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NOTES OF READING ON GEORGES BATAILLE[1]
By Boyan Manchev
The critical energy of Bataille’s philosophical and literary work aims at something brutally radical: the rejection of meaning transposition[2]. Hence Bataille’s hostility toward the image when it is thought as a figurative, allegorical image, the image of the Incarnation. And yet, Bataille’s project was paradoxically also a return to an archaic idea of the sacred which he thought had been banished from Christian religion along with its proper manifestations – eroticism, orgy, and sacrifice. Through them man, a discontinued individual, is offered an opportunity to get back to the sacred, to the continuity of being[3]. This further accounts for Bataille’s aversion to the incarnational symbolization in the Christian doctrine of transubstantiation which is there to compensate for the absence of real sacrifice, violence, bloodshed, excess.
Therefore, the infamous scene of desecration which takes place in the final chapter of Story of the Eye – and which I want to focus on – cannot be read merely as an act of transgression and sacrilege, i.e., a kind of supreme anti-religious gesture. What is at stake for Bataille here is rather the unmasking of the anti-sacred, in his view discontinued, transcendence of Christianity, and its final abolition via a transgression that is at the same time a regression to the virulent archaic sacred. The scene then, in which a rape, the murder of a priest, and a profanation of the Eucharist takes place, should not be analyzed in negative terms as a sacrilege but rather as a positive and total enactment of the sacred. It regresses to the brutal, material, real sacrifice; it returns to the Eucharist its material sacrificial literalism through a monstrous regressive transgression. In the penetralia of the Christian symbolism and the sacramental allegory – on the very altar of the cult, Bataille spreads the epidemic of sacrifice and death, reenacts the primal scene, the state of feeling in touch with the continuity of being. The attempt to dissolve in this continuity cannot be interpreted as a yearning for transcendence in accord with religious mysticism insofar as Bataille’s continuity pertains to the organic materiality of living beings, to the self-effacement into an acephalous idealess flesh.
* * *
Bataille’s aim is to erase all distances, to cancel out the very transcendence by sucking it into the body – instead of trying to fill in the void that God’s fall from the realm of transcendence has opened. The excess, the central and obsessional category of Bataille, enacted also by his conceptual personages, can be considered a disintegration of and, necessarily, also a dissolution in the flesh. Hence the persistent recurrence of the dismemberment which must accordingly be conceived of as an attempt at producing the body as such: the formless, orgiastic body of pure immanence. Against the normative body of the form-economy, which is the object of the surgical dismemberment, Bataille sets the excessive orgiastic body, the body of archaic Dionysian sparagmos: the body as flesh, dysfunctional, inoperative and, by extension, organless. So the dismemberment, which is a kind of orgiastic surgery, serves as a technique for becoming this primary body, this acephal.
That is why, while erasing the allegorical image and dismembering the incarnational body as symbolical image of the Spirit, Bataille is at the same time obsessed with the visual: with sight and image. On the one hand, vision is negatively present in Bataille’s fixation on the loss of sight – a leitmotif in his work (often related to the traumatic memory of his father). On the other, the theme emerges in Bataille’s idea of a supreme sight through the pineal eye which refers back to Descartes (this eye stares right into the sun from its position at the crown of the head): a vertical gaze as opposed to the horizontal one[4]. Undoubtedly, there is a paradoxical relation between the figure of the pineal eye and the formless figure of the acephal. In this way Bataille not only denigrates sight as according to Martin Jay’s interpretation[5]; rather, he opposes two kinds of sight just as he differentiates between two bodies and two types of images. But then, isn’t this an overdetermination through the metaphysics of presence to which Bataille expressly objects[6]? Just as the continuity of being could be considered yet another version of the metaphysical figure of sovereign life, so the supreme pineal sight seems quite close to the inner sight of the mind with its metaphysical image-ideas and, by extension, close to the whole indefatigable train of ocular-centric metaphysics from Plato’s idea (i.e., eidos, which means image, face) to Surrealism. Yet, Bataille does manage a radical subversion of metaphysics from its very inside. His metaphysics, if metaphysics it be, is paradoxical: a metaphysics of the flesh. The immanence of the body absorbs and thus annihilates the ontotheological transcendence. By the same token, Bataille’s sun which returns the gaze of the pineal eye is no longer Plato’s Good, the idea of ideas, but pure materiality, i.e., pure impurity (the title of a famous work by Bataille, The Solar Anus, is revealing in this respect). The obscene is the name of the material. Following the etymology of the obscene proposed by Varro, namely ob-scaena, i.e., belonging to the theater, we could say that the obscene is the scene of the flesh.
* * *
In the wake of the differentiation between the two types of body as well as the two types of image, Bataille’s major paradox emerges: the paradox of the object. How is the problematic alliance between the formless and the image possible? In the first place, this paradox has to do with the formless community and therefore needs to be considered in the context of Bataille’s anthropological ideas. They are based on the distinction between two worlds, the profane vs. the sacred, the world of norms vs. the world of transgressions. By violating the norm through transgression and excess, i.e., through eroticism and aggression, by experiencing death, the discontinued individual fuses with the others into an orgiastic sacrificial community that can attain the continuous being, the sacred. Bataille explicitly defines the sacred orgiastic sacrificial community as “formless”: “I can imagine a community with as loose a form as you will – even formless.”[7] The project of such a formless community is undoubtedly implicated in the concept of the acephal[8]. The paradox ensues from the fact that the violation of a norm is itself part of that norm: indeed, sacrifice and orgy (with its etymological meaning of “sacrament”) are ritual actions. Since the essence of the orgy is inseparable from the erotic as the royal road to the sacred that also crosses the realms of violence and death, Bataille encounters the paradox of the erotic object which by and large can be generalized as the paradox of any object: “eroticism, which is a fusion, a strife to overcome personal being and its limitations, still has to be objectified in something. This is the paradox precisely: we face an object which exemplifies the denial of all borders between all objects – the erotic object.” (The Eroticism).
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This paradoxical status of the formless community and the erotic object is exemplified by the work of Hans Bellmer, one of the artists who were closest to Bataille. The quasi-pornographic illustrations that Bellmer created for the second edition of the Story of the Eye, along with his famous Dolls, can be considered visualization, an inconceivable formless figuration of the Bataillian projects for a community (see figs. 1 and 2). Bellmer’s work moulds the excessive acephalous corpus which transgresses the boundaries of the discontinuous bodies: an orgiastic organics against the functional, or operative, organics. The quasi-pornographic illustrations visualize the former as the state of the community in Bataille’s paradoxical project. Whereas the Dolls tie up with the paradox of the erotic object described above, i.e., the tension between form and formlessness. And still, through the formlessness of their disfigured acephalous figures, the Dolls do relate to the ecstatic community as well.
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J.-A. Boiffard was the artist with whose images Bataille’s short text dedicated to the “anti-concept” of the formless were juxtaposed on the pages of the journal Documents. The objectionable formless images of Boiffard – close-ups of big toes, flies etc. – directly correspond to Bataille’s entries in the famous Critical Vocabulary of Documents.
Significantly, Documents, edited by Carl Einstein, was a journal of ethnology. It marked the development of Bataille’s interests towards anthropology and sociology. In this framework Boiffard’s formless images were very likely influenced by the ethnological interest in the fetish. The fetish is the anthropological evidence of the interrelation between the formless and the sacred. The fetish as a sacred object is not an image, not an anthropomorphic idol. The latter comes into existence only when the divinity gets shared by the whole society, i.e., when the sacred has been universalised[9]. By contrast, the fetish is a particular sacred, a piece of strictly private property, lacking a form that could make it shareable. The fetish can neither be shared nor seen, or else it will blind you. The blinding fetish or fascinus (an amulet in the shape of a phallus) – a formless chthonic form – has given rise to the word “fascination”, i.e., a blind rapture. An image at the edge of the imaginable, a sacrum, an obsessive virtual object.
Bataille is inevitably fascinated by this fetish, this formless, heterogeneous, hypertrophied, unimaginable image that is the paradoxical object as such. The fetish-image is no mere image but an object-image. And the object is inherently disjuncted, marked by a constitutive rupture. The fixation on this impure torn-apart object-image emerges as the purest mode of Bataille’s narrative. It is the only mode that can present continuity through the co-position of all surfaces. In the same move it de-presents the discontinuous and presents (but never re-presents, since the distinction between essential and phenomenal is erased) continuity. The image is monstrous and centauric not only due to its heterology (which Didi-Huberman discovers in Bataille’s formless images[10]) but also because it has no prototype. In this respect its heterology is not a mere montage as in Krauss and Bois’s understanding of Didi-Huberman’s position. The heterology does not bespeak a multiplicitous semiosis or some alternative, rival mimesis. It simply presents the birth of the image out of a condensation in the formless. What now transpires is that the image has never been pre-figured by a prototype – and in this resides the singular daemonic power of the image. The image is not a likeness because it precedes any resemblance, hence it is a pure singularity. It is an event, ‘sacred’ only because of its uniqueness, its absolute indeterminacy and instability, its radically hazardous and unsafe nature.
* * *
Now we can face the in/famous, unimaginable image from the final chapter of Story of the Eye: the image of the eye staring out of the vulva that stands at the very end of its “story”. The tearing out of the eye of the murdered priest is a crucial step on the move beyond or rather the move that will destroy the beyond of transcendence. In this sense, the radical gesture of Simone – the insertion of the eye into her vulva, into the gaping abyss where death and nothingness nest – is inevitable as well as irrevocable. It is performed at the threshold of a radical visibility and radical materialisation. The question that forces itself upon us is: is the torn eye staring from between Simone’s legs an image – or else, the very end of the image?
This appearance of the impossible image in Bataille marks first and foremost the end(ing) of the narrative, the inability of narration to continue after this. The impossible image ruptures the narrative, making any further figuration impossible. The only way for the narrative to persist is to give up unfolding the figure in time and instead to fold together its surfaces at one single point. Thus it can’t produce any figure other than the monstrous – the figure of the eye in the vulva. No longer capable of unfolding in time, the figure is exhibited, exposed as an image, as a frozen crystalline temporality. This de-monstration (from the Latin monstro) of the monster that makes up the totality of the monster’s being pushes the narrative toward its limit and forebodes its end. Bataille’s narrative, just like that of his contemporary across the Atlantic H. P. Lovecraft, is based on the project of an impossible imaging (hence the tautology of the descriptive regime, one that self-destructs and self-parodies in its fixation on detail, on a fragmentary virtual object which disintegrates the whole since this virtual object is not a metonymy, much less an allegory).
So, while trying to realise its impossible project for demonstrating the multi-layered heterosimultaneous monstrous image, the narrative is arrested in the experience of a deictic gesture which is the supreme gesture of de-monstrating the truth. This rupture, this short-lived moment, revelation and catastrophic threshold between the horizontal regime of the narration and the vertical regime of the truth, necessarily comes through as an image. It is literally an image inside the text: a freezing of the narrative movement into an image, a pictura – the eye in Simone’s vulva. It is precisely the narrative’s readiness to work in the regime of truth that makes possible its end(ing): the narrative can reach its limit and stop at its final point by introducing the limitless into the limited – which amounts to the excessive egression of the limited into the limitless, to the erasure of the limit.
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Does Bataille’s Story of the Eye repeat the story of Oedipus’s eye? Or else, is the eye-as-object the most radical antipode to Oedipus’s stabbed eye, since Bataille’s eye is an ideal sphere which can “see” despite the darkness in its abyss – the same as the darkness overwhelming Oedipus? But then again, don’t those two eyes express the same unquenchable yearning, both exalting and obscene, for the sacred?
Oedipus can be conceived of from a Batallian perspective as the perfect figure of art in his readiness to sacrifice himself, to expose himself to risk and danger[11]. Thus, we could understand the centauric eye from the final chapter of Story of the Eye in accord with a Bataillian reading of the Oedipal logic. The eye, then, emerges not only as a symptom or better a materialisation of the sacrificial virulent sacred, but also as an exemplifier of the essence of literature and art which, Bataille maintains, are to be thought of precisely as an enactment of the sacrificial: “In fact literature is born in the wake of the religions as their heir. Sacrifice is a novel, a book of tales with gory illustrations. Or rather a theater spectacle in embryo, a drama reduced to its final episode in which the sacrificial object (animal or human) plays alone but plays to the death” (The Eroticism). For Bataille, then, literature and art are inconceivable unless one is ready to endanger and even sacrifice oneself. That is why Bataille is so attracted to ritual self-mutilation as part of the self-threat in which art originates[12]. Sacrificial in this sense is also the pineal eye which stares into the sun and thus self-destructs: it “opens and offers itself to blindness in a conflagration, in a fever that devours the being or more precisely the head.” Once again, we can see how the acephalous figure and the figure of the pineal eye are interconnected.
If we follow Bataille, we’ll have to understand the concluding image in Story of the Eye – and so art in general – in the light of this sacrificial logic of the sacred. But I’d like to introduce a correction here and thus go beyond Bataille’s orthodox readings. Namely, I maintain that continuity is possible only in the radical singularised discontinuity, i.e., in the image. The image is an immanent split and as such, it is opposed to the sacrifice whose execution depends on contact as a guarantee of the continuity of being. I suggest that we draw a clear-cut line between the religious sacrificial sacred of continuity and the singular immanence of the discontinuous singularity that is impossible except as a rupture.
* * *
 Looking at Andre Mason’s cover for the first edition of Story of the Eye, we see the image of a convergent divergence, i.e., the putting together of the separate virtual fetish-objects (the spread legs, the egg, the eye) via the transversal distances between them in the shape of undulating lines. This convergent divergence alludes to the unimaginability of the final scene in Story of the Eye: an unimaginability that paradoxically is a manifestation of the image par excellence. It exposes the immanent difference, the discontinuous continuity as a distance inherent to the contact (the undulating lines connect the objects on the cover but at the same time emphasize the distance – the distance that inevitably takes place between the gaze and the image).
The eye, stabbed out during the regressive sacrifice, i.e., during the enactment of the project for a sacred community and a sacred orgiastic body, is a sacred but singular image-body. The eye-as-body marks the setting against each other of two bodies and two images: the orgiastic body vs. the theological incarnational body, and the monstrous demonic image without an archetype vs. Plato’s allegorical image-as-model. This double opposition gives rise to two distinct interpretations of Bataille’s figures of the heterologic and the formless. But the disagreement between the two interpretations could be neutralised by taking into account the fact that each has a different focus: thus, the dismemberment of the figurated body, on which Jay and Parret, as well as Krauss and Bois focus, is inseparable from the creation of a new body – the body as heterology and montage from Didi-Huberman’s reading.
Yet, I would add a third perspective from which to consider the formless and thus to redeem it from its negative dependence on form based on the ontological pregivenness of form (as for example in Krauss and Bois for whom the formless is the undoing of a preexistent form, as well as in Parret who defines the formless as anti-form). I read the formless as inseparable from the image – an inseparability which testifies to the simultaneous production of form and matter. In this sense the image is not the abolition of the formless but its condensation, its eruption – so that both the image and the formless are impossible without each other and interdependent for their mutual production/rupture. The continuity and the formlessness of being which Bataille speaks of are connected with, opened by, and only made possible through the fixation in the image. What constitutes the image-object is its originary impossibility. The singular, absolute image manifests itself in this impossibility of representation.
* * *
The attaining of truth should not be considered as the attaining of a preexistent essence but rather as a manifestation, the manifestation of manifestation itself. Or, to avoid the phenomenological jargon, the presentation of presentation itself. Presentation, not re-presentation. Presentation arrests time. How does it arrest it? In an image: an image either of power or of impotence that is a fixation of language beyond which it cannot go on – language facing the Sphinx. The image is the rupture and the truth of narrative. It defies the simple dichotomisation descriptio vs. narratio and is the very essence of the narratio manifested in/through it. In turn, the limit of the image is the point where the image transcends itself in the unimaginable and this transcending, this opening in the tissue of the visible, or of the narration, is the truth of the image.
Thus, truth is co-substantial with the heterosimultaneity of the exposed image-body. The image is always heterosimultaneous and made up of multiple strata – it is a scaly body, an aggregate of surfaces. Truth then is the co-positioning of incompossible surfaces. The friction of such incompossible surfaces like the eyeball and the skin of Simone’s leg in Story of the Eye. It is no wonder that it provokes a yell since it “aborts” the slit between two strata. The slit becomes a surface – a new surface surfaces here and in turn folds in onto itself. This may well be Nancy’s expeausition, with its play on the untranslatable homophony between peau i.e. skin and the syllable “po-” in exposition[13]. The exposition as “skinning” involves the narration’s jumping out of its skin whereby truth is unconcealed as a rupture.
Thus Bataille makes us witness the constitutive paradox of the image: the eye in its very sphericity becomes a surface. The eye staring out of the vagina is the convergent divergence in which depth coincides with surface, and the dark abysmal vagina with the bright eye, i.e., the organ of absorption with the organ of radiation.
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… to have a look also at Courbet’s L’Origine du Monde.
To paint a recumbent female body with spread legs, sinister and threatening, formless because acephalous, as a radical negativity, i.e., God, is the last breath that a degenerate apophatic theology draws, as testified by the allegorical title of the work, L’Origine du Monde. This is the end of the era in which the sacred was profaned, in which art offered a compensatory and substitute sacred through the sanctioned mode of representation. Despite the outward typological similarity between Courbet’s and Bataille’s artistic gestures, the latter, coming 60 years after the former, is utterly incommensurate with it. When Madame Edwarda, the female protagonist in Bataille’s story of the same name, opens her vagina to the narrator saying “Look. I am God”, her radical gesture is directed against the transposition of meaning or symbolisation, i.e., against the mode of representation. Bataille no longer substitutes, no longer places the obscene Thing in the now emptied frame of the sacred but points at, and thus blinds, the sacred directly. Madame Edwarda points at the supreme object: the sacred fetish. Not only does it blind: it also sees, as it becomes evident from Story of the Eye. Continuity is achieved in petrifaction, in the fixation in a radical discontinuity and singularity.
* * *
Thus, what finally transpires is that the image is not an “image” of truth (truth as substance-model-archetype) but is truth itself. Far from being the object of narration and the incarnational image-body cast in a preexistent archetypal model, the image is the very truth of narration. To return to the theological perspective that was my starting point: monotheism, which supports a universal sacred, is born when the divinity takes on an image, as Jean-Pierre Vernant had claimed. Through its absence-presence in the image the divinity presences itself to the community as its own universal. The paradoxical interdependence between the image and the sacred is such not because the essentially unrepresentable divinity must not be represented, but because in truth the image precedes the divinity. The image-body before incarnation is the only possible ‘divine’.
* * *
If the body emerges thus as an event – the point where virtually all spaces and times converge, the locus which “closes” the world (as world, as closing of the opening), then what lies inside beyond the skin is an absolute exteriority. Tearing out the eye so as to make it peep from its slit both inside and out is an attempt to absolutely invert the event: an attempt to turn the skin into an eye. The skin, then, is not the maelstrom that rushes into the grounding umbilical bottom, sweeping along the entire world in the shape of miraculous cataracts. Rather, the skin is the absolute exteriority of the world. If the world gives you(r) existence – and if this is the identifiable miracle-event, then the metamorphosis of Oedipus into Diogenes, who with his own eye in his hand enters himself in order to search for what in turn searches for him, leads to a second miracle-event in which you give the world to itself/its self.
Footnotes:
(2011-12-23)
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