Sacred Eroticism

Book excerpt: Sacred Eroticism addresses a neglected chapter in Latin American literature, namely, the influence of Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski's atheist mysticism in the Latin American erotic novel of the twentieth century. Combining a Lacanian analytical framework with an (Inter)textualist approach. Juan Carlos Ubilluz reveals how Julio Cortazar, Salvador Elizondo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Garcia Ponce adopted Sataille and Klossowski's aesthetic and philosophical models as a point of departure to rearticulate the modern subject's buried dimension of the sacred through various Innovations on the erotic novel's form. Ubilluz examines the dialectical irruption of these literary experiments into their particular aesthetic, theoretical, and political contexts; showing, for instance, that Cortazar's