I gasped from pleasure. The more those pictures terrified me, the more intense was my excitement at the sight of them. After days of accumulating alarms, tensions, suffocations, I was beyond withstanding my own ignominy. I invoked it and I blessed it. It was my inevitable fate: my joy was all the greater since, with regard to life, I had long since entrenched myself in an attitude of suffering, and now, in the throes of delight, I progressed even farther into vileness and degradation.”
― Georges Bataille, My Mother / Madame Edwarda / The Dead Man