Pain as a wakening of consciousness in erotic response

K. Kieslowski, A short film about Love

[It is banal to devote oneself to an end when that end is clearly only a means. The quest for wealth - sometimes the wealth of egoistic individuals, sometimes wealth held in common - is obviously only a means. Work is only a means. 

The response to erotic desire - and to perhaps more human (least physical) desire of poetry, and of ecstasy ( but is so decisively easy to grasp the difference between eroticism and poetry, and between eroticism and ecstasy?) - the response to erotic desire is, on the contrary, an end.]  

G.Bataille, The tears of Eros 

Screenshots from A. Resnais' Hiroshima mon Amour and Kieslowski's A short film about Love.
To remember/To forget: opposite states of consciousness are pursued by means of superimposition of a self-inflicted pain on erotic response.

That is precisely what we do not know!

It is a word

that we use

to indicate

the opening of our consciousness to ward possibility beyond measure, 

tireless and beyond measure.

And precisely what is consciousness?

That is precisely what we do not know.

It is nothingness.

A nothingness

that we use

to indicate

when we do not know something

from what side

we do not know it

and so

we say

consciousness,

from the side of consciousness,

but there are a hundred thousand other sides.

Well?

It seems that consciousness

in us is

linked

to sexual desire

and to hunger;

but it could

just as well

not be linked

to them.

One says,

one can say,

there are those who say

that consciousness

is an appetite,

the appetite for living;

and immediately

alongside the appetite for living,

it is the appetite for food

that comes immediately to mind;

as if there were not people who eat

without any sort of appetite;

and who are hungry.

For this too

exists

to be hungry

without appetite [...]

A. Artaud , To have done with the Judgement of God