Exurgent Meanings

In the trenches of World War I, Ernst Junger was already celebrating face-to-face combat as the authentic intersubjective encounter: authenticity resides in the act of violent transgression, from the Lacanian Real - the Thing Antigone confronts when she violates the order of the City - to the Bataillean excess. In the domain of sexuality itself, the icon of this 'passion for the real' is Oshima's "Empire of the Senses", a Japanese cult movie from the 1970s in which the couple's love relationship is radicalized into mutual torture until death. Is not the ultimate figure of the passion for the Real the option we get on hardcore websites to observe the inside of a vagina from the vantage point of a tiny camera at the top of the penetrating dildo? At this extreme point, a shift occurs: when we get too close to the desired object, erotic fascination turns into disgust at the Real of the bare flesh.

- Slavoj Zizek, "Welcome to the Desert of the Real"