Petite mort
La petite mort, French for "the little death", is a metaphor for orgasm.
More widely, it can refer to the spiritual release that comes with orgasm or to a short period of melancholy or transcendence as a result of the expenditure of the "life force", the feeling whereof is caused by the release of oxytocin in the brain after the occurance of the orgasm. Literary critic Roland Barthes spoke of la petite mort as the chief objective of reading literature. He metaphorically used the concept to describe the feeling one should get when experiencing any great literature.
A recent study of brain activation patterns using Positron Emission Tomography (PET) give some support to the experience of a small death:
- "To some degree, the present results seem to be in accordance with this notion, because female orgasm is associated with decreased blood flow in the orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain that is crucial for behavioural control."
The term "la petite mort" or "the small death" does not always apply to sexual experiences. It can also be used when some undesired thing has happened to a person and has affected them so much that "a part of them dies inside". A literary example of this is found in Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles when he uses the phrase to describe how Tess feels after she comes across a particularly gruesome omen and meeting with her own rapist:
- "She felt the petite mort at this unexpectedly gruesome information, and left the solitary man behind her."
'La petite mort' has been referenced in other art forms as well. In 1993 Jake and Dinos Chapman created a piece called "Little Death Machine (Castrated)". The sculpture is part of an installation at the Tate Britain gallery in London, which explores some of the overtly sexual views of the Surrealist movement. Surrealists such as Salvador Dali explored the links between sex and death through their art.
In the 1973 musical A Little Night Music is a song entitled "Every Day a Little Death", written by Stephen Sondheim.
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