Limit Experience — Bataille, Agamben, and Chemsex Benelux

The about-text — note 3005

Note 3005 quotes the about-page of Chemsex Benelux (2022):

"It is not our intention to either condone or judge chemsex, nor to proclaim any position vis-a-vis the politico-economic union of Benelux. It is our desire to induce a state of pleasant disorientation when confronted with an unknown but uncannily familiar territory. We offer souvenirs to help you integrate the limit-experiences you never had."

The note attributes the project's inspiration to Jonas Čeika's video essay Hellraiser, Bataille and Limit Experiences (CCK Philosophy, 2018). Full transcript at sources/ingested/cck-philosophy-hellraiser-bataille-2018.md.

The two NFT collections

Indiscreet Units (2022) — 266+ flags with continuous hue rotation, stored on Ethereum and IPFS; the inaugural collection of Chemsex Benelux.

Phantom Crush — Rezym, generative portrait based on pastel drawings by Enver Hadzijaj — *Phantom Crush* (2022/2023) — 130 generative portraits programmed by Harm van den Dorpel from pastel drawings on paper by Enver Hadzijaj; the second collection released under *Chemsex Benelux*. Token shown: *Rezym*.

What Čeika's video essay says

The essay (transcript ingested) makes four points:

Most horror restores the status quo. The threat appears as an external parasite, is vanquished, the order is restored. Žižek on Jaws is the example.
Two failed responses to the genuinely other. Outright rejection (Sade, Nietzsche, MLK while alive — dismissed as subversive) or post-mortem domestication (the radical content stripped, the figure absorbed as harmless icon).
A third path. Encounter the other without rejecting and without neutralising. The Cenobites (from Hellraiser) are read this way — already within the subject, summoned by desire.
Bataille's limit experience. The state in which boundaries collapse — pleasure / pain, ecstasy / horror, eros / death. Bataille opposes the profane (utility, acquisition) to the sacred (pure expenditure, energy spent without expectation of return). His example: the Lingchi photograph he kept on his wall and looked at over years.

This is the framework the about-text imports — pleasant disorientation as a calibrated form of the limit experience for a viewer; uncannily familiar territory as the Cenobite-style structure where the taboo is already within; souvenirs to help you integrate the limit-experiences you never had as the work's stated function.

Note 1266 — Agamben on the integrally profane order

Note 1266 paraphrases Giorgio Agamben:

"An integrally actual and integrally profane order in which the destructive distinctions between sacred and profane, the exception and the norm, the singular and the universal are neutralized — and put behind us. They are not to be somehow magically destroyed (…) but instead are to be seen in a new light. (…) Distinctions would continue to exist (…) but they would cease to have the divisive force they carry today; they would cease to be instruments in the hands of those in power."

Bataille proposes the sacred against the profane. Agamben does not propose either side: the distinction itself is what holds power in place. Profanation is the operation of returning the form to common use without replacing one term with the other.

Note 805 — Hayles on the flickering signifier; an embedded intimate fragment

Note 805 cites N. Katherine Hayles. The flickering signifier is a signifier characterised by "unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions" — meaning that does not settle, but is in transit.

Three theoretical paragraphs in the note are interrupted, mid-text, by a single sentence in a different register:

"When I laid there beside you, could you feel me there? My arms were wrapped around you, and I was stroking your neck."

The juxtaposition — the technical-theoretical paragraphs and the intimate fragment in the same note — is the note's distinctive feature.

Note 837 — Derrida on the archive

Note 837 cites Derrida from Archive Fever: the archive is not "the stockroom and the conservatory for archivable contents of the past which would exist in any case (…) without the archive"; archival technology shapes "the very events" it appears merely to preserve. The note is developed in Mediation and the Archive.

The about-text uses the word souvenirs — small portable objects mediating an experience. The Derrida point in 837 bears on this: a mediating object does not transparently transmit a pre-existing event.