談玉儀                  

談玉儀。“Nothing Forbidden Nothing Erotic:” Love and Death in Lust, Caution”。2009 English Festival-Panel Discussion: Ang Lee’s Transcultural Magic。主辦單位: 靜宜大學英國語文學系。時間: 98年4月28日。地點: 柏垣大樓102教室。

                          Nothing Forbidden Nothing Erotic:

                                                       Love and Death in Lust, Caution

Yuh-yi Tan談玉儀 

台北商業技術學院助理教授

Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution, an erotic espionage thriller based on the respected Chinese novelist Eileen Chang’s short story, has created many sensational discussions on the issue of love and eroticism. Likewise, in his philosophical book Erotism, Georges Bataille seriously considers sexual experience to be a means to freedom of the transgressive spirit, and this aspect becomes an important source for the continued development of the theory of eroticism. In this presentation, I propose to explore Bataille’s conception of eroticism and apply it to observe the possible connections in Lee’s film. What is undeniable is that Lee and Bataille share a number of thematic and theoretical commonalities, in particular on the subject of human nature, death, and sexuality even though there are some divergences between the two.

“Eroticism is one aspect of the inner life of man,” Bataille says (Erotism 29). Apparently, not only does eroticism detail the physicality of the desired object, but also it is based on the interiority of the other that corresponds to man’s essential inner experience. There are three forms of eroticism, according to Bataille, namely, physical, emotional, and religious. Physical eroticism, characterized by a “heavy, sinister quality” bordering on death, is a violent form of dissolution that reinforces two individual subjects mingled in the sexual act of continuity (Erotism 19). While physical eroticism attains to holding “on to the separateness of the individual in a rather selfish and cynical fashion,” emotional eroticism reaches a state of anxiety after a union of the physical and spiritual due to the realization of the inaccessibility of continuity (Erotism 19). Thus, in the religious eroticism, an encounter with a kind of absolute and sacramental continuity is reworked through a rite of crossing the threshold of death.

Lust, Caution is closely tied up with the Bataillian trinity of eroticism, especially in the three erotic sex scenes that bring us into the inner experience of eroticism. In a continuing process of revealing continuity through discontinuity, the two major leads Wang and Yee in Lee’s film demonstrate their anguish in love at the core of balancing eroticism and death. Lee’s three sex scenes, along with the representations of the supporting functions of songs and cinema, redeem the lovers’ predicament of trying to go beyond their physical and emotional involvement to a more sublime and sacred promise that transcends the limits of self. Lee has distinguished himself as a philosophical visual thinker who considers that without the sin of breaking taboos, sex is not erotic. Both Lee and Bataille associate eroticism with death and transgression, and this recognition offers an approach to observe the essence of truth and art.

Keywords: eroticism, physical, emotional, religious, death, transgression, (dis)continuity.