philosophical conversations

Vision#2: the eye & slashing

It is interesting to read Bataille in the light of the previous post on visual culture. In an brief piece called 'Eye' (reprinted in Visions of Excess) he makes mention of the surrealist film by Salvador Dali and Luis Brunel.

The opening scene of this film----Andalusian Dog--- is one of a razor cutting the eye of a young woman:( it's actually a dead cow's eye)

clip

Does that clip represents the violent termination of vision. Blindness? A rejection of the eye as a mirror of nature? A turn to the inner eye as inspired vision/revelation?

In his text Bataille mentions the eye of conscience, the eye of human justice and the eye of the police. These are juxtaposed or montaged-----in order to undercut the traditional privileging of vision in favour of a liberating blindness?

Bataille also wrote a pornographic book called Story of the Eye.
The illustrations were by Hans Bellmer, best known for his life-size pubescent dolls in sexually explicit positions.

I have not read Bataille's book nor have I seen the illustrations done by Bellmer and Masson.

Sontag mentioned Bataille's Story of the Eye in the context of pornography elevated to literature in her essay The Pornographic Imagination, which was reprinted in Styles of Radical Will (1967). There she said "Experiences aren't pornographic only images and representations are." The book was eventually published as literary pornography in in english.

There is a brief account of the text here by Stefan Prince along with some of his paintings. Stefan says the:

"Story of the Eye relates the sexually charged adventures of three adolescents preoccupied with lewd acts and obsessive behaviour. At times soft boiled eggs, milk, a bull's testicles and an eye ball are employed during their sex games and when these games become ill-fated such elements mixed with lightning, rain, piss, gun shots and blood, take on a fantastic effect akin to a surreal roller coaster orgy of sex and death....
...The adventures of the narrator and his girlfriends Simone and Marcelle lead ultimately to Marcelle hanging herself (after they have rescued her from an asylum) and to the remaining pair teaming up for further adventures with an Englishman Sir Edmund. In Spain they witness the gory death of a bullfighter and sexually molest and murder a priest in his church vestry. Ultimately the three set sail from Gibraltar in a purchased yacht "towards new adventures with a crew of Negroes".

Stefan has a painting of that part of the "novella' in which the eye of a garrotted priest is shoved up the anus and vagina of the heroine.
Stefan Prince, The Eye and he quotes a brief passge "in Simone's hairy vagina, I saw the wan blue eye of Marcelle, gazing at me..."

Is this a surrealist pissing or shitting eye?

It devalues the noble eye.

The eye is important in philosophy.

Sitting in the background as it were, sits old Hegel. First, we have Hegel's Master Slave dialectic of mutual recognition and affirmation. This world of intersubjectivity is one in which mutual regard embodies visuality; one situated within a range of sensory and embodied experience. Secondly, we have Hegel and Marx's idea of (the eye of?) reason being able to penetrate the appearances of processes to grasp the dialectical essences behind. Of couse the essential dialectical process---what makes something what it is----are only what appears.

Brunel's slashing razor that slits the eye is part of a surrealist tradition in which eyes are blinded, mutilated, or transfigured:

Albert Giacometti, Suspended Ball, 1930-31

What has happened since Bataille is the relentless suspicion of vision: that suspicion sees vision as a form of power, control and domination. What comes to mind here is Sartre's gaze, which robs the subject of freedom, & Foucault's Panoptican as an architectural embodiment of Sartre's absolute look.

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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at January 29, 2004 06:16 AM | TrackBack