There is often much talk of the Marquis de Sade and his name as the basis for the word sadism. Sade did indeed inspire my imagination as a teenager exploring my sexuality and blossoming sadistic fantasies. His ideas were clearly as much about transgression and the limits of freedom and action, as they were about pain or suffering.

Yet there is another figure who could easily have formed the basis of the word for how I see the pushing of the limits of pain, breaking of taboo, and breaking down of the Ego, but I have never seen him mentioned. His name is Georges Bataille. I feel his ideas have much to offer those exploring the outer edges of pain, degradation, and transgression.

Bataille was a different kind of intellectual, writer, and transgressive figure. He was also a kind of dark mystic who deeply considered the transformative power of violent, sexual, and sadomasochistic actions. Much like the Hindu ascetics, the Aghori, Bataille believed that divine ecstasy and extreme horror were in fact identical states and that the breaking of taboos was central to a form of spiritual or experiential realisation.

The main concept that relates to the raw emotional power of sadomasochism is the concept of the Limit Experience. A limit experience would include violence, sadomasochism, or any extreme or overwhelming experience that causes the self or subjective to cease to function.

For Bataille the extreme or the edge of what is possible could break down experience to the point of a kind of incomprehensible state or existence. He wrote that his focus was on what “exists between the utmost in pleasure and the utmost in pain: the identity between being and non-being, between the living and the death-stricken being”.

French philosopher Michel Foucault, also drew upon the notion of the Limit Experience in his work. When we consider he was a practicing sadomasochist and wrote extensively on sexuality, madness, and power, it is clear that such an understanding influenced everything he did.

When this view of the Limit Experience is applied to sadism and masochism the potential for a form of transgressive or antinomian experience or spirituality is clear. Pain, degradation, CNC, violence, and going to the limit of what is possible between two individuals in my understanding and experience is the path to a non-dual awareness, and an inner change that is beyond words. It is at the core of human experience, and sexuality in its most extreme forms offers the most direct route.