Content note: This post contains artistic nudity.
Note to readers: This meditation will appear in the forthcoming Acéphalous: The Erotic Tarot of Georges Bataille Compendium, published alongside the tarot deck created with Noah Trapolino. While both the deck and the compendium will be sent first to campaign backers, a small surplus of each will be made available for general purchase once fulfillment is complete. Many of you have already reached out with inquiries, and we are grateful for your patience—the surplus will be announced soon.
What follows is an advance publication of this meditation, shared here in its entirety. Follow this blog for more updates in the near future.
The nearer we approach the ultimate questions of existence, in our departure from logicality, the more deadly becomes the state of error we fall into. The Ariadne ball has become all unwound long ago, and man is at the end of the tether.” [1]
—Lev Shestov, All Things Are Possible
Among the lesser-known contradictions of Dionysus is his renown as a god of uncanny silence. Though famed for frenzy and divine ecstasy, “stillness and calm too are among the gifts he bestows.”[2] As Dionysian forces gather, a familiar story unfolds: the self dissolves and the ego unravels, all stable wholes are undone by catastrophe, disintegration, or a surge of unruly affect. Yet within every divine mania and ludic joy that Dionysus stirs, a paradoxical thread emerges. Contrary to the myth’s apparent center, the silence attributed to Dionysus is, in truth, Ariadne’s gift. Ariadne’s repose on the isle of Naxos is not merely the mythical counterweight to Dionysian revelry, it is the complement to Dionysus own solitude.
What is the nature of Ariadne’s silence, a gift that myth has rendered silent as its giver? Her abandonment, so often read as wound and betrayal, also marks the threshold of an ecstatic solitude. Her ecstatic solitude is not merely the necessary prelude to mystic union with Dionysian forces, but the very passage through silence required to unbind the will from the heroic mode of existence—an oppositional posture suffused with vengeance, sacrificial duty, and the weight of obligation. It is within Ariadne’s silence that we dissolve the attachments forged by the hero’s ressentiment.
To grasp the nature of Ariadne’s silence, we must return to the moment of her abandonment, when, after aiding Theseus in the slaying of the Minotaur, she is left to sleep on the shores of Naxos. This moment—so often figured as the severest of betrayals—enshrouds the passage through which the power of her silence unfolds. That silence is obscured by a host of other betrayals, beginning with her complicity in the murder of her half-brother, the Minotaur. Yet more tragic than Theseus’s eventual abandonment is Ariadne’s symbolic estrangement from the bestial forces that mark her divine lineage and constitute the very ground of her becoming.
The multiplicity of life, the fullness of our destiny, and the draw toward what we are called to become often feel like more than we can endure. Here the silence of Ariadne morphs into resignation. Moved by silent trepidation before her fate with the bull-god, Ariadne delays her destiny by seeking refuge in the arms of a heroic mortal. The monstrous flourishings of her future marriage to Dionysus are foreshadowed in the traces of what she herself has abandoned.
Marked by its recoil from life’s shameful excesses and its drive toward self-splitting, Theseus’ heroism demands Ariadne’s renunciation of the becoming-monstrous of the Minotaur. By submitting to his heroic ethos, Ariadne takes upon herself his burden, shouldering its full cosmic and ethical weight as she is initiated into the world of heroic being. The consequence of this initiation is that she becomes the final excess in a cascade of betrayals, cast off in the wake of Theseus’ departure on his return voyage.
Ariadne’s subsequent desertion, itself silent departure, marks a severance from the heroic mode of existence—not merely by abandonment, but through a reversal of the will to negation. When this will, once bound to oppositionalism, turns against reactive forces themselves, it cuts through the heroic impulse and opens a caesura where shame, resentment, and bad conscience begin to sublimate, rising like vapors from the wound. By contrast, the scissions of the hero do not liberate but detach him from the intensive multiplicities that compose him. What the hero severs becomes a dialectical thread, strung between the wound and the flesh it no longer dares to claim. It is only when the blade is turned upon the hero’s own logic—his own oppositional stance—that these wounds may be transcended, and the thread, once spun from betrayal, finally loosened from its burden.
On the sands of Naxos, Dionysus brushes the brow of the sleeping Ariadne, offering not salvation but an awakening, a new equanimity unfettered by the oppressive heroism of the lover that left her behind.
But first she must sleep.
Ariadne’s midnight slumber recalls the noontide sleep of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, in which the shadow becomes conterminous with the body. Like that of the wanderer-prophet, Ariadne’s sleep marks a transformation of aim: while Zarathustra’s repose inaugurates his becoming as teacher of the eternal return, Ariadne’s sleep prepares her for co-regency with the forces of divine dissolution. The resemblance between Ariadne and Zarathustra, however, gives rise to the deeper question where they diverge. Unlike Zarathustra’s midday forest, the shores of Naxos remain shrouded in darkness as silver tongues of a lunar tide lap at the slumbering feet of a woman betrayed. Here emerges not the fiery logos of Heraclitus but the watery depths of which he gravely warned. Could the silence in focus be too much for those, like Heraclitus and Nietzsche, who seek the dryness of the soul? Perhaps it is all too aqueous, too bathed in moonlight—not to mention all too feminine…
We must interrogate the figure of Ariadne as a woman repeatedly possessed by her lovers. In doing so, we should also consider the symbolic possibilities that lie beyond the masculine claims imposed upon her mythic depictions. Ariadne spurned is left suspended between passions—the love of a hero and her destined betrothal to a god. Though a marriage promises an Olympian tribute of the highest order, it nonetheless offers new obligations. To hasten her wedding is to risk abandoning the silence that saturates the secrecy of Dionysus’ domain. Does giving voice to Ariadne’s silence constitute an apostasy (itself an abandonment) or a turning away from the divinity of Dionysus? Or is the honor we seek to confer upon Ariadne’s night on the shores of Naxos the very repose required for the god’s festive powers to unfold?
It is here that we encounter the mythic experience of naxosis—not merely the eponym of Naxos, but the designation for the nadir of an affective liminality: not simply the zero point of dissolution, but a total lapse in knowledge and memory borne along by pure forgetting. It is imagined as a cosmic aperture adrift, through which only the formless may pass. As an imageless image, no form can circumscribe it. Though naxosis recalls the scene of Ariadne’s abandonment, it evokes less a place than an atmosphere: a lingering afterimage of ruination, a muted metabolism of shadows, a somnambulism suffered over rugged nocturnal shores. Fragments of former imperatives, orientations, and identities all shuffle unbound in the undertow of something inoperative yet rapturous. If Dionysus is the god of orgies and paroxysms, then Ariadne’s naxosis is the hushed wind and undulating susurrations that herald the god’s imminent arrival.
To give voice to Ariadne’s naxotic silence—the interval between her betrayals and her affirmations—is not only necessary for grasping the deeper logic of her transformation, but because it forges a connection between ecstatic solitude and the mystic union of the Dionysian festival without the askeses of the hero or the priest:
Blest is the happy man
Who knows the mysteries the gods ordain,
And sanctifies his life,
Joins soul with soul in mystic unity,
And, by due ritual made pure,
Enters the ecstasy of mountain solitudes...[3]
What’s more, naxosis articulates a zone of indeterminacy amidst the transformation of reactive forces into active modes of existence. In contrast to the pneumatic ascent of the hero—his lungs swelling through the endurance of the ordeal—Ariadne, in her forsakenness, evokes deflation, collapse, and enervation, lapsing into solitude and the calm of repose. A night on Naxos sutures all wounds with its stillness. It is here that every drop of remorse drains into the Aegean sands, where the weight of guilt is sloughed off like kelp in the tidewrack, and the spirit of vengeance is borne away on the breath of the blackened waters. In the inoperativity of silence following naxotic withdrawal, a new incubation of forces begins.
In the realm of the psyche, naxosis may be experienced in many ways. Though paradoxically, it rarely rises to the level of a distinct event or encounter. When lovers meet, it often happens that one assumes or endures the Herculean burdens of the other. In such a configuration, the hero’s inordinate emotional needs may cast the other into the role of Ariadne. Over time, the tension becomes intolerable, a tangle of unmet desires and insecure attachment. Yet if a rupture occurs—if, for example, the lovers go their separate ways—it sometimes happens that, upon reunion, the original attachments have quietly dissolved. As if by some clandestine force, the thread that once tethered one lover to the other through the labyrinth has simply come undone. Perhaps then a new love takes shape, one more platonic or more powerful for being forgetful of what has come to pass.[4]
This dynamic is not unique to romantic love but extends to our other existential attachments as well. Our relationships with such practices as music, poetry, philosophy and so on can grow strained at certain moments along the lifeline, leaving us disenchanted, dismayed, or embittered when our strivings fail to align with our phantasmic obsessions. A retreat from our tortured meditations may quell the fire of longing. In time, we may find ourselves moved by other forces, drawn into a qualitatively different encounter with the creative act—one no longer tethered to former heroic demands, but transfigured by distance, silence, and forgetting. A programmatic or intentional approach towards personal transformation may aid but scarcely guarantees the metamorphosis seemingly promised in these lines recorded here. It is rare for us to say how these dissolutions unfold, though we are nonetheless called to become worthy of the event.
Like Ariadne, when we experience a betrayal, we may succumb to the notion of our own insufficiency, at least measured in terms of our attachments to those who have turned away from us. But the specificity of a particular betrayal may also induce a sense of terminal or cosmic insufficiency to which Bataille often gestures. It is this more encompassing existential insufficiency that the stage may be set for a naxotic rupture.
The image of sleep or repose connected to naxosis is marked by inactivity and a drift into imaginal waters. Naxotic sleep illuminates the contours between the formed and formless. It sheds light upon the insufficiency of beings and their tragic inability to retain postures in accord with the imperious armatures of illusory stabilities such as God, Reason, and the State.
Bataille’s concept of ipse, the one who remains abandoned to a perpetual confrontation with the insufficiency of being, forever feels the pull of the naxotic undertow. The enterprise of philosophy itself urges us towards an encounter with this engulfing swell. In the work of Shestov, Bataille’s first major philosophical mentor, this impulse is not a deviation but philosophy’s very purpose: the enterprise by which we both discover and lose Ariadne’s thread, relinquishing an illusory obligation to an existence bound by the strictures of logicality.[5]
When we lapse into a naxotic somnambulism, our feet grope along the Aegean shore—bereft, tremulous, uncertain. Our soles are spurred by entrenched memories, each step thereafter shifting, uneven, and forgetful of the one before, pressing forward into a seemingly endless void stood upon the darkened sands. The moon shifts between shimmers of madness and an aeonic porcelain quiet. A tangle of lunar light, ecstasy, and anguish gives rise to whirlpools from which laughter and tears flow together. Here we risk everything and forget it all besides.
The dissolution of naxosis is marked by its very “unbearability”—for nothing more can be borne upon ipse in this moment. Naxosis names an attunement to the inoperative silencing that emerges within every event of dissipation. We can hear silence silencing, even amidst the cacophony of the greatest global catastrophes or when we are drawn close to the slow gnaw of the cosmos’ ordinary molecular cruelty.[6] Experiencing this peculiar paradoxical mixture of strife and serenity, along with the release from the insistent solidity of a transcendent world, marks the naxotic moment of passage.
At last, the silence we seek in solitude is an ecstasy—it is a sovereign moment. Traditionally, solitude in religious and mystical practice was shaped by askesis, a disciplined withdrawal that, in Dionysian terms, split the body from itself to approximate a divine image. Ipse evacuated the body and the world, absconding with the dream of orgiastic union. Naxotic solitude, however, is not withdrawal, but immersion within and among bodies. It is a union sans askesis, a solitude that cannot betray the teeming multiplicity of the cosmos, the solemn, shared hush by which festivals and their archetypal variations are so often inaugurated: the mystery, the sacrifice, the feast, the orgy, the chorus, the insurrection—all the great heralds of the bull-god’s perennial return…
[1] Shestov, L. (1977). All things are possible: Apotheosis of groundlessness (B. Martin, Trans.). Ohio University Press. Part I, §21.
[2] López-Pedraza, R. (2000). Dionysus in exile: On the repression of the body and emotion. Chiron Publications, p. 2.
[3] Euripides. (1954). The Bacchae and other plays (P. Vellacott, Trans.). Penguin Classics, p. 194.
[4] Christine Downing, “Ariadne: Mistress of the Labyrinth,” in Facing the Gods, ed. James Hillman (Irving, TX: Spring Publications, 1980), 135–149; Gilles Deleuze, “The Mystery of Ariadne According to Nietzsche,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 122–130. Downing’s reading is the most resonant use of the myth for my purposes here, as it frames Ariadne in a way that amplifies Deleuze’s double affirmation.
[5] Shestov, All Things Are Possible, Part I, §21.
[6] the concept of “silence silencing” refers to Charles E. Scott’s discussion of silence in Telling Silence: Thresholds to No Where in Ordinary Experiences (2023)