This provocative book re-conceives the erotic and its imaginative manifestations as an aesthetic ultimately driven by the disruption of desire. Critical, philosophical, and erotic texts construct a framework for understanding the aesthetics of eroticism including a «resisting nude» grounded in a theory of absence and the psychosocial dynamic of physical and mental surveillance. Resisting Nudities offers a necessary link between the poetry of jouissance and the revolt of body and mind intrinsic to the erotic, at a key moment in our contemporary cultural landscape. Written through a poetic lens, it is a creative new analysis of what George Bataille called the most intense of human moments.