Sacrifice of Feminine Eros Heavenly in Creatures

A he sleeves and cuffs of the navy woolen coat siphon mud and water.The first blows drew the hands into the pain, into the skin opened by the brick; now the hands and arms stretch out.The fingers stiffen with each crush of brick against hair and skin, and they relax as the brick in the stocking bounces away.Arabesques of blood darken the ground: ochre on brown.The face moulds features in the mud.Black buttons mould cir cles.The head weeps.The murder in the final scenes of the film Heavenly Creatures (1994) brings two girls, Pauline Parker and Juliet Hulme, to the zenith of their wildly extravagant love.1They are sentenced to five years in prison and, as a condition of their release, are prohibited from ever re-establishing contact.The murder of Pauline's mother culminates a vertiginous, ruin ous love between the girls.What kind of eros-life principle, or more spe cifically, sexuality-tends toward violent murder?What kind of eros is figured in Heavenly Creatures?In his works Theory of Religion ([1973] 1989) and Erotism ([1957] 1986), Georges Bataille develops a theory of eros as an inherently violent life force.I will sketch Bataille's conception of eros and the necessity of violence, and his constructions of human relationship and feminine eros within his representation of eros.Bataille's theory, I argue, complements and illuminates the ontology and politics of Heavenly Creatures.I then introduce Jessica Benjamin's feminist theory of eros as presented in The Bonds of Love (1988) to resist the seduction of the Bataillian erotic cosmos

Aesthetics · Archaeology · Creatures · Epistemology · Psychoanalysis · Sacrifice · Theology · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Religious Studies and Spiritual Practices

• Reading Mysskin’s Serial Killers Through Bataille and the Buddha

  Open Access•Swarnavel Eswaran•South Asian Review•2026

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