DISCURSIVE BODIES: The Corpses of
Georges Bataille's The Blue of
Noon
...[E]roticism which is a fusion, which shifts interest
away from and beyond the person and his limits, is nevertheless expressed
by an object. We are faced with the paradox of an object which implies
the abolition of the limits of all objects, of an erotic object.
Bataille, Eroticism,
p. 130
PREFACE
In
the middle of the night, the narrator enters his mother's bedroom, removes
his pajamas and masturbates in front of her corpse. Yet it was the author
too, who was crying at the foot of his mother's deathbed, the bed where
two years earlier he held an orgy on his thirty-first birthday. The
life-giving lifeless body, or the bodies intertwined in lovemaking.
Grieving alone in thick silence, the final incarnation of physical origin
revolves from its intimate accumulation of memories into the fixed non-presence
of death. Fixate on an object: the bed is exploding with memories. It
becomes the tangible resonance between an erotic fever dream and the
terrorizing distress of death's physical form; but more importantly,
it remains steadily approachable, unlike the corpse its metaphor supplants.
The bed becomes the means for a possible transgression of death. Arousal
usurps grief and allows the narrator the stimulating force necessary
to himself become corpse-like.
[1]
INTRODUCTION
Corpses
are the things of nightmares, figures that vibrate perpetually with
the deafening echo of the last breath of presence. Georges Bataille's
[2]
1935 novel The Blue of Noon
is inundated with literal and metaphorical descriptions of corpses,
which are used to convey the narrator's self-ravaging tides of fear
and desire. Simultaneously, the novel is interjected with strangely
removed (despite the narrator's physical proximity) observations of
the political events leading up to World War II. When viewed in the
context of its author's biography and the period in which it was written,
the disjointed poetic narrative that it unfurls is both personal and
prolific.
[3]
Like
all of Bataille's narrative works, The Blue of Noon is in part a self-mediated biography, told through
the thinly veiled voice of his male narrator Henri Troppmann. Although
the implications will not be thoroughly explored here, the question
of what requisites lend momentum to societies transgressions looms darkly
in the background. Death exposes a very particular, and perhaps a penultimate,
chaos; to surpass tears with momentary satiation does not escape comprehension.
I would like to use specific passages from The Blue of Noon to discuss Bataille's personal and authorial transgression
of the Impossible, and more precisely to study his use of corpses as
signifiers for this exploration of threshold and how to implement language
in describing this struggle. From his notions on expenditure, to the
death of philosophy, Bataille waged a war on limits. Before aging into
the figure we study here, Bataille was a young adult on the path to
becoming a monk.
[4]
Between
the years 1920-1924, Georges Bataille's belief system underwent a dramatic
shift. A series of encounters during this period helped set into motion
a dizzying struggle with paradox Bataille attempted to both define and
destroy for the duration of his life. Small cracks had begun to destabilize
the foundation of a devout Catholicism he had presumably taken up as
a means of insulating himself from the madness of his childhood; but
it wasn't until his initial readings of Nietzsche that he felt deeply
confounded by an intellectual choice in obsessive pursuits. His reaction
to Nietzsche was in fact so provocative, that his first response was
to reject the material. Reflecting years later on this moment, Bataille
stated, "It is natural for a man encountering the destiny which
belongs to him to experience an initial moment of recoil."
[5]
The terror of his adolescence crashed over him for
a second (and certainly not the last) time, but unlike his self-enclosing
escape into religion, he chose to pursue this new and unnerving opening
before him. By yielding to the Death of God and the laughing whilst
peering into the void, transgression became his anti-idealistic ideal
for living, signifying the end of an upright value system, in which
all subjects are interchangeable and every structure is offered up for
transmutable inversion. In his personal life, this allowed for his most
debased desires to be structured accordingly; the brothel would become
his church, and every person, from himself, to his mother, to his lovers
(prostitutes, wives, and mistresses alike) was ultimately, a corpse.
Bataille's association of human flesh to an ever-present mortality may
be a holdover from his years of monistic study, but it also stems from
childhood memories of his blind, syphilitic father, who deteriorated
progressively into madness until his death. Bataille claims to have
been in love with his father until the age of fourteen. At the onset
of the new self-consciousness of puberty this adoration shifted to a
deep hate.
[6]
By focusing on the movement of shifting, my investigation
of The Blue of Noon begins:
with love and hate, desire and repulsion, the nakedness of flesh and
the nudity of death.
PART
ONE
I know.
I'm going to die in disgraceful circumstances. Today, I am overjoyed
at being an object of horror and repugnance to the one being whom I
am bound to. My desire? Whatever worst things can happen to a man who
will scoff at them. The blank head in which "I" am has become
so frightened and greedy that only my death could satisfy it.
Bataille, BN,
p. 23
Part
One of The Blue of Noon
is two pages in length, typeset (almost) entirely in italics, and it's
opening sentences read as if it were penned by Bataille's interpretation
of his father's hand. In some ways, Troppmann's voice is formed by the
alienated anguish of an adolescent Bataille playing ventriloquist. Bataille
as the still-scorned adult creates what he deems to have been his father's
internal dialogue and injects it with his own resentments. Keep in mind
that Bataille was fathered by a man already blind from syphilis. Bataille
recalls (fictively?) readying his father's bedpan, watching "those
huge eyes [that] went almost entirely blank when he pissed."
[7]
Perhaps, as a young child, this specialized position
of secondary caregiver allowed him to both love his father (with pity
due to his total dependency, or without, simply because the strangeness
was captivating) and abnormally recast his overwhelmed mother as his
competitor. All of this apparently changed as Bataille became a teenager,
when maybe for the first time social consciousness inflicted him with
a nauseating realization that his family life was far from typical.
Although there is no account of an explicit event that facilitated this
change, his father would forever more be recalled as that "object
of horror and repugnance" that Bataille's narrator Troppmann perpetually
attempts to dominate in The Blue of Noon. A frightened, racing "I," waiting for death in the middle
of this figurative night. One afternoon, while walking in a city "that
looked like the setting for a tragedy," the narrator passes a gravesite,
extending an "ironic invitation" to its owner. In the middle
of the night Troppmann comes face to face with this dead man, the "Commendatore"
(notably the only word in all of Part One not in italics). This figure
of authority confronts Troppmann in the same manner in which Bataille
is menaced by the dead eyes of his father.
Facing
him, I started to tremble. Facing him, I became derelict. Next to me
lay the second victim. The utter repugnance on her lips made them resemble
the lips of a certain dead woman. From them dribbled something more
dreadful than blood. Since that day, I have been doomed to solitude
that I reject and no longer have the heart to endure. However, to renew
the invitation, one shout is all I need; and if I could trust my blind
anger, this time it wouldn't be me who exited, but the old man's corpse.
Bataille, BN,
p. 24
His mother (or is it Dorthea?), the other victim of
his father's illness (via Bataille's conferral of contempt), lays beside
Bataille in this family grave; but sympathy for this dead woman (or
is it just Dorthea with ejaculate on her lips) will be replaced with
repulsion in "blind anger," when the narrator
realizes that she has copulated with his father. A slightly altered
excerpt of this novel's opening passage appears in Bataille's Inner
Experience, published in
1943, but which he dates at its conclusion as August 1934. In this version
the last phrase of the paragraph is replaced with:
Yet I have only a cry to repeat the invitation andif
I believe my angerit would no longer be me, it would be the shadow
of the old man who would go away.
Bataille, Inner Experience,
p. 79
Consider
the variations in these two versions in terms of diffrence: how does one read the slippage of meaning that is
the space between rewording, word choice, and ordering? I trust, no I believe that this description calls for a specific type of anger, it is blind
like Bataille's father, or rather the anger recalls with its modification
the self-trauma induced by Bataille's recognition of all the tangents
his father's blindness illuminated. The choice of words lays the foundation
for a hyper-personalized value system, as their placement becomes potential
inclusion or exclusion for any reader outside of their author. Despite
this phrase's explicitness made intentionally (paradoxically) ambiguous,
one can make out how even as a corpse the old man still casts a shadow
of negatively charged influence over Bataille. The perpetually hovering,
disfigured father figure Bataille is wishing would finally exit, would finally go away.
Shadows and solid objects, corpses and living flesh. Bataille poignantly
fumbles with dissonance between phrases, allowing this potential of
signification to vibrate stiffly within certain fields of meaning while
one may simultaneously ride out into infinity on their reverberations.
"We do not have access to a thing or a state, but only to coming.
We have access to an access." (Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular
Plural, p. 15) This is the standstill of philosophical discourse
that Bataille's narrative inhabits. One may begin a dialogue with a
statement, but the choice of composition in the first utterance to the
idea reworked to the nth degree, offer nothing more than an opening.
These phrases will never allow a direct, experiential contact with that
which is being described. If one is willing to take this (at the least)
into a peripheral consideration, than one may begin to unravel the autobiographical
elements ever present in Bataille's fictional
narratives. Troppmann and his object of desire Dorthea are Bataille's
literary attempt at personifying the abstract, disillusioned memory
of his parents with the ironically heroic characteristics he gives to
these main characters. The Blue of Noon
is in part a subconscious homage, a sort of psychological evacuation
of the remembrance of this estranged state of childhood. It is a reaffirmation
of the glory of the initial realization of separateness purchased in
time coming into adulthood. As an adult (Bataille was 38 when he wrote
this novel), Bataille is free to remember his parents as he wishes (in
1935 his father had been dead twenty years, his mother for five), and
so he creates characters that both incorporate and reject (but always
with a disaffected violence) his memories of them and their continued
influence on his life. The act of writing, the story of Genesis: a God
dissatisfied by a world of vegetation and beasts, creates man in his
image, in hopes of rectifying the inadequacy he perceives in his world?
The author makes characters from his dissatisfactions; they are made
in his image (by his interpreted memories for them) and must therefore
also possess a self-conscious will that dooms them to the endless pursuit
of this same unfulfilling coming into the world.
Born
of disreputable pain, the insolence that persists in spite of everything
started growing again: slowly at first, then in a sudden burst that
has blinded and transfigured me with a happiness that defies all reason.
At this moment I am intoxicated with happiness. Drunk with it. I'll
sing and shout it forth at the top of my lungs. In my idiotic heart,
idiocy is singing its head off. I HAVE PREVAILED!
Bataille, BN,
p. 24
Credo
quia absurdum.
[8]
In this last passage from Part One, Bataille is speaking,
all at once, in a sudden burst,
as Bataille, maybe as Troppmann, through the interpreted voice of his
father, as a continuation of the Father. Through this polymorphous voice,
Bataille allows for an ecstatic accessing of the condition humaine.
Man is blinded by his attempts (in project or science) to prevail against
nature (death and sex) .
[9]
It is only through his blindness, his idiocy, that man can congratulate himself for adhering to
the order of law. Resistance to this ordering is futile, as vain as
the construction of order itself is. If one is not aware of this constructed
illusion, if one does celebrate it "with a happiness that defies
all reason," then one seals his conception of the world within
the closed lines erected through the trial and error of those devoted
to the project of preservation. In this passage, the blindness being
described is two-fold; on the first order, it exists as a rejection
of nature that privileges order and project; on the second, it is seeing
the first order through the blurred focus of transgression.
Through
drunkenness, sexuality, and other expenditures of energy categorized
as being consumptive and non-productive, the characters of Bataille's
narrative seem to aspire to a constant state of transgression.
[10]
From the beginning to the end of the novel their
actions attest to this (in the Introduction of the novel Troppmann and
Dirty retreat very drunkenly to a prestigious hotel, where Dirty proceeds
to vomit and shit in the presence of an elevator attendant and a maid).
More importantly, Bataille's use of language in The Blue of Noon
is a rejection of an explicit
subjectivity, which allows him to go beyond simply describing his characters
acts of transgression, and in turn, participate in an authorial transgression
of his own. Bataille is the author of the narrative, but the characters
he constructs are woven from his interpretation of the autobiographies
of multiple subjects. His narrator is speaking in a perpetual out of
body experience, like someone who is dead, or watching his life unfold
with a conscious disregard for the consequences. Troppmann knows he
is already already a corpse and lives his life accordingly. By endowing
Troppmann with the split consciousness of his own traumas, and allowing
his narrator to slip through past, present and dream states with equal
ardor, Bataille creates a fragmented portrait of a man who is enlivened
by knowing he is surrounded by an all consuming death. Bataille writes,
"I will never forget what connects the violent and the marvelous
to the will to open one's eyes, to face what is happening, what is.
[11]
"Several
days ago (not in any nightmare but in fact)..." Troppmann came
to a city "that looked like the setting for a tragedy." "One
evening," he watches, "two old pederasts twirling as they
danced (not in any dream, but in fact)."
"That afternoon" he had passed by a grave. "In
the middle of the night" Troppmann is in his room, he comes face
to face with authority, the Commendatore; an old man, a ghost or his
corpse.
[12]
What is happening
to Bataille's narrator? The
emphatic emphasis of chronology and the insistence that this all takes
place "in fact", only works to heighten the reader's perception
of the author's hand mutilating the paper before him. This action, the
writing, is a dis-remembering, a dismemberment; a purification of self
and chronology that tears Troppman with the continuous anguish of death.
[13]
Bataille states, "[Man] becomes aware that he
tears himself, not something exterior that resists him."
[14]
INTERMISSION
[N]ot
under the cover of this or that sly, unconscious perversion, a shameful
accomplice to its opposite (the dignity/shame pair is pulverized forever),
but in a redoubled tearing where thought intervenes as the trace of
the tear itself... Now this tear cannot be thought (written) unless
we deliberately associate jouissance
and horror... Eroticism is irreducible contradiction... Prohibition
and transgression in fact are not 'identical' (no more than jouissance and horror), but related through a contradictory redoubling:
the prohibition is never 'eliminated', never definitively transgressed. Philippe
Sollers, The Roof: Essay in Systematic Reading, p. 67
With a tear that starts to pull at the stitches of
horror and ends in an open-mouthed jouissance, we return again to the scene that began this text.
...I
woke up around three in the morning. I thought I'd go into the room
where the corpse was. I was terrified, but for all my quivering I kept
standing there in front of that corpse. Finally I took off my pajamas.
Bataille, BN,
p. 38
PART
TWO
In
Part Two of The Blue of Noon we
are made aware that the erotic object, the one that keeps resurfacing in this narrative, is a corpse. The walking
dead Commendatore and his second victim from Part One both reappear
in Troppmann's visions of Dirty. A son, Troppmann, is masturbating in
front of a corpse, his mother's. In fits of nervous compulsion or recounted
in cathartic outpourings, he makes mention of this incidence several
times, both in passing inner-dialogues and directly to other women (notably
the story is never related to any of the male characters in the narrative).
In the first instance he describes the corpse as belonging to a woman,
not beautiful but "shriveled" (to his friend Lazare, p. 38);
in another he admits it was his mother (to his lover Xenie, p.76). Dirty
seems all too aware and tried by the symptoms; by the middle of the
first page of Part Two, the reader learns that Dirty has left Troppmann.
..."[Dirty]
loved me, but towards the end she used to look at me stupidly, with
an evasive, even bitter smile. She was aroused by me, she aroused me,
but all we managed to do was nauseate one another. Everything became
impossible. I felt done for. At times like that all I could think about
was jumping in front of a train..." I paused, then went on. "It
always left this taste of corpses" Bataille, BN, p. 35
Impotence,
a feigned desire to suicide, an impossible arousal that leaves the taste of corpses. This excerpt comes from the beginning of Troppmann's
conversation with his friend Lazare about his sexual difficulties with
Dirty. He tells Lazare, as a provocation, that he believes the possible
cause of this impotence to stem from his necrophilic desires. He then
recounts for her the story of masturbating in front of an unspecified
dead woman. Lazare remains steadfastly unfazed and responds by suggesting
that Dirty could have played the part of dead woman in order to stimulate
him. Despite Dirty being corpse-like just prior to their separation
(she is very ill and Troppmann describes her as being shockingly pale
and thin), Troppmann is frustratingly aware that the erotic game they
play revolves around her defiance. Eroticism is irreducible contradiction
(Sollers, p. 67). For reasons unspoken by Dirty and exhaustive to Troppmann,
a silent contempt announces the forthcoming split: "We'd reached
a point where anyone wandering in and seeing us would have assumed there
was a corpse in the room. We came and went without uttering a word."
(BN, p. 40) Troppmann's life continues, more or less painfully,
without Dirty, wandering drunkenly through the streets of Paris where
he eventually meets a girl named Xenie. She is described as "a
girl with too much money at loose ends" (BN, p. 50) and later she too assumes "the appearance
of a dead woman" (BN, p. 85). It is to her that Troppmann tells a more complete version of
his story:
"Did
you know I have a perverted liking for corpse?"... I was laughing.
I was going to tell her the same thing I told Lazare. But this time
things were stranger... "When my mother died" (I felt too
weak to go on. It abruptly came back to me: with Lazare, I had been
afraid of saying "my mother". Out of shame I said "an
elderly woman.")
Bataille, BN,
p. 76
With
Lazare he did not say it was his mother; but when he recounts the episode
for the second time, to Xenie, he does so in full detail. Troppmann
is portrayed as being partially uncomfortable with his actions in the
story, but he tells it on the first order to unnerve himself and his
listeners. The narrator knows that "the prohibition is never 'eliminated',
never definitively transgressed" (Sollers,
p. 67); but his audience's reaction at least shows the narrator that
he is manipulating these boundaries. Troppmann is experimenting with
his personal history; sometimes leaving out the details he finds shameful,
yet overall aggressively reinforcing how he desires to be perceived.
He wants to reassure himself that he is in control of his going out
of control; say it until the shame wears through to comfortability.
Exploit the restrictions until the boundaries fan out into a murky void,
then wait for the next confrontation. Bataille is obsessed with transgression;
he makes Troppmann obsessed with his brand of transgression. The (impossible)
fact that Troppmann's story is at the same time a firsthand experience
of the author's is something Bataille is emphatically alluding to; first
by giving it priority via constant reiteration in the Blue of Noon, and secondly by referencing it in autobiographical
descriptions.
[15]
Bataille desires to make this narrative a concrete
adjunct to his legacy in order to assure his place within the canon
of author's he admires. This self-conscious positioning can be seen
in the text Bataille wrote a few years after The Blue of Noon,
entitled The Story of Rats
[16]
. The namesake of the story comes from an incident
in the novel where a man orchestrates a very particular scenario in
order to achieve sexual release. The narrative described in this text
comes from the biography of Marcel Proust. Through Troppmann's repeated
telling of this necrophilic incident, Bataille is attempting to perpetuate
some sort of sexual deviation myth for himself, so that he, like Sade
and Proust, will be remembered not only for his literature, but for
his personal strives towards transgression.
Fragmentary
memories, disfigured by distance, recollect in a distorted displacement;
a novel or a dream.
On
the same night that Troppmann meets Xenie, but later, much later, he
is drunk in front of a cafe, brandishing a leather belt at passing women.
He manages to engage a blonde girl in his sadistic play and they reenter
the cafe where they dance together as she holds a doll made of pliable
wax. Without Dirty, Troppmann is spinning in the down and out. Women
become emblematic of this molten rift of jouissance
and horror: the doll of the blonde girl plagues Troppmann in its uncanniness, just as the corpse of his mother is an erotic
object, and his lovers subject
to a perpetually deferred intimacy, symptomatic of the man who is aware
that he tears himself, not something exterior that resists him. Fragments of these visions come together in the following
nightmare, which must be recounted nearly in its entirety to illustrate
all of the connecting points previously discussed:
I recalled what I had just dreamed: on entering a large room, I found
myself in front of a four-poster canopy bed a kind of wheelless
hearse. This bed, or hearse, was surrounded by a certain number of men
and women; the same, apparently, as my companions of the previous evening...
The forth coming entertainment was evidently upsetting and full of outrageous
humor: we were expecting a real corpse to appear. At that point I noticed
a coffin resting in the middle of the four-poster. The plank covering
it disappeared, gliding back as noiselessly as a theatre curtain or
the lid of a chest set; but what was revealed was not horrible. The
corpse was an object of indefinable shape pink wax of dazzling freshness.
The wax recalled the blonde girl's doll whose feet had been cut off.
What could be more delectable? [T]he pink object, which was both disturbing
and appealing, grew considerably larger: it took on the appearance of
a gigantic corpse carved in marble... Personally, I could no longer
tell whether I was supposed to feel anxious or start laughing. It became
clear that if I did start laughing, this corpse of sorts would be nothing
but a sarcastic jest; whereas if I started trembling, it would rush
at me and tear me to pieces... The recumbent corpse turned into a Minerva
in gown and armor, erect and aggressive beneath her helmet... When she
saw me, she realized I was afraid. My fear attracted her... Suddenly
she came down and started rushing at me, twirling her lugubrious weapon
with ever wilder energy. Things were coming to a head. I was paralyzed
with horror. I quickly grasped that, in this dream, Dirty (now both
insane and dead) had assumed the garb and likeness of the Commendatore. In this unrecognizable guise, she was rushing at
me in order to annihilate me. Bataille, The Blue of Noon, p. 55
The
main prop on this stage is a bed, simultaneously seen as a hearse even
before the narrator realizes there is a coffin resting in it. For Bataille
and for Troppmann, the bed is already a signifier of death; the petites
morts of the orgy and the mother's corpse on display. In this dream,
the corpse inside the coffin first takes a form similar to the wax doll
of the blonde girl Troppman had met the night before.
[17]
Delectable, disturbing, appealing... like his lovers,
prostitutes or corpses, all the forms are interchangeable, and desire
is kept at a distance. The corpses final form is Dirty as Minerva, insane
and dead, and dressed as the Commendatore (i.e. the impotent
father). The fear that the narrator is capable of moving through by
restructuring it as erotic desire belongs to the mother; the fear that
paralyzes him and prevents him from forming intimacy with his lovers
belongs to the father. For Troppmann, Dirty is the only character to
inhabit both positions at once. She is the "redoubled tearing [that]
intervenes as the trace of the tear itself" (Sollers). She senses
his vulnerability (...she realized I was afraid),
and she is sexually activated by it (...she came down and started
rushing at me, twirling her lugubrious weapon with ever wilder energy). The impact of her presence, that incites horror
against the backdrop of an overwhelmed jouissance, is how the narrator
envisions his death; Dirty is the
means for Troppman's transgressions.
CONCLUSION
[Transgression]
serves as a glorification of the nature it excludes: the limit opens
violently on to the limitless, finds itself suddenly carried away by
the content it had rejected and fulfilled by this alien plentitude which
invades it to the core of its being. Michael
Foucault, Preface to Transgression,
p. 28
Dirty
is a corpse on a pedestal, her character the continuous obsession of
the narrator that propels his movement through the events in The
Blue of Noon. Troppmann fixates on her as limit, and in some dazed
actuality she is the connector of all the diverse elements of this narrative.
The corpse of the mother is just a shield used to lend an air of self-control
to the narrator, whereas Dirty disarms him completely. She exposes his
weaknesses and imparts the greatest sense of mortality. The body is
a confrontation: the corpse is already useless, it can be manipulated
for effect; even in her death-like state, Dirty remains a steadfast
manifestation of threshold no author can transgress.
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[1]
"[I]n masturbation there is nothing but loss.
There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of certain
force, and nor return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse... The
self becomes emptier and emptier, till it is almost a nullus, a nothingness."
D.H. Lawrence in Obscenity and Pornography in David Bennet p. 179-80.
[2]
Born in Billom, France on September 10, 1897; died
July 8, 1962 in Paris.
[3]
According to Michel Foucault, Bataille uses an extreme
form of language: "The sovereignty of these experiences must
surely be recognized some day, and we must try to assimilate them:
not to reveal their truth--- a ridiculous pretension with respect
to words that form our limits--- but to serve as a basis for finally
liberating our language." in A Preface to Transgression, p. 30.
[4]
Bataille's Catholicism coincided with the German invasion
of his hometown of Rheims, which spurred he and his mother to relocate
and abandon his syphilitic, dying father in their home with only a
nurse to care for him.
[5]
Notes from Guilty in O.C. V p. 505 in Surya p. 53.
[6]
In a fit of madness, Bataille's father shouted "Doctor,
let me know when you're done fucking my wife!" (Surya. p. 10).
Witnessing the father's enraged betrayal of his primary caregivers
at this point in Bataille's life make for quite a coming of age revelation.
[7]
Surya, p. 7, excerpt from The Story of the Eye p. 72.
[8]
"I believe because it is absurd," from Quintus Septimius Florens Tertullianus, or Tertullian, a church
leader and prolific author of Early Christianity who notably introduced
the word Trinity into the Christian vocabulary.
[9]
"Moral isolation means that all the brakes are
off; it shows what spending can really mean. The man who admits the
value of other people necessarily imposes limits upon himself. Respect
for others hinders him and prevents him from measuring the fullest
extent of the only aspiration he has that does not bow to his desire
to increase his moral and material resources. Blindness due to respect
for others happens every day; in the ordinary way we make do with
rapid incursions into the world of sexual truths and then openly give
them the lie the rest of the time." Bataille, Eroticism, p. 171.
[10]
"In excess of the negativity that transforms
the human void into human subjectivity, there is an experience of
nothingness that prevents transgression turning into dialectical negation. This fissure that constitutes the sexuality
that circulates it, throwing up the violent images that illuminate
its darkness, opens up the negativity characteristic of action, work
and self-consciousness to a negativity that risks itself absolutely,
a negativity that, in its transgression of limits, is consumptive,
non-productive, self-destructive, hurling itself back into the void
from whence it came." Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille:
A Critical Reader, p. 4
[11]
As quoted by Philippe Sollers in The Roof: Essay
in Systematic Reading,
p. 66.
[12]
The excerpts are taken from the following passage:
"Several days ago (not in any nightmare, but in fact), I came
to a city that looked like the setting for a tragedy. One evening
I mention this only to laugh more cheerlessly I was not alone as
I drunkenly watched two old pederasts twirling as they danced (not
in any dream but in fact.) In the middle of the night the
Commendatore entered my room. That afternoon, as I was passing
his grave, pride had incited me to extend him an ironic invitation.
His unexpected arrival appalled me." Bataille,
The Blue of Noon, p. 22-23. Note the parentheses and their adjacent
punctuation.
[13]
"Death, if that is what we want to call this
non-actuality, is of all things the most dreadful, and to hold fast
what is dead requires the greatest strength. Lacking strength, Beauty
hates the Understanding for asking of her what it cannot do. But the
life of Spirit is not the life that shrinks from death and keeps itself
untouched by devastation, but rather maintains itself in it. It wins
its truth only when, in utter dismemberment, it finds itself."
Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 19. [14] Eroticism, p. 39 [15] "I slept badly and recalled that two years earlier during my mother's absence I abandoned myself to a drawn-out orgy in this room and in this bed which was serving as the support for the corpse. This orgy in the maternal bed took place by chance on the night of my birthday: the obscene postures of my accomplices and my ecstatic movements in the midst of them were interposed between the birth which had given life to me and the dead woman for whom I experienced a desperate love which was expressed on several occasions by terrible absurd sobs. The extreme sensual pleasure of my memories led me into the orgiastic bedroom to masturbate passionately as I looked at the corpse." Bataille, Ouvres compltes II, p. 130.
[16]
Les Editions de Minuit, 1947.
[17]
It is interesting to note the special attention paid
to feet in this chapter, itself entitled Motherly Feet. The wax doll of the blonde woman has its feet cut
off, as does the second vision of the nightmare corpse: "[The
legs] had no feet they were the long, gnarled stumps of a horse's
legs." Bataille, BN, p. 56. |