Obscenity is a zone of nothingness we have to cross without which beauty lacks the suspended, risked aspect that brings about our damnation. …If I contemplate the nothingness of obscenity independently of desire and so to speak on its own behalf, I only note the sensible, graspable sign of a limit at which being is confronted with lack. But in temptation, the outer nothingness appears as a reply to a yearning for communication. …Crude obscenity gnaws away at my existence, its excremental nature rubbing off on me — this nothingness carried by filth, this nothingness I should have expelled, this nothingness I should have distanced myself from — and I’m left defenseless and vulnerable, opening myself to it in an exhausting wound.