ritual ordeals which test the faith of someone being initiated into an ascetic spiritual discipline.
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye [Amazon, Amazon, Bookshop, Publisher, Local Library]
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Consider also:
- “The value of a ritual is that it involves self-discipline and belonging. The ritual is pointless in itself so the doing of it is purely a matter of discipline and the willingness to do it.”
- “Most pornography—the books discussed here cannot be excepted—points to something more general than even sexual damage. I mean the traumatic failure of modern capitalist society to provide authentic outlets for the perennial human flair for high-temperature visionary obsessions, to satisfy the appetite for exalted self-transcending modes of concentration and seriousness. The need of human beings to transcend ‘the personal’ is no less profound than the need to be a person, an individual. But this society serves that need poorly. It provides mainly demonic vocabularies in which to situate that need and from which to initiate action and construct rites of behavior.”
- “the poetry of transgression is also knowledge. He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.”