Eros and Art

In Bataille's anthropology, humans are not only human by intelligently creating tools. They are also human through their desires and dreams. They become human by discovering eroticism and creating art. Ancient religions and mythologies stem from these sources. The unity of eroticism and art, which dominated ancient Greek culture, waned in the Middle Ages but was revived with the Renaissance, driving humanism. In the 18th century, it formed the basis for the autonomization of aesthetics and art with the romantic philosophers. The eroticism-art unity became thoroughly politicized with the organization of aesthetic modernism and the avant-garde, mobilizing the creativity of desire, imagination, magic, dreams, and play against rationalist dogmas and disciplines reduced to utility and function.