He was an elusive yet central figure that essentially established what was possible or impossible in the wake of the Marquis de Sade. Nietzsche and Sade in one neat package called the eroticization of the death of god. The profane, the sacred and the erotic in a threesome. Roland Barthes asserted that any exploration of pornographic transgression such as in “Story of the Eye” by Georges Bataille, will inevitably involves some form of linguistic transgression. Barthes did imply that Bataille did indeed find the means to accommodate pornographic excess.Bataille was exploring theories on the relation between trauma, pornographic narrative and the human body. Was it an impossible attempt to synthesize and integrate trauma with a narrative form. Certainly the distortion and anguish in the work indicate a valiant effort that can perhaps best be measured as a literary experiment on the spatial organization of text….
The “metaphysician of evil.” Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. For Bataille, the cursed and the degraded was always the more profound; the pure and untouchable is always presented as a something to be peeled and discarded , a perhaps necessary but nevertheless, timid, perhaps cowardly covering up of the most primordial aspect of the sacred.
…Yet Miro probably drew more “dirty pictures” than almost any painter one can think of, at least up until the very recent past. Vulvas litter his canvases of the ’20s, triumphant penises urinate fulsomely, the imagery of copulation is endless, smokers stroll with enormous erections that visually rhyme with their tiny pipes, semen turns to pollen, breast milk fills the sky, and there is an endless genital metaphoric play as hairy labia become mouths that in turn become spiders that in turn become radiant suns that in turn become eyes that in turn become ova….
The sacred of established religion- of elevation and eternity- is therefore only a loss of intensity of the more “genuine” religious tendency- that of the “accursed share” , the share of the moment, the instant that does not and cannot lead outside itself. The truly unconditioned death of god in other words; like St. George burying the slain dragon for many millenniums to come.
…It is, of course, this very process of metaphor–or what Bataille would call “transposition”–that seems to wall these pictures off from Bataille’s base materialism. For if Bataille spoke of the fetishist’s loving the shoe more than any art lover could love a painting, if he asked us to consider staring wide-eyed before the erotic sight of the big toe, this was because he thought of this experience as “without transposition.” His concept of the fetish was more tribal than Freudian; it contained a picture of being compelled to worship a stone or an effigy not as a substitute, but as the real thing.
And yet, as Roland Barthes has shown, Bataille’s own pornographic novel, The Story of the Eye, is itself an extraordinary cycle of metaphor in which “the story” is built up of chains of substitutions either along the shape of the object (eye–testicles–egg–sun) or along its contents (tears–sperm–urine–yolk–rain). And these chains not only produce the action of the novel, they generate its imagery as well, as in the phrase “the urinary liquification of the sky.” ( Rosalind Krauss )
Perhaps Bataille’s most famous text, Story of the Eye is a tale of obsessive sexuality involving rape, necrophilia, coprophilia, fetish objects (particularly eggs and eyeballs), and half a dozen other types of deviance.If Bataille’s novel was an attempt to write that which should not be written – it is his work that introduced the notion of transgression, the violent, ecstatic breaking of ta
that became so important to postmodern thinkers like Michel Foucault and Susan Sontag .Read More:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0268/is_n5_v32/ai_15143622/pg_3/?tag=content;col1
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/bataille.htm
http://www.greylodge.org/occultreview/glor_013/bataille_story_of_eye.pdf
http://www.haro-online.com/movies/georges_batailles_sote.html
http://kaganof.com/kagablog/2008/06/09/georges-bataille-and-the-notion-of-gift/
ADDENDUM:
Story of the Eye, a classic of erotic literature, was written in 1928 under the pseudonym Lord Auch. It told a tale of a young couple, Simone and the narrator, who explore the boundaries of sexual taboos. They play with eggs, milk and all bodily fluids. During a champagne orgy, their friend Marcelle is left in a wardrobe. She becomes traumatized and is taken to a sanatorium. After she is brought back she hangs herself in the same wardrobe. Simone and ‘the Cardinal’, the narrator, escape to Spain, where their sexual fantasies become more blasphemous. “I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.” In one scene of the book the heroine strangles her partner to force sexual arousal on him. Later the Japanese director Nagisa Oshima used similar climax in his ritualistic film In the Realm of the Senses (1976), which was based on an actual criminal case in the 1930s Japan. Story of the Eye has enjoyed a cult status. Most recently it was rediscovered by the Icelandic pop singer Björk Guðdmundsdóttir.
…The notion of the gift in Bataille is closely related to that of sacrifice. Bataille basis his comments on the nature of the gift on the essay by Marcel Mauss, first published as “Essai sur le Don” in 1950 . Marcel Mauss (1872 – 1950) was the literal heir of Emile Durkheim and deeply involved in Durkheim’s project of sociology. While substantially a work of objective anthropology, the impact of the work, as Mauss makes clear in comments in his conclusion, was to be a critique, indeed an alternative vision, to utilitarian visions of capitalism. As Mary Douglas has argued in her foreword to the translation of the essay, “The Essay on the Gift was part of an organized onslaught on contemporary political theory, a plank in the platform against utilitarianism.”
At the heart of the essay lies a critique of anthropologists’ reading of gift-giving as a form of rational economic exchange. He berated anthropologists for imposing on other cultures preconceived models concerning the necessity and universality of economic exchange.
Read More:
http://kaganof.com/kagablog/2008/06/09/georges-bataille-and-the-notion-of-gift/
Thank-you Andrew; and also for tackling such a challenging subject. Best.