Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in the Latin American Erotic Novel

Sacred Eroticism: Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski in the Latin American Erotic Novel addresses a neglected chapter in the field of Latin American literature: 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)textual approach, Juan Carlos Ubilluz reveals how Julio Cort&3225;zar, Salvador Elizondo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Garcia Ponce adopted Bataille 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 also examines the dialectical irruption of these literary experiments into their particular aesthetic, theoretical, and political contexts; showing, for instance, that Cortazar’s Rayuela and Elizondo’s Farabeuf reintroduce a Bataillean sense of tragedy into the secularist nouveau roman, that Garia Ponce exemplifies the Barthian death of the Author by ‘copying’ with originality the form and content of Klossowski’s novels, and that Vargas Llosa’s Los cuadernos de don Rigoberto gives an unbecoming neo-liberal spin to Bataille and Klossowski’s anti-capitalist theorization of the sacred.