Limit Experience — Bataille, Agamben, and Chemsex Benelux

The about-text (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 says the project "was heavily inspired by" Jonas Čeika's video essay Hellraiser, Bataille and Limit Experiences (CCK Philosophy, 2018; transcript).

The collections

Indiscreet Units (2022), hue-rotating flag (Hong Kong)

Indiscreet Units (2022) is credited on harm.work as "the inaugural commission by Chemsex Benelux": 266 flags whose colours rotate continuously through the hue circle, stored on Ethereum and IPFS.

Phantom Crush — Rezym, generative portrait based on pastel drawings by Enver Hadzijaj — *Phantom Crush* (2022/2023), token *Rezym*

Phantom Crush (series 2022, deployed 2023) is 130 generative portraits based on pastel drawings on paper by Enver Hadzijaj, programmed by van den Dorpel. The token Rezym shows a face in charcoal and pastel with red-rimmed eyes, symmetrical ink-blot shapes laid over it. harm.work's page for the collection does not mention Chemsex Benelux, so whether it belongs to the project is not established.

What Čeika's video essay says

Most horror restores the status quo. The threat arrives from outside as a parasite and is expelled. Žižek on Jaws is the example.
Two failed responses to the genuinely other: reject it, or neutralise it and then absorb it. Čeika's examples are transgressive thinkers such as Nietzsche and the Marquis de Sade, and Martin Luther King Jr., dismissed as subversive while alive and stripped of his radicalism after his death.
A third path. Meet the other without rejecting or neutralising it. Clive Barker's Cenobites in Hellraiser are read this way: already within the subject, summoned by desire.
Bataille's limit experience. In Georges Bataille's account, boundaries collapse: pleasure and pain, ecstasy and horror. Bataille opposes the profane (utility, acquisition) to the sacred (expenditure without expectation of return). His example is the Lingchi photograph he kept on his wall and looked at for years.

The about-text draws on this framework: pleasant disorientation as a mild limit experience for a viewer, uncannily familiar territory as the taboo already within, and souvenirs to help you integrate the limit-experiences you never had as what the work offers.

The profane order (1266)

At the artist's instruction the page reads three further notes beside the project. Note 1266 copies, without naming its source, Leland de la Durantaye's account of Giorgio Agamben's "profane order" (boundary 2, 2008):

"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. The order described in 1266 takes neither side: the distinctions are neutralized, not destroyed, and they lose their divisive force while they continue to exist.

Flickering signifiers and an intimate sentence (805)

Note 805 strings together, without attribution, passages from N. Katherine Hayles ("Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers", 1993; How We Became Posthuman, 1999). Her flickering signifier is marked by "unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions": meaning in transit. Between the third and the fourth passage stands one sentence in another register, of unknown source:

"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 of theory and intimate fragment is the note's distinctive feature.

The archive and the souvenir (822)

Note 822 is a lightly rewritten passage from Derrida's Archive Fever (1995); in the vault it also appears as the link text beside the forest photograph of note 837. The archive, it says, is not "the stockroom and the conservatory for archivable contents of the past which would exist in any case, and just the same, without the archive": archival technology would have transformed history "in its very events". Mediation and the Archive develops the note.

The about-text offers souvenirs, small objects that carry an experience. Read with 822, such an object does not transmit an event that exists apart from it.