Trevor,
It will take me some time to digest your article on Barthes' piece on Bataille's Story of the Eye (full text)
I haven't read too much Barthes as I found him too literary, too structuralist and way too formalist. He also said in 'The Photographic Message' (printed in Image-Music-Text) that the photographic image was "a message without a code". (p.17) In other words, photography is a transparent window on the world which readers then enwrap in a mesh of interpretations. Helmut Newton's body of work shows the strangeness of that view. The path of photography has been marked by a threefold relationship between the press and museums/art galleries and fashion/advertising. Photographs are just as interpretative as other visual arts, such as painting and drawing.
Whilst I digest your article on Barthes I want to briefly pick up on Bataille's On Nietzsche that I'd left off here. That last post finished with considering the last part of section one.
Now to consider section 2 of On Nietzsche which Bataille entitled Summit and Decline. It suggests a more theoretical consideration than section one, which was more about Bataille's inner experience. In his brief synopsis of section two Bataille says:
"The questions I want to raise deal with good and evil in reference to being or beings. ..there is the possibility that all morality might rest on equivocation and derives from shifts".
What does that mean? Bataille gives some indication by turning it inside out. He says:
"On the contrary, good relates to having contempt for the interest of beings in themselves....evil would be the existence of individuals --insofar as this implies their separation."
Bataille says that:
"Reconciliation between these conflicting forms seems simple: good would the interest of others."
Hence morality depends on equivocation and derives from shifts.
That's Bataille's overview of section two of On Nietzsche. It is hard to get much sense of what is going on. You can sense Nietzche in the backgroud with the genealogy of morality, the going beyond good and bad, and the critique of individual morality. So is Hegel, with Bataille's dialectical talk about opposition, shifts, reconciliation.
Here is my guess. The philosophical background to Bataille is Kant. Curtis Bowman gives a good description of Kant's philosophy. He says that Kant advocates the idea that we should become autonomous individuals who freely investigate the world in and around us without appeal to external authorities (whether they be human or divine). For Kant we become individuals who live freely by subjecting ourselves to the moral laws of our own creation.
Kant held that we are beings whose immeasurable value and dignity lies in our innate capacity for freedom of thought and action; that we are free beings who strive for autonomy. Autonomy as an achievement means that we are able to choose and set ends for ourselves and to develop the appropriate means to those ends. Being free but not autonomous is a condition Kant called heteronomous.
Our task is to become enlightened individuals who are truly autonomous, who choose and set ends for themselves and who develop the appropriate means to those ends. We are to do this in a way which respects the freedom of others, and so we are to act in ways that others can rationally consent to, thereby maximizing the amount of freedom in the world. As Kant sometimes puts it, we are always to treat others as ends and never merely as means as does instrumental reason.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at February 7, 2004 11:22 PM | TrackBack