By playing with desires, and people are nodal points, (letters and genders, but not names or identities), Bataille explores areas of desire and loss, sculpting a body of agony. This agony always finds release however, when desire is locked away and pulled apart from itself so as to be inarticulate. He manages to find a way to twist it a bit further, so that each node knows another by dominance, servitude and love. These middling complexities are glimpses of the intimacy each knew another by, so that their absence was in itself a union. It is impossible that we live, as organisms, as differences in consciousness and configuration can recognize each other and become adapted to one another's presence that without them, we are nothing but less than ourselves. This is also not to say how their relationships can affect us too, so that our sense of self is our sense of another -- a very specific other.