To Lacan, this anamorphosis lays bare the transcendental structure of Christian love – and of desire in general. In the chaos of the world, desire is seeking its ultimate object, but that object is put on the very position that allows us to remain blind to the emptiness behind it (the hole behind the mirror in the middle of the painted table). This is the Christian image of the jouissance human desire longs for.

Adrian Ghenie — The Hotel Room II (oil on canvas, 2025)

“Even after psychoanalysis, the contradictory aspects of eroticism appear in some way innumerable; their profundity is religious - it is horrible, it is tragic, it is still inadmissible. Probably all the more so because it is divine”. Georges Bataille in Tears of Eros

From Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace by David Lipsky.