Trevor I do hope your article on Catherine Breillat's film For My Sister gets published in Studies in French Cinema.
Does it matter what the academic reviewers thought about your article in terms of whether Bataille and Klossowski were or weren't surrealists.The journal, ie., Studies in French Cinema, is closed to the public domain and the intellectual commons of civil society. It is for experts to talk to one another behind closed doors about their scholarly investigations. Nothing in the journal is online. Same for the editor's homepages. There is nothing online over at Susan Hayward's homepage. Same with Phil Powrie the other editor.
There is a need to probe the issues raised by, but never explored in this review. There is a crossover between literature, film and philosophy that recalls the France of the 1930s.
What can I infer from the above closure? That these nook dwelling scholars are not interested in facilitating a broader online conversation about French culture. In contrast, Michael over at Two Blowhards is, with his brief discussion of Catherine Breillat's films. But again its cinephile responses not philosophy and so the radicality of experience is not explored in depth.
I'm not sure about Bataille and surrealism. I do not know enough about surrealism. Did not Andre Breton recoil from Bataille's emphasis on the impure: animality, dirt, excrement, ruptured eyes, rotten suns? He saw it as unreason replacing reason. Did not Breton also reject Bataille's attempts to reason about what is unreasonable? Breton, from what I can gather, did not accept Bataille's thesis of the interpenetration of reason and animality. I could not find Breton's Second Surrealist Manifesto online to check out his criticisms of Bataille.
Nor am I sure about the seeking self-dissolution. What does that mean? The Impure? Perversion? Sacrifice? Orgasm? Death? Ecstasy? Excess? Visions?
From what I can gather Bataille accepts Nietzsche's claim that God is Dead and then argues that this nihilistic void leads to a world of parody, burlesque, perverse and morbid sexuality, stinking decomposition, destruction, unharnessed violence, sacrifical violence, and the destabilization of signification.
Is this a surreal world? A world of parody? Once God is dead we live in a surrealist world? A headless world of nihilistic emptiness? Is that the philosophical argument?
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at September 21, 2003 01:18 PM | TrackBack