Yesterday I wandered down through the central market to the city. I was in search of some second books on Cicero, Seneca and Montaigne. I had little luck. So I moved onto the avant garde and alternative bookshop Dark Horsey to pick up, and order, some books by Bataille.

The streets were more or less deserted even though it was a glorious sunny day. A few souls walking aimlesssly. Lots of people in the Internet cafe. The bookshops were empty. No singles looking for causal sexual encounters.

Everybody is reading Georges Bataille. That is the word on the avant garde circuit. Not in Anglo-American philosophy departments in regional universities in South Australia I might add. Of course Sydney, being the global city, would say that they are post-Bataille.

On the way home I had planned to have a coffee and glance through The Australian. I wanted to do the urban thing as well as search for hot cultural tips about the intellectual fashions. I wanted to bring junk for code up to speed as an avant garde site. A weblog that continually reinvents itself through constant negation. I was looking for suggestion on how to do this.

But the coffee shop wanted to charge me 50c to read Rupert Murdoch's rag. I gave the coffee a miss and returned home thinking about experimental writing and the academy. I had a glass of wine on the terrace in the late afternoon. Suzanne was down at Victor Harbor.

When I returned to the virtual world I discovered this had came floating through public opinion. I discovered that there are a lot of these kind of Babe sexblogs

UnaBlogger is different. It is beauty as subversion by a warblogger who once desired to be Editor-in-Chief of Slate, and is now everywhere and nowhere.

Cheescake as subversion? I had heard of women politicians being elected to the Italian Parliament through the simple electoral strategy of showing their breasts. Simple and effective. A brothel madam tried to get elected to the SA parliament (the upper house) here in Adelaide in 2002. She played it straight but failed. Pity. The Legislative Council could do with some real life.

For the record I voted for her. I did so on the grounds of decriminalisation of prostititution and occupational health and safety for sex workers). I had a romantic relationship with a Catholic sex worker in Toorak, Melbourne sometime ago. It was after I'd done a stint as conductor on the Melbourne trams to counterbalance being an economist in search of utility. Unlike the acceptance shown here, playing the role of dirty whore in sleazy situations undermined my friends identity, made her feel dirty and a slut and it lead to a fragmentation of her subjectivity. She felt she was becoming schizo. Instead of unblocked free-flowing desire there was a subjectivity in turmoil due to an emotional and sexual degradation from being an erotic plaything of men who abused her.

So can I understand sex as subversion that opens up into creative erotic writing and sexblogs Sex as subversion for the hedonists is the classic alternative to Marxism as there is a lot of raw human experience there.

So what to make of the Unablogger? Can the gesture to the trace of the Unabomber be sustained? Or is it a cheap postmodern play?

We are dealing Blogger here so the archives do not work well. But they work enough to see that there is no deconstruction of public opinion. But I did like this reworking of suburban guerilla. And this one of Tim Blair. Poor junk for code. It does not make the list. What kind of deconstruction can be made of junk for code I wonder. Perhaps something along these lines?

In the end UnaBlogger is all too surfacy and glossy. It does not step into the experiental world of sex and violence. It the lacks the rawness of human experience that blows up the conventions we surround ourselves with to feel safe and secure.

Bataille holds that pain shapes our character. Without pain you are nothing! Pain filled with jouissance that pushes reason, utility, law and language to the limit.

Subversion keeps circulating around with those desiring subjects who often thrive on sexual perversity. I cannot help but think of Bataille and his conception of bourgeois society drowning in sexual secrets and prohibitions and the sacrament being found in the brothels. The sacrament? It is the moment of orgasm rendering the separate and unified self into a physicality that is no longer located in one body.

Bataille transgresses that old sexual duality that still shapes our culture: the Victorian repressive sex interpretation of sexuality and its mirror liberationism that had lingered in the shadows of sexual repression for so long. It opens up sexuality as a fissure in which the experiences are difficult to express in language, and whose excess throws up violent images.

Hence we have a new form of seductive romantic contestation through the drive of sexual desire. That brings us into contact with Bataille.

A friend of mine with a PhD tried to teach Bataille in relation to Catherine Breillat's film Romance at a university in Adelaide. Some students complained. He was an casual teacher. He was fired on the spot for teaching pornography and corrupting the young.

Bataille is explosive.