I went to the library, tried to check out books from the other thread, but could not find them. I checked out Story of the eye by Bataille. I did not expect it to be pornography book, though it said it goes beyond pornography. Who recommended it? I bet it was Ian.
I think I recommended another book of Bataille, his
Literature and Evil, but the
Story of the Eye is an incredible work as well. It most definitely is pornographic, and quite extreme in many ways. But tied into his whole rather bizarre, slighty occultist, brand of surrealism. Bataille was a semi-detached member of the surrealists, who broke quite ferociously with André Breton, but continued to pursue his own particular variety of this aesthetic ideology. Such things as ritual sacrifice, cruelty, the pursuit of evil as an end in itself, fascinated him (perhaps a little in the manner of a negative Catholic theologian - whilst not a Catholic or one with any particular knowledge of Catholicism, I imagine this sort of fascination has very deep roots in Catholic thinking - there have been suggestions that much of the mentality and iconography associated with sadomasochism date from the Counter-Reformation, especially with the emphasis on imagining the physical suffering of Christ on the Cross), but that is not to say that he was simply some sort of Satanist. Rather Bataille sought to examine and incorporate the very presence and existence of such forces into more wide-ranging models of human existence and society, articulated most extensively in his major multi-part work
Le Part Maudité (translated into English as
The Accursed Share). Here, remarkably, he brought together theories of both political economy and eroticism into a comprehensive model. In a drastically reduced form, the model he presents could be described as follows: the processes of production and consumption, when all are done, leave a certain surplus in terms of human energies, which can then take various forms. These excess energies can be expended in artistic creation, in non-procreative sexuality, or more darkly in cruelty, war, and the like. It's a compelling theory, I believe, though veers towards mysticism (Bataille's
part maudité is perhaps not so different from Wilhelm Reich's cranky theories of 'Orgone', a type of cosmic energy that is an abstraction of the orgasm, about which he theorised in his late years and rewrote his earlier books to accomodate). Anyhow, very worth reading about and considering.
The Story of the Eye (
L'Histoire de l'Oeuil) is an early work, written before some of Bataille's wider theories were fully formulated, but still anticipates these later concerns. For all its debauchery and cruelty, there are moments when, to me at least, it has a strangely idyllic quality, one that is not predicated upon any sort of evocation of lost worlds. That in itself may be a dangerous implied ideology, but it is certainly fascinating to explore.
I'll be very interested in your thoughts on it (if it doesn't repel you). An interesting interview with various experts which is very illuminating on Bataille's world-view can be found here:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/relig/enc/stories/s281136.htm
