La Petite Mort Abstract collage works inspired by Marguerite Duras’ erotic novella The Lover (L’Amant) – a sparse, disjointed, dreamy, almost... Read More
La Petite Mort
Abstract collage works inspired by Marguerite Duras’ erotic novella
The Lover (L’Amant) – a sparse, disjointed, dreamy, almost hallucinatory
minimal tale of love and cruelty. Of longing, absence, primitive need, and
dislocation. The novel speaks to the language of dreams, the language of
recollections.
The title of the series, La
Petite Mort (Little Death) – refers
to the French expression meaning "the brief loss or weakening of
consciousness,” and is generally used as a euphemism for orgasm. Modern usage
refers specifically to "the sensation of post orgasm as likened to death.”
More widely, it can refer to the spiritual release that comes with orgasm or to
a short period of melancholy or transcendence as a result of the expenditure of
the "life force."
For modern philosophers, la
petite mort is about more than just the physical act of sexual climax, it’s
also about psychological loss. Some philosophers have theorized that la petite mort is about the spiritual
release that comes with orgasm. This spiritual release, they argue, makes you
temporarily “lose” yourself. Some scientists have linked this feeling to the
release of oxytocin in the brain after an orgasm. For a philosopher like Roland
Barthes, it’s a feeling that we can find beyond the bedroom.
Barthes spoke of la
petite mort as the chief objective of reading literature. He used the
concept of la petite mort, which he
called jouissance (“bliss”), to
describe how we should feel about reading certain books in his well-known work The Pleasure of the Text (1973). A book
that inspires feelings of jouissance,
he theorized, will cause readers to momentarily lose themselves in the work.
We’re all familiar with the expression of
“losing yourself in a good book,” but how many of us know that this concept was
originally theorized in relation to a euphemism for orgasm? These paintings –
excerpts of text taken from Duras’ erotic novel and placed in a different
context – playfully suggest a subtle connection between sex and death and great
literature.