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"Sexual activity, whether perverted or not; the behavior of one sex before the other; defecation; urination; death and the cult of cadavers (above all, insofar as it involves the stinking decomposition of bodies); the different taboos; ritual cannibalism; the sacrifice of animal-gods; omophagia; the laughter of exclusion; sobbing (which in general has death as its object); religious ecstasy; identical attitude toward shit, involuntary defecation; the custom of making woman both brilliant and lubricious with makeup, gems, and gleaming jewels; gambling; headless expenditure and certain fanciful uses of money, etc. together present a common character in that the object of the activity is found each time treated as a foreign body (daz ganz Anderes); in other words, it can just as well be expelled following a brutal rupture as reabsorbed through the desire to put one’s body and mind entirely in a more or less violent state of expulsion (or projection). The notion of the (heterogeneous) foreign body permits one to note the elementary subjective identity between types of excrement (sperm, menstrual blood, urine, fecal matter) and everything that can be seen as sacred, divine, or marvelous: a half-decomposed cadaver fleeing through the night in a luminous shroud can be seen as characteristic of this unity."
Georges Bataille, The use value of D.A.F. De Sade (1930)
