May 18, 2007
I stumbled into taking the brim and Documents and came across Black Sun: Bataille on Sade by Geoffrey Roche. This text helps me to understand Bataille who I begun to read when I began this blog only to toss away.
Roche has more staying power. He says:
Bataille shares with Sade a number of thematic preoccupations. Bataille’s fictional work, in particular Story of the Eye, is similar to that of Sade to the point of appearing derivative. As in Sade, in Bataille there is a great deal of scatology, sex scenes in churches, blasphemy, humiliation, rape, torture and necrophilia....There are also philosophical similarities, although these have often been exaggerated. The most obvious theoretical commonality
is in their ethical orientation. Sade’s view that civilization and morals have softened man is close to Bataille’s attitude (Juliette, J, 776). Both writers draw a link between the absence of God and the nullity of morality suggesting a traditionally religious view of moral thought (Bataille’s project of founding an ‘anti-ethics’, without reason or justice, is explicitly a Godless ethics )
That makes sense. I can now understand Bataille as continuing the Surrealist project of revolutionary liberation from morality.
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Feel free to email me if you have any questions about the Bataille article.
-Geoffrey Roche