...awareness of the impossibility opens consciousness to all that is possible for it to think. In this gathering place, where violence is rife, at the boundary of that which escapes cohesion, he who reflects within cohesion realizes that there is no longer any room for him (Theory of Religion 10).
When Georges Bataille first published The Story of the Eye in 1928, anonymously and "in a limited edition of 134 copies" (Lechte 118), he had been at the Bibliothèque Nationale in the department of numismatics for nearly six years. Bataille was thirty-one at the time of publication, and it was not his first or the most violent piece. "The Solar Anus" which preceded it actually looks ahead to the serious ethnographic articles, albeit often of a scatological nature, which Bataille wrote for Documents, a short-lived journal which he edited and founded in 1929. Active in surrealist and avant-garde circles, Bataille courted the radical left of the political and aesthetic arenas, although his professional work compelled him to function within rigid systems.
While The Story of the Eye is often dismissed as adolescent writing (Bataille himself calling it juvenile in a preface to a later edition), I offer here a reading of The Story of the Eye in the context of his profession as a librarian and of his work as editor and writer for Documents, a journal that consolidates his reflections as antiquarian, literary artist, and amateur ethnographer. To read Bataille's fiction in concert with his sociological and critical writing elevates the radical negativity of its violent transgression to a positive value. The text of this novel contains, in an embryonic stage, the basic theories which he continued to refine and develop and that were later to be influential in the evolution of post-structuralist thought. It executes Bataille's need to express through his writings what could not be contained by the cultural system within which he lived and worked, and it expresses his need to recognize the existence of what the system cannot contain--the vision of that other eye out of which he looks at the world. Thus rather than dismiss this text as juvenile or adolescent writing, readers should be aware of it as an early declaration of identity formation, one affected by actual events in his life and, although overwhelmingly privileging his sexual obsessions, one which contains nevertheless the core of his thinking.
In Bataille's profession of librarianship, cataloging or classification of material becomes obsessive to the extent that every item within a collection must have a named place or it cannot have a place in the collection, for only by being inserted into a named placed within a system can an object be curated or cared for. Bataille captures the intention of this systematizing in his Documents essay on "The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade" when he writes: "the work of philosophy as well as science or common sense ...has always had as its goal the establishment of the homogeneity of the world [through]...the identification of all the elements of which the world is composed" (Visions 96). To know or identify an object such as a coin restricts the coin to its place within the organization of numismatics. The operation reduces knowledge to the ability to recognize an object's location within the system and to reduce its particularity to an homogeneous whole.
Knowledge of coins, or the field of numismatics, involves the collection and study of coins that have been removed from their use as exchange and which no longer have exchange-value or use-value; value resides now only in their form as coins, or in their coinness. As Denis Hollier explains in his article on Bataille and "The Use-Value of the Impossible," use-value is value integral to an object which is expended as the object is consumed or used. Exchange-value is use-value detached and deferred, as it is exchanged for an object with which it shares a common value (136). Within the system of numismatics, the original use-value of the coins is no longer expressible, having become a form of non-knowledge within the system.
Numismatists, Hollier writes, "cannot stand expenditure" (133), and I use his article as a starting point in connecting The Story of the Eye to a reactive gesture of Bataille's against the categorical nature of his profession. While Bataille never publicly acknowledged authorship, according to Susan Rubin Suleiman because of his fear of prosecution (314), in his Preface to the 1943 edition he explains the pseudonym under which the text appears: "The name Lord Auch...refers to a habit of a friend of mine; when vexed, instead of saying "aux chiottes!" [to the shithouse], he would shorten it to "aux ch'." Lord is English for God (in the Scriptures): Lord Auch is God relieving himself" (98). Bataille encourages his text, therefore, to be read as the waste generated by systems formed in reference to absolutes, whether it be an absolute spirit or absolute knowledge. Such discharge precludes conformation within a system and exalts in the waste expelled. Through the text of The Story of the Eye, in other words, Bataille effects the expression and the ecstasy of the non-knowledge which the systems of knowledge cannot accommodate.
Bataille, like other surrealists, advocated a return to "the primitivism of use-value" (Hollier 135), that is, a return to the realm of expenditure, which in museum terms supports a re-contextualization of an object on display. A collection of coins coming to the museum could include a paper bank draft contemporary with one of the coins indicating its original use or currency value(16). In order to maintain the discipline of the system, the draft must be classified as coin in contradiction to what is known to be coin, or it must be laid aside on a shelf in a state of non-existence (not existing within the arrangement), or simply thrown away as excess, as non-knowledge. The draft does not con-form, but disrupts form by interjecting evidence of function or use-value of a coin now valued as an object qua object. Representing a heterogeneity not tolerated by modern formalists who resist the "primitivism of use-value," the bank draft must be expelled in order to maintain the essential homogeneity the collection requires for its functioning. As Bataille points out in his article on De Sade, "the intellectual process automatically limits itself by producing of its own accord its own waste products, thus liberating in a disordered way the heterogeneous excremental element" (97). The sorting of the collection takes place under the eye of the numismatist who observes the proper descriptive markings on a coin, executing an empirically-based scientific system of knowledge which depends on the eye as the human tool through which the process of differentiating and classifying proceeds. The Story of the Eye on one level narrates the processing of the experiences of one adolescent and his friends. On another level it is both the narration of the excretion and the excretion itself of the waste generated by the processing of experience
In the opening pages of the text, Simone appears dressed in black and white, replicating the binary character of empirical knowledge which reduces the particularity of what is seen to the homogeneity of the understood. The imagery Bataille develops in these early pages concentrates on intersections of people and things whose not coming together sustains a heterogeneity which communicates the plenitude of life: "Now in the corner of a hallway there was a saucer of milk for the cat. `Milk is for the pussy, isn't it?" said Simone. `Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?'" (4). Simone then places her bared genitals in the center of the saucer, forming "The Cat's Eye," the title of this first chapter. By the centering of her self in the saucer of milk, Simone forms an eye, an instrument of observation in a movement that transgresses the moral center of the human.
"The Cat's Eye" mimics Bataille's Document article "The Pineal Eye" in which he discusses the pineal gland as the center of consciousness and postulates an inverse evolution in apes, which locates the pineal eye in the anal orifice rather than the head. A defecating ape in the zoo demonstrates "what science cannot," that is, "the expressive value of the excremental orifice" (87). The centering of Simone in the saucer images an individuating action which acknowledges a self directed by animal nature and sets the scene for the later excremental movement of the text. The inversion of the animal and human, of the anal and buccal cavities executes a perverse metonymic action, releasing vision from the servitude of a rationally centered eye. By transgressing the nature of the human, Simone opens the center of human vision to other possibilities. Mankind may stand erect, but through his imagery Bataille constantly reverses mankind's way of seeing. "Acute evil," Bataille claims, "has a sovereign value for us," (Literature and Evil ix). Sovereign value, like use-value, infers immanence which cannot be transferred, but only experienced. "Literature is communication," Bataille explains, and it is the "complicity in the knowledge of Evil, which is the basis of intense communication" (ix). Bataille effects this complicity in Simone's milk and saucer scene through his perversion of a Baudelaire poem, which Susan Rubin Suleiman calls attention to in "Transgression and the Avant-Garde." Baudelaire's text equates a woman's genitals with jewels, but Bataille returns the flow of imagery to its erotic base by re-situating the "pink and dark" in the anterior portions of the anatomy(323), illustrating Derrida's contention in Writing and Difference that Bataille's text displays "a sovereign form of writing which...must interrupt the servile complicity of speech and meaning" (266). Such writing erases relationships as it strives for an existence at the limit of being where being experiences non-being insofar as this is possible. Derrida uses the term "slide" as a descriptive because Bataille attempts to privilege movement across limits, preferring the abyss of neither this nor that in his attempt to partake of both. Bataille not only slides Baudelaire's jewels back to the genitalia, he turns the seeing of them into the seeing by them.
The action in Bataille's text takes place at the edge of surfaces, at the limit of the boundaries of self or object. Fluidity abounds, but nothing flows into another. Nothing can be subsumed in this saucer of milk which exhibits only the surface of a pool. What comes together but remains separate in the saucer violates the limits of the system in bringing together incommensurable elements. The feline pussy needs milk; the female pussy desires semen. It is a metaphoric image which resists metaphoricity--the milk drips down Simone's thighs; Simone and the narrator achieve orgasm simultaneously but "without touching." The milk and the semen are spilt, displaced. "Use-value, according to Marx," Denis Hollier notes, "always refers in the final analysis to the needs and organs of a living body" (137). In this saucer of milk scene, the use-value is consumed on the spot by the biological needs of two adolescents. Use-value consumed on the spot cannot repeat; the sexual encounter that precludes a physical exchange cannot reproduce or produce meaning. This scene of sexual arousal where nothing is exchanged is a parodic gesture that succeeds in its failure. The use-value of the scene for Bataille's text is its non-meaning, that is, "the expressive value" of what takes place outside of coupling.
"Perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genital finality)," Bataille clarifies in "The Notion of Expenditure," has no end beyond itself (118). But such emptiness has positive value, whereas performance with the expectation of a return or surplus begets obligation. This latter concept of expenditure with reserve is a movement grounded on the Hegelian master-slave relationship in which the slave works for, or agrees to be for the master, producing a bondage of responsibility on both sides. Bataille illustrates that a father provides for a son with the expectation that the son will remain loyal to his wishes. The relationship requires continual expenditure restricted to the preservation of the system. Bataille on the other hand insists that loss is necessary because to experience loss is to experience the emptying out of being that marks the limit of the human. Violent loss produces anguish; experiencing the transgression of the self produces at the same time an ecstasy at the sight of the nothingness beyond. To know this nothingness is to know the fullness of being. To be human is to die. As Michael Richardson points out, for Bataille "eroticism is life momentarily overflowing its limits" (103-4). To experience the violence of the overflow is to have a foretaste of death. "Life starts only with the deficit of these systems," Bataille asserts (Visions 128). When the overflow bankrupts and spending beyond the limits leaves no reserve, only then can you know the fullness of being human.
The concept of expenditure without reserve, central to Bataille's judgment "that nonbeing is filled with meaning" (On Nietzsche 188), derives from the primitive custom of potlatch which Bataille borrows from Marcel Mauss' ethnographic study of the Northwest American Indians. Essentially potlatch is the extravagant expenditure of wealth, usually taking place as part of a spectacle or festival, which involves the giving of gifts or some form of divestiture of wealth for the particular purpose of obligating a rival by challenging him/her to do the same. It can become self-destructive through the destruction of wealth. Pure potlatch is a giving without obligating a return. Bataille sees a continuation of the concept of potlatch in a post-master-slave society where accumulation can occur solely for the purpose of expenditure. As a voiding action potlatch "in unconscious forms...symbolizes excretion, which itself is linked to death" (Visions 122). Thus Bataille conceives an expenditure without reserve, or an immediacy of consumption for the purpose of consumption--"appropriation as a means of excretion" (99).
The text of The Story of the Eye can be seen as a narration of the experience of potlatch from the perspective of an adolescent son who is expressing a need for "the limitless loss," a need Bataille asserts is never satisfied by a being in society. To narrate is to tell or to give an account, to describe. The narration here is a telling of the picaresque exploits of a male adolescent and his blond cohort, Simone, which precludes a building up of a structure or the production of a portrait of life. Character does not develop in a narrative of potlatch, for there can be no progression, only a sequence of parodic images which transgress traditional notions. Desire motivates the action, not as an urge to annihilate the distance between subject and object of desire, but to maintain the distance. Only the discontinuous self supported by transgressive acts can avoid subordination to the homogenous social.
From an initial position on the title-page of The Story of the Eye, excretion as voiding is set up as the movement of the text, both in the immediate consumption through the action of passing through and as the waste of the metaphoric action of appropriation. Urinating in medical terms is frequently referred to as voiding, for it rids the body of waste. The term to urinate, or uriner denotes a passing or a making of water--both the immediate consumption or expenditure without reserve and a making which is a making of waste. Urination releases what is leftover following the body's consumption or appropriation of what it needs. In Bataille's text it not only expresses the formless excreted after the action of appropriation, it expresses as well the action of immediate consumption, the passing through from orifice to orifice. It is the making of language and the passing through of non-meaning. A metaphoric action condenses the meaning of two words, one word takes on the meaning of another, much in the way the body absorbs what it consumes. What is not taken in is the leftover of waste. The urination upon the genital organs and the urination which takes place as part of the process of sexual pleasure are actions which void (in the English usage) or clear (as évacuer in the French usage). Simone repeatedly requests and participates in this action as a sign of desire, and so it always must be for the desire that transgresses form. Through this action, the text continually clears its own meaning. The possibility of reproduction is consistently voided or cleared, cleared in the sense of the evacuation of meaning or the washing away of the place of intersection of the semen and the egg.
This action of excretion releases the orgy of adolescents in the second chapter. Marcelle, who "could only climax by drenching herself...with a spurt of urine" (31), locks herself in the armoire--"the makeshift pissoir"(15)--which references the system, particularly as a holder of garments. To dress is to be within the system, as the narrator reminds the reader: "We [Simone and I] had abandoned the real world, the one made up solely of dressed people" (32). Marcelle, the most pious of the protagonists' friends, that is, most conformed within the system, violates her own containment as the urine excreted during masturbation seeps through the doors. Her screams are ejaculations of the repressed formless self, but also a cry of horror at the confrontation with the existence of the formless. The experience of a self which exceeds the bounds of a culturally imposed self throws Marcelle into a state of madness in which forms lose their referents. In the disorder outside the limits of her culture she confuses the narrator, bloodied and wearing a Jacobine liberty cap, with a cardinal. Marcelle reads meaning where there is none. The boundary between the "piety and abomination" becomes confused through the violence of Marcelle's actions, foregrounding the structural weakness of the pious form. Moral and ethical categories are artificially imposed limits which bar people from the totality of life. What Bataille attempts to uncover is the true heterogeneity of the character who wears the cardinal's hat or the Jacobine cap, participating in both the sacred and the profane.
These scenes in The Story of the Eye work out in erotic imagery what Bataille attempts to achieve through the journal Documents whose subtitle, "Archeology Beaux-Arts Ethnography" gestures towards ethnography's mission to revive the use-value or to recover the absent trace in order that the completeness of the object's originary presence can be made known. To restore completeness ruptures form because form is always determined by the dictates of a system. As Denis Hollier observes, Bataille's notion of formless takes into account "the whole which, because it is formless, takes on an unexhibitable monstrosity. It resembles nothing [because]...it destabilizes the difference between object and world, between part and whole" (141). Access to the formless beneath form comes through the action of thought when thinking is expressed in the ejaculation or spewing forth of words, as an article on spitting by colleagues of Bataille in one issue of Documents argues. To shock with words is to spit. Speaking becomes spewing when what is said evades form. Because in The Story of the Eye ejaculation frequently takes place without penetration, such action is a spewing out of what would be fertile material if it were ingested into another form. Artistic expression can be the means, in other words, of capturing the presence of the ephemeral bank draft---a spitting out of words that articulates the formlessness of the not-there.
The encounter with the formless which throws Marcelle over the edge expands the idea of self for Simone and the narrator, extending their horizons beyond the self to a recognition of the limitlessness of the universe:
Our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth, sky, and atmosphere... the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars...a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating (32-33).
As the eye is a tool which allows humankind to form the world in his or her own image, the sun represents a universal eye in the sense that it centers our world and illuminates or brings forth what we see. The stream of sunlight appropriates what it illumines, such that she who sees by it is bound by its light. In the "The Solar Anus" Bataille turns empirical knowledge upside down and subverts the taboo against the sight of the anal cavity and in uncovering it locates there the urge towards "the Absolute Spirit." The defecating action of the anus becomes an urge of the sacred within the self--that which recognizes the beyond which exceeds the human limit. Excretion of non-meaning in the shaping of the world of knowledge becomes the stream of sunlight which emits from the eye of the anus. "It is clear that the world is purely parodic...when I scream I AM THE SUN an integral erection results, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorous frenzy"(Visions 5). Bataille's imagery here again refers to the pineal gland as the supposed site of consciousness in the human, and he postulates an evolutionary extreme such that the eye erupts from the top of the human head as the ultimate erection.
While Bataille sees the streams of light from the sun as excretion, the refuse or the loss constitutes the sacred, as in the ecstasy produced by pure potlatch, or by "great competitive spectacles" whose production squanders "as much money as possible ...in order to produce a feeling of stupefaction" (Visions 119). Like potlatch, these losses enact fellowship, as Bataille writes in "The Sacred:" "the sacred is only a privileged moment of communal unity, a moment of the convulsive communication of what is ordinarily stifled" (242). The sun produces both blindness--when looked at directly-and insight--by illuminating the world for us to see. To look at the sun full on shuts off any sight of the heterogeneous elements of the universe. But the blinding sun is also the excreting sun. What escapes the absorption of the viewer returns as the sunlight that refuses to be captured. The authorial gaze must be appropriating, but Bataille structures his text to resist narrative meaning, executing a passing of the water, not the making of it. His text is the waste of the making. As Foucault writes of Bataille's concept of the eye in "Preface to Transgression" "...the somber core of the eye pours out into the world like a fountain which sees, that is, which lights up the world" (45). Bataille's fountain shocks those who come under his gaze into being aware of its existence. While an egoistic eye only lights up its own vision, throwing into darkness what escapes it, he creates a spectacle that insists a community witness. The gaze of the sun is excretory, a universal fountain, but the gaze of another, such as Simone's "eyeing" of the narrator, is an appropriating movement which must always be countered by the voiding of urination. Thus the chapter entitled "Sunspot," focuses on the sheet Marcelle hangs out of the window of the sanitarium, a sheet on which she has urinated. The spot on the sheet recalls Simone's urinating on the tablecloth and sitting in the dish of milk. All three are instances of marking the place of self on a homogenous surface, a movement not to be seen as a sign of appropriation, but as a gesture of refusal of the system that celebrates the refuse of the system. Only by this individuating movement can the heterogeneity which Bataille believes is critical to the completeness of the universe be communicated.
During Simone's recuperation her fascination with eyes intensifies. No longer able to participate in any sexual activity, she and the I who focuses the text(17) play with eggs in a manner which mimics a metonymic substitution of images. "She soon delighted in having me throw eggs into the toilet bowl, hard-boiled eggs, which sank, and shells sucked out in various degrees to obtain varying levels of immersion"(36). Sometimes she would urinate on them. Physically confined, Simone continues the violation of fixed images, while the images themselves proliferate and the possibilities of incommensurate connections explode. Eyes in the toilets, hard-boiled eggs, partially sucked eggs, all objectify imagery that is fixed. Simone's play with eggs gradually increases the force of its transgressive nature. The mother's entrance into the room advances the play to the edge of its own limits; instead of disrupting their activity, her presence intensifies their pleasure. In order for their behavior to be have impact, there must be a prohibition against it. The play must occur within the system so that the system itself can release its own non-meaning.
"Play," Bataille notes, "is nothing if not an open and unreserved challenge to everything opposed to play" (quoted by Derrida 378n40). Simone's play with the egg prefigures the Derridean concept of play, an activity of the difference that results from the appropriating action of classification systems such as language or numismatics. Bataille's play executes the non-meaning in the appropriative movement that creates meaning--being an activity of that which is not retained in the substitutive movement of metaphor. To return to the system of coinness, Bataille's play with the egg and the eye and the testicles---a seemingly random contiguity of images privileging surfaces in this text which classifies eyeness--calls attention to a system that contains objects detached from their totality of meaning. The coin collected as coin no longer in currency is a coin detached from its use-value. Play is the activity of the use-value, the presence of the bank draft. A reading or writing of the text is an action of expenditure without reserve--pure potlatch.
The images are put into play by the urination which figurates the fissure or rupture needed to unlock the contained optical simulacrum and to unleash the violent discharges of the pineal eye: "Upon my asking [Simone] what the word urinate reminded her of, she replied: terminate, the eyes, with a razor, something red, the sun" (38). In The Story of the Eye the "eye" of the anus or genital orifice, the description of which always foregrounds the raw and fleshy aspects, becomes the rupturing gaze, and its most gruesome portrayal is the bullfighting scene when the eye of Granero, the matador, is gouged out by the bull.
The final scene in the church of Don Juan, however, depicts the most virulent transgression of The Story of the Eye. If the text is God relieving Himself, then these final scenes can be read as God voiding His own Absoluteness, a gesture reified in the urination of the priest into the ciborium containing the communion wafers which are an embodiment of the absent Christ, himself an embodiment of the absent Absolute. Since the ritual of the Mass includes the expression "the Word is God." The action of urination here is then the transgressing of the system of Christian religion that grounds the systems of knowledge in Western culture, that is, the systems through which we know our world and which enable us to live within it. But as urinating is the passing and the making, this transgressive action expends in order that the system can continue to make.
In Simone's intercourse with the dying priest, she attempts to capture the totality of the experience of life which can only be gained by dying. Her action takes place at the limit of life, as this last transgressive scene takes place at the limit of the prohibition---the violation of the most sacred. Transgression must occur within the system or it would not be a transgression, as Bataille seeks to embrace the non-meaning of the bank draft within the system because to go outside the system would be to be outside the totality of coinness and to render the non-meaning meaningless. For a human to die is to experience the totality of what it means to live, but to die is to move beyond expression. Bataille needs always to be at the limit while including a gesture toward the non-being on the other side.
Bataille writes at the conclusion of his essay on "The Notion of Expenditure" that "the states of excitation, which are comparable to toxic states, can be defined as the illogical and irresistible impulse to reject material or moral goods that it would have been possible to utilize rationally (in conformity with the balancing of accounts)" (128). What he presents to the reader, in the form of the narrative text, The Story of the Eye is a logical gesture of irrationality which expresses the need of a limitless loss which Bataille maintains is necessary to remain rationally within the system. Bataille's transgressive text transgresses the prohibition against the transgressive act, but without text there could be no transgression. From within the system, however, the gesture must always remain an irrational gesture of refusal to remain within the system. The text, for the reader as well as Bataille, is an experience of irrationality, expended in the reading and the writing.
[current t.o.c.] . [about Schuylkill] . [previous issues] . [submissions] . [events & announcements] . [credits]