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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Vision#4: Bataille's Rotten Sun « Previous | |Next »
February 2, 2004

Bataille wrote several more articles that undercut the privileging of vision and the eye that I had noted here. They are 'Rotten Sun', 'The Jesuve' and 'Pineal Eye' (all reprinted in Visions of Excess). The last two articles, which are about an excremental fantasy, will be explored in another post.

In the earlier post I mentioned that this undercutting was part of an anti-Platonic turn in philosophy. The 'Pineal Eye' probably refers back to Rene Descarte's pineal gland, which Descartes argued was the key link between what our physical organs sense (eg. what our eyes see) and what our mind sees. Descartes' texts are full of visual imagery: sight is the noblest of the senses; what the mind sees clearly and distinctly are innate ideas; the valorizing of the fixed gaze of disembodied spectatorial eye; ideas as an image in the eye of the mind; the mind as a camera obscura; the sharp clear light of of the reasoning mind; there is a correspondence between our innate geometrical sense and the geometrical reality of the world of extended matter.

Hence we have the Cartesian perspectival tradition. It is a very pro-vision tradition premised on the sun of reason as the noble and the elevated.

This perspectival tradition is directly challenged by Bataille in the short 'Rotten Sun'. In this fragmentary piece the sun as the summit of elevation is equated with the sudden fall of unheard-of violence. Bataille says:


"The myth of Icarus is particularly expressive from this point of view: it clearly splits the sun into two----the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus's elvation, and the one that melted the wax, causing failure and a screaming fall when Icarus got to close."

Is Bataille endeavouring to bring about the fall of the Cartesian perspectival system through a hammering of the idols (Descartes/ the Enlightenment) now that God is dead?

The above myth illustrates the danger of too much enlightenment (illumination) and hence we have is the delirium of reason. Just as one can be blinded by looking directly into the illuminating sun the extreme point of illuminating reason opens the way to a certain blindness; Hegel's system has a blindness to non-knowledge, to the base materialism of dirt and filth, madness etc. The erotic literary works, such as Story of the Eye, explore this unassimilable base element in terms of obscenity and pornography.

Seeing - theory - cannot grasp its other (shit).

Hence the dethroning the eye in the Story of the Eye where uses images of eggs, testicles and the sun as symbols of the eye. Eggs are thrown into the air and shot at; raw bull testicles are placed into Simone's vagina and cause a brief orgasm; the ripping out of the matador Gratero's eye by a bull; the cutting out of the eye of the priest in the last chapter; the scene in the vestry of the church of Don Juan (the dead priest), where in the darkness Simone takes the enucleated eye of the priest and places it into her vagina.

As Daniel Brown says these images stand for "destroying the nobility of vision and reclaiming the base ecstasy of the dark natural world."

I have come across this passage from the Story of Eye in an artivcle on Bataille and cinema by Don Anderson. The passage highlights the code at work in Bataille's text:


"Upon my asking what the word urinate reminded her [Simone] of, she replied: terminate, the eyes, with a razor, something red, the sun. And egg? A calf’s eye, because of the color of the head (the calf’s head) and also because the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball. The eye, she said, was egg-shaped. She asked me to promise that when we could go outdoors, I would fling eggs into the sunny air and break them with shots from my gun, and when I replied that it was out of the question, she talked on and on, trying to reason me into it."

Don Anderson then says that the narrator then briefly references the author’s own writing and construction of the system:

"She played gaily with words, speaking about broken eggs, and then broken eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable."

Anderson says that the system inherently at work in the text is set up as follows: eye-sun-egg implemented into scenes involving termination and sunlight that unfold in violence and transgression (gun shots, urination).

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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 1:26 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (1)
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Comments

Comments

Gary, here are some thoughts in response to your vision entries:

What is the result of our fear of the destructive power of the voracious Australian sun, which so thoroughly and ceaslessly burns away illusion? To cover the burn marks we roll in a sightscreen of iconography. To patch the hole left by a stolen generation we put up a postcard of a sunset on Uluru. While we sit in the ravaged dustbowl we've made, we collectively dream of the wide brown land.
That being said, the symbolic surrealists spring to mind (unfortunately I''m not au fait enough with contemporary Aust art to give any names). They took a rotten sunesque pleasure in the reversal of this iconography. But it's just not comfortable stuff for mainstream culture is it.

Perhaps the marginalising of visual art by our philosophical tradition (not to mention our culture in general) is yet another symptom of the priveledging of profane discourses. Perhaps in a land of such environmental extremes and isolation, such beauty and peril, we feel we cannot afford to indulge in the realm of the sacred. to do so would risk utter annihilation. Perhaps its a form of self preservation.


Your earlier comments also lead me to contemplate the panopticon and how we have moved from a colonialist fantasy of visual aesthetics to one of surveilance. We've gone from painting pretty bushscapes to watching ourselves on Big Brother and The Block.

Not sure where this leads to, but its been some food for thought.