If I'm forced to engage with all this subjectivity stuff when reading surrealism, Bataille and Klossowski, then I'm going to read their texts in psychoanalytic terms of a male subjectivity in crisis and symbolic defeat in an technological shaped capitalist-patriarchal world. The more I read Bataille's diary section in On Nietzsche, and consider the way they construct their reading of a torn and fractured Nietzsche, then the more I interpret these guys as being screwed up real bad. They have split subjectivities to the point of disintegration.

Let me introduce technology into this with Metropolis a classic expressionist film about what Heidegger woudld call the technological mode of being in modernity. This takes the metaphysics further as it expresses the way that modernity ses human beings as a form of machine.

Metropolis is an industrial capitalist civilization.Underground we have the phallic industrial images of gears, pistons, generators moving in inexorable rhythms and repetition.The workers toil underground in the darkness for long hours. They toil as robots, their movements dominated by the mechanical rhythms of machines. The workers are enslaved by mechanisms that resemble giant ten-hour clocks. It is classic dystopian picture of technology.

On the surface we have a thriving metropolis, vast skyscrapers linked by aerial highways, huge stadiums and pleasure gardens, airplanes hovering between huge buildings and lines of cars that flow like streams below. This is a world of technological dynamism that set the futurists into such raptures.In this utopia technology is an empowering tool that benefits human desires and liberates the inhabitants for sensual pursuits and playful activity.

Metropolis also introduces the figure of the cybog:

These connect to the sculptures of the cyborg artist, Lee Bul. Or rather Bul's work refers back to the Maria-borg in Metropolis.

In an interview with Hans Ubrist Bul says:

"And while notions of femininity may appear to be changing with the advent of new technologies and new ideas and theories arising from those technologies, I still find that certain representations simply reinforce and continue traditional discourses about what constitutes femininity and images of femininity."

I'm not sure.

Bul would have the Maria-borg in Fritz Lang's Metropolis in mind? Did not the Maria-borg eventually prove to be subversive?

The narrative is simple. Metropolis is an authoritarian capitalist patriarchal society(women are excluded from the public arena)ruled by the capitalist controller Joh Fredersen.Fredersen, as the Master of Metropolis, and a mad scientist named Rotwang, devise a scheme to undermine the workers' liberation movement and to discredit its leader Maria by infiltrating the workers' ranks with an agent-provocateur, a cyborg-double of Maria. This scheme backfires when the Maria-borg, acting in defiance of its programming, leads the workers on a rampage to destroy the machines that enslave them. The female robot as a s machine-woman is more than a product of male industrial technology and male sexual fantasies because she transformed into a rebellious cyborg.

What then is the cultural significance of this cyborg figure? After all Hollywood represents cyborgs as invincible killing machines in films such as the Terminator and Robocop.

Peter Ruppert in 'Technology and the Construction of Gender in Fritz Lang's Metropolis' says:

"If robots are completely mechanical figures, and androids are genetically engineered organic entities containing no non-biological components, then cyborgs may be identified by the fusion of human beings with technology, 'a hybrid of machine and organism' as Haraway puts it."

Ruppert goes on to say:

"Crossed boundaries, in fact, distinguish the cyborg. Neither entirely human nor artificial, but a combination of the two, the cyborg problematizes all dualities and oppositions. For Haraway, a human centered universe rests on dualities: we fatally program every opposition into good/bad, positive/negative, male/female, real/artificial, analytical/emotional, natural/cultural, master/slave. These dualisms that structure our thinking and need to be supplanted. For when the boundary between human and artificial collapses, all other dualities also dissolve."<
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As the cyborg is a product of replication rather than reproduction, it defies the Oedipal process, and in so doing, it also defies the manner in which gender and identity are constructed,thereby challenging the patriarchal construction of 'otherness.' There is a transgression of the boundaries between human and machine and to challenge the construction of woman as male other. The cyborg acts as means for redefining difference as it an 'inappropriate' other---a fractured, hyphenated identity. The cyborg is a site of numerous dualities and differences that are in fluidic transgression.

But if you locate the texts of Bataille and Klossowski about Nietzsche back into the modernist, expressionist world of Metropolis, then you can see the fracturing and distintegrating subjectivities of a masculine self divided against itself. Bataille and Klossowski's fascination with Nietzsche's descent into madness and mystical states arises from their male subjectivity being in crisis and symbolic defeat.

Well, that's how I'm going to read these texts. Bataille's diary section in On Nietzsche makes little sense otherwise.