...awareness of the impossibility opensconsciousness to allthatis possible for it to think. In this gathering place, whereviolence is rife, at the boundary of that which escapes cohesion,he who reflects within cohesion realizes that there is no longerany room for him (Theory of Religion 10).
When Georges Bataille first published The Story of theEye in 1928,anonymously and "in a limited edition of 134 copies" (Lechte 118),he had beenat the Bibliothèque Nationale in the department ofnumismatics for nearly sixyears. Bataille was thirty-one at the time of publication, and itwas not hisfirst or the most violent piece. "The Solar Anus" which precededit actuallylooks ahead to the serious ethnographic articles, albeit often ofascatological nature, which Bataille wrote for Documents,a short-lived journalwhich he edited and founded in 1929. Active in surrealist and avant-garde circles, Bataille courted the radical left of the political andaestheticarenas, although his professional work compelled him to functionwithin rigidsystems.
While The Story of the Eye is often dismissed asadolescent writing(Bataille himself calling it juvenile in a preface to a lateredition), Ioffer here a reading of The Story of the Eye in thecontext of his professionas a librarian and of his work as editor and writer forDocuments, a journalthat consolidates his reflections as antiquarian, literary artist,and amateurethnographer. To read Bataille's fiction in concert with hissociologicaland critical writing elevates the radical negativity of its violenttransgression to a positive value. The text of this novelcontains, in anembryonic stage, the basic theories which he continued to refineand developand that were later to be influential in the evolution ofpost-structuralistthought. It executes Bataille's need to express through hiswritings whatcould not be contained by the cultural system within which he livedandworked, and it expresses his need to recognize the existence ofwhat thesystem cannot contain--the vision of that other eye out of whichhe looks atthe world. Thus rather than dismiss this text as juvenile oradolescentwriting, readers should be aware of it as an early declaration ofidentityformation, one affected by actual events in his life and, althoughoverwhelmingly privileging his sexual obsessions, one whichcontainsnevertheless the core of his thinking.
In Bataille's profession of librarianship, cataloging orclassificationof material becomes obsessive to the extent that every item withinacollection must have a named place or it cannot have a place in thecollection, for only by being inserted into a named placed withina system canan object be curated or cared for. Bataille captures the intentionof thissystematizing in his Documents essay on "The Use Value ofD.A.F. de Sade" whenhe writes: "the work of philosophy as well as science or commonsense ...hasalways had as its goal the establishment of the homogeneity of theworld[through]...the identification of all the elements of which theworld iscomposed" (Visions 96). To know or identify an objectsuch as a coinrestricts the coin to its place within the organization ofnumismatics. Theoperation reduces knowledge to the ability to recognize an object'slocationwithin the system and to reduce its particularity to an homogeneouswhole.
Knowledge of coins, or the field of numismatics, involves thecollectionand study of coins that have been removed from their use asexchange and whichno longer have exchange-value or use-value; value resides now onlyin theirform as coins, or in their coinness. As Denis Hollier explains in his articleon Bataille and "The Use-Value of the Impossible," use-value isvalue integralto an object which is expended as the object is consumed or used. Exchange-value is use-value detached and deferred, as it isexchanged for an objectwith which it shares a common value (136). Within the system ofnumismatics,the original use-value of the coins is no longer expressible,having become aform of non-knowledge within the system.
Numismatists, Hollier writes, "cannot stand expenditure"(133), and Iuse his article as a starting point in connecting The Story ofthe Eye to areactive gesture of Bataille's against the categorical nature ofhisprofession. While Bataille never publicly acknowledged authorship,accordingto Susan Rubin Suleiman because of his fear of prosecution (314),in hisPreface to the 1943 edition he explains the pseudonym under whichthe textappears: "The name Lord Auch...refers to a habit of a friend ofmine; whenvexed, instead of saying "aux chiottes!" [to the shithouse], hewould shortenit to "aux ch'." Lord is English for God (in theScriptures): Lord Auch isGod relieving himself" (98). Bataille encourages his text,therefore, to beread as the waste generated by systems formed in reference toabsolutes,whether it be an absolute spirit or absolute knowledge. Suchdischargeprecludes conformation within a system and exalts in the wasteexpelled. Through the text of The Story of the Eye, in other words,Bataille effects theexpression and the ecstasy of the non-knowledge which the systemsof knowledgecannot accommodate.
Bataille, like other surrealists, advocated a return to "theprimitivismof use-value" (Hollier 135), that is, a return to the realm ofexpenditure,which in museum terms supports a re-contextualization of an objecton display. A collection of coins coming to the museum could include a paperbank draftcontemporary with one of the coins indicating its original use orcurrencyvalue(16). In order to maintain thediscipline of the system, the draft must beclassified as coin in contradiction to what is known to be coin, orit must belaid aside on a shelf in a state of non-existence (not existingwithin thearrangement), or simply thrown away as excess, as non-knowledge. The draftdoes not con-form, but disrupts form by interjecting evidence offunction oruse-value of a coin now valued as an object qua object.Representing aheterogeneity not tolerated by modern formalists who resist the"primitivismof use-value," the bank draft must be expelled in order to maintainthe essential homogeneity the collection requires for its functioning.As Bataillepoints out in his article on De Sade, "the intellectual processautomaticallylimits itself by producing of its own accord its own wasteproducts, thusliberating in a disordered way the heterogeneous excrementalelement" (97).The sorting of the collection takes place under the eye of thenumismatist whoobserves the proper descriptive markings on a coin, executing anempirically-based scientific system of knowledge which depends onthe eye as the humantool through which the process of differentiating and classifyingproceeds. The Story of the Eye on one level narrates the processingof the experiencesof one adolescent and his friends. On another level it is both thenarrationof the excretion and the excretion itself of the waste generated bytheprocessing of experience
In the opening pages of the text, Simone appears dressed inblack andwhite, replicating the binary character of empirical knowledgewhich reducesthe particularity of what is seen to the homogeneity of theunderstood. Theimagery Bataille develops in these early pages concentrates on intersectionsof people and things whose not coming together sustains aheterogeneity which communicates the plenitude of life: "Now in the corner of a hallwaythere wasa 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 placesher baredgenitals in the center of the saucer, forming "The Cat's Eye," thetitle ofthis first chapter. By the centering of her self in the saucer ofmilk, Simoneforms an eye, an instrument of observation in a movement thattransgresses themoral center of the human.
"The Cat's Eye" mimics Bataille's Document article"The Pineal Eye" inwhich he discusses the pineal gland as the center of consciousnessandpostulates an inverse evolution in apes, which locates the pinealeye in theanal orifice rather than the head. A defecating ape in the zoodemonstrates"what science cannot," that is, "the expressive value of theexcrementalorifice" (87). The centering of Simone in the saucer images anindividuatingaction which acknowledges a self directed by animal nature and setsthe scenefor the later excremental movement of the text. The inversion ofthe animaland human, of the anal and buccal cavities executes a perversemetonymicaction, releasing vision from the servitude of a rationallycentered eye. Bytransgressing the nature of the human, Simone opens the center ofhuman visionto other possibilities. Mankind may stand erect, but through hisimageryBataille constantly reverses mankind's way of seeing. "Acute evil," Bataille claims, "has a sovereign value for us,"(Literature and Evil ix). Sovereign value, likeuse-value, infers immanencewhich cannot be transferred, but only experienced. "Literature is communication," Bataille explains, and it is the "complicity in theknowledgeof Evil, which is the basis of intense communication" (ix).Bataille effectsthis complicity in Simone's milk and saucer scene through hisperversion of aBaudelaire poem, which Susan Rubin Suleiman calls attention toin "Transgression and the Avant-Garde." Baudelaire's text equatesawoman'sgenitals with jewels, but Bataille returns the flow of imagery toits eroticbase by re-situating the "pink and dark" in the anterior portionsof theanatomy(323), illustrating Derrida's contention in Writing andDifference that Bataille's text displays "a sovereign form of writing which...mustinterruptthe servile complicity of speech and meaning" (266). Such writingerasesrelationships as it strives for an existence at the limit of beingwhere beingexperiences non-being insofar as this is possible. Derrida usesthe term"slide" as a descriptive because Bataille attempts to privilegemovementacross limits, preferring the abyss of neither this nor that in hisattempt topartake of both. Bataille not only slides Baudelaire's jewels backto thegenitalia, he turns the seeing of them into the seeingby them.
The action in Bataille's text takes place at the edge ofsurfaces,at the limit of the boundaries of self or object. Fluidityabounds, butnothing flows into another. Nothing can be subsumed in this saucerof milkwhich exhibits only the surface of a pool. What comes together butremainsseparate in the saucer violates the limits of the system inbringing togetherincommensurable elements. The feline pussy needs milk; the femalepussydesires semen. It is a metaphoric image which resistsmetaphoricity--the milkdrips down Simone's thighs; Simone and the narrator achieve orgasmsimultaneously but "without touching." The milk and the semen arespilt,displaced. "Use-value, according to Marx," Denis Hollier notes,"alwaysrefers in the final analysis to the needs and organs of a livingbody" (137). In this saucer of milk scene, the use-value is consumed on the spotby thebiological needs of two adolescents. Use-value consumed on thespot cannotrepeat; the sexual encounter that precludes a physical exchangecannotreproduce or produce meaning. This scene of sexual arousal wherenothing is exchanged is a parodic gesture that succeeds in its failure. Theuse-value ofthe scene for Bataille's text is its non-meaning, that is, "theexpressivevalue" of what takes place outside of coupling.
"Perverse sexual activity (i.e., deflected from genitalfinality),"Bataille clarifies in "The Notion of Expenditure," has no endbeyond itself(118). But such emptiness has positive value, whereas performancewith theexpectation of a return or surplus begets obligation. This latterconcept ofexpenditure with reserve is a movement grounded on theHegelian master-slaverelationship in which the slave works for, or agrees to be for themaster,producing a bondage of responsibility on both sides. Batailleillustratesthat a father provides for a son with the expectation that the sonwill remainloyal to his wishes. The relationship requires continualexpenditurerestricted to the preservation of the system. Bataille on theother handinsists that loss is necessary because to experience loss is toexperience theemptying out of being that marks the limit of the human. Violentlossproduces anguish; experiencing the transgression of the selfproduces at thesame time an ecstasy at the sight of the nothingness beyond. Toknow thisnothingness is to know the fullness of being. To be human is todie. AsMichael Richardson points out, for Bataille "eroticism is lifemomentarilyoverflowing its limits" (103-4). To experience the violence of theoverflowis to have a foretaste of death. "Life starts only with thedeficit of thesesystems," Bataille asserts (Visions 128). When theoverflow bankrupts andspending beyond the limits leaves no reserve, only then can youknow thefullness of being human.
The concept of expenditure without reserve, centralto Bataille'sjudgment "that nonbeing is filled with meaning" (OnNietzsche 188), derivesfrom the primitive custom of potlatch which Batailleborrows from MarcelMauss' ethnographic study of the Northwest American Indians.Essentiallypotlatch is the extravagant expenditure of wealth, usually takingplace aspart of a spectacle or festival, which involves the giving of giftsor someform of divestiture of wealth for the particular purpose ofobligating a rivalby challenging him/her to do the same. It can becomeself-destructive throughthe destruction of wealth. Pure potlatch is a givingwithout obligating areturn. Bataille sees a continuation of the concept of potlatch ina post-master-slave society where accumulation can occur solely forthe purpose ofexpenditure. As a voiding action potlatch "in unconsciousforms...symbolizesexcretion, which itself is linked to death" (Visions 122). Thus Batailleconceives an expenditure without reserve, or an immediacyof consumption forthe purpose of consumption--"appropriation as a means of excretion"(99).
The text of The Story of the Eye can be seen as anarration of theexperience of potlatch from the perspective of an adolescent sonwho isexpressing a need for "the limitless loss," a need Bataille assertsis neversatisfied by a being in society. To narrate is to tell or to givean account,to describe. The narration here is a telling of the picaresqueexploits of amale adolescent and his blond cohort, Simone, which precludes abuilding up ofa structure or the production of a portrait of life. Characterdoes notdevelop in a narrative of potlatch, for there can be noprogression, only asequence of parodic images which transgress traditional notions. Desiremotivates the action, not as an urge to annihilate the distancebetweensubject and object of desire, but to maintain the distance. Onlythediscontinuous self supported by transgressive acts can avoidsubordination tothe homogenous social.
From an initial position on the title-page of The Story ofthe Eye,excretion as voiding is set up as the movement of the text, both intheimmediate consumption through the action of passing through and asthe wasteof the metaphoric action of appropriation. Urinating in medicalterms isfrequently referred to as voiding, for it rids the body of waste. The term tourinate, or uriner denotes a passing or a making ofwater--both the immediateconsumption or expenditure without reserve and a making which is amaking ofwaste. Urination releases what is leftover following the body'sconsumption orappropriation of what it needs. In Bataille's text it not onlyexpresses theformless excreted after the action of appropriation, it expressesas well theaction of immediate consumption, the passing through from orificeto orifice. It is the making of language and the passing through ofnon-meaning. Ametaphoric action condenses the meaning of two words, one wordtakes on themeaning of another, much in the way the body absorbs what itconsumes. Whatis not taken in is the leftover of waste. The urination upon thegenitalorgans and the urination which takes place as part of the processof sexualpleasure are actions which void (in the English usage) or clear (asévacuer inthe French usage). Simone repeatedly requests and participates inthis actionas a sign of desire, and so it always must be for the desire thattransgressesform. Through this action, the text continually clears its ownmeaning. Thepossibility of reproduction is consistently voided or cleared,cleared in thesense of the evacuation of meaning or the washing away of the placeofintersection of the semen and the egg.
This action of excretion releases the orgy of adolescents inthe secondchapter. Marcelle, who "could only climax by drenchingherself...with a spurtof urine" (31), locks herself in the armoire--"the makeshiftpissoir"(15)--which references the system, particularly as a holderof garments. To dressis to be within the system, as the narrator reminds the reader: "We[Simoneand I] had abandoned the real world, the one made up solely ofdressed people"(32). Marcelle, the most pious of the protagonists' friends, thatis, mostconformed within the system, violates her own containment as theurineexcreted during masturbation seeps through the doors. Her screamsareejaculations of the repressed formless self, but also a cry ofhorror at theconfrontation with the existence of the formless. The experienceof a selfwhich exceeds the bounds of a culturally imposed self throwsMarcelle into astate of madness in which forms lose their referents. In thedisorder outsidethe limits of her culture she confuses the narrator, bloodied andwearing aJacobine liberty cap, with a cardinal. Marcelle reads meaningwhere there isnone. The boundary between the "piety and abomination" becomesconfusedthrough the violence of Marcelle's actions, foregrounding thestructuralweakness of the pious form. Moral and ethical categories areartificiallyimposed limits which bar people from the totality of life. WhatBatailleattempts to uncover is the true heterogeneity of the character whowears thecardinal's hat or the Jacobine cap, participating in both thesacred and theprofane.
These scenes in The Story of the Eye work out inerotic imagery whatBataille attempts to achieve through the journal Documentswhose subtitle,"Archeology Beaux-Arts Ethnography" gestures towards ethnography'smission torevive the use-value or to recover the absent trace in order thatthecompleteness of the object's originary presence can be made known. To restorecompleteness ruptures form because form is always determined by thedictatesof a system. As Denis Hollier observes, Bataille's notion offormless takesinto account "the whole which, because it is formless, takes on anunexhibitable monstrosity. It resembles nothing [because]...itdestabilizesthe difference between object and world, between part and whole"(141). Access to the formless beneath form comes through the action ofthought whenthinking is expressed in the ejaculation or spewing forth of words,as anarticle on spitting by colleagues of Bataille in one issue ofDocumentsargues. To shock with words is to spit. Speaking becomesspewing when what issaid evades form. Because in The Story of the Eyeejaculation frequentlytakes place without penetration, such action is a spewing out ofwhat wouldbe fertile material if it were ingested into another form. Artisticexpressioncan be the means, in other words, of capturing the presence of theephemeralbank draft---a spitting out of words that articulates theformlessness of thenot-there.
The encounter with the formless which throws Marcelle over theedgeexpands the idea of self for Simone and the narrator, extendingtheir horizonsbeyond the self to a recognition of the limitlessness of theuniverse:
Our personal hallucination now developed asboundlessly asperhapsthe total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth,sky, and atmosphere... the universe of our unbearable personalvision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars...a geometricincandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of lifeand death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating(32-33).
As the eye is a tool which allows humankind to form the worldin his orher own image, the sun represents a universal eye in the sensethat itcenters our world and illuminates or brings forth what we see. Thestream ofsunlight appropriates what it illumines, such that she who sees byit is boundby its light. In the "The Solar Anus" Bataille turns empiricalknowledgeupside down and subverts the taboo against the sight of the analcavity and inuncovering it locates there the urge towards "the Absolute Spirit."The defecating action of the anus becomes an urge of the sacredwithintheself--that which recognizes the beyond which exceeds the humanlimit. Excretion of non-meaning in the shaping of the world of knowledgebecomes thestream of sunlight which emits from the eye of the anus. "It isclear thatthe world is purely parodic...when I scream I AM THE SUN anintegral erectionresults, because the verb to be is the vehicle of amorousfrenzy"(Visions 5). Bataille's imagery here again refers to the pineal gland as thesupposed siteof consciousness in the human, and he postulates an evolutionaryextreme suchthat the eye erupts from the top of the human head as the ultimateerection.
While Bataille sees the streams of light from the sun asexcretion, therefuse or the loss constitutes the sacred, as in the ecstasyproduced by purepotlatch, or by "great competitive spectacles" whose productionsquanders "asmuch money as possible ...in order to produce a feeling ofstupefaction"(Visions 119). Like potlatch, these losses enactfellowship, as Bataillewrites in "The Sacred:" "the sacred is only a privileged moment ofcommunalunity, a moment of the convulsive communication of what isordinarily stifled"(242). The sun produces both blindness--when looked atdirectly-andinsight--by illuminating the world for us to see. To look at thesun full onshuts off any sight of the heterogeneous elements of the universe. But theblinding sun is also the excreting sun. What escapes theabsorption of theviewer returns as the sunlight that refuses to be captured. Theauthorialgaze must be appropriating, but Bataille structures his text toresistnarrative meaning, executing a passing of the water, not the makingof it. His text is the waste of the making. As Foucault writes ofBataille's conceptof the eye in "Preface to Transgression" "...the somber core of theeye poursout into the world like a fountain which sees, that is, whichlights up theworld" (45). Bataille's fountain shocks those who come under hisgaze intobeing aware of its existence. While an egoistic eye only lights upits ownvision, throwing into darkness what escapes it, he creates aspectacle thatinsists a community witness. The gaze of the sun is excretory, auniversalfountain, but the gaze of another, such as Simone's "eyeing" of thenarrator,is an appropriating movement which must always be countered by thevoiding ofurination. Thus the chapter entitled "Sunspot," focuses on thesheet Marcellehangs out of the window of the sanitarium, a sheet on which she hasurinated. The spot on the sheet recalls Simone's urinating on the tableclothand sittingin the dish of milk. All three are instances of marking the placeof self ona homogenous surface, a movement not to be seen as a sign ofappropriation,but as a gesture of refusal of the system that celebrates therefuse of thesystem. Only by this individuating movement can the heterogeneitywhichBataille believes is critical to the completeness of the universebecommunicated.
During Simone's recuperation her fascination with eyesintensifies. Nolonger able to participate in any sexual activity, she and the Iwho focusesthe text(17) play with eggs in amanner which mimics a metonymic substitution ofimages. "She soon delighted in having me throw eggs into thetoilet bowl,hard-boiled eggs, which sank, and shells sucked out in variousdegrees toobtain varying levels of immersion"(36). Sometimes she wouldurinate on them. Physically confined, Simone continues the violation of fixedimages, while theimages themselves proliferate and the possibilities of incommensurateconnections explode. Eyes in the toilets, hard-boiled eggs,partially suckedeggs, all objectify imagery that is fixed. Simone's play with eggsgraduallyincreases the force of its transgressive nature. The mother'sentrance intothe room advances the play to the edge of its own limits; insteadofdisrupting their activity, her presence intensifies their pleasure.In order for their behavior to be have impact, there must be aprohibitionagainst it. The play must occur within the system so that the system itself canreleaseits own non-meaning.
"Play," Bataille notes, "is nothing if not an open andunreservedchallenge to everything opposed to play" (quoted by Derrida378n40). Simone'splay with the egg prefigures the Derridean concept of play, anactivity of thedifference that results from the appropriating action ofclassificationsystems such as language or numismatics. Bataille's play executesthe non-meaning in the appropriative movement that createsmeaning--being an activityof that which is not retained in the substitutive movement ofmetaphor. Toreturn to the system of coinness, Bataille's play with the egg andthe eye andthe testicles---a seemingly random contiguity of images privilegingsurfacesin this text which classifies eyeness--calls attention to a systemthatcontains objects detached from their totality of meaning. The coincollectedas coin no longer in currency is a coin detached from itsuse-value. Play isthe activity of the use-value, the presence of the bank draft. Areading orwriting of the text is an action of expenditure withoutreserve--purepotlatch.
The images are put into play by the urination which figuratesthefissure or rupture needed to unlock the contained opticalsimulacrum and tounleash the violent discharges of the pineal eye: "Upon my asking[Simone]what the word urinate reminded her of, she replied: terminate, theeyes, witha razor, something red, the sun" (38). In The Story of theEye the "eye" ofthe anus or genital orifice, the description of which alwaysforegrounds theraw and fleshy aspects, becomes the rupturing gaze, and its mostgruesomeportrayal is the bullfighting scene when the eye of Granero, thematador, isgouged out by the bull.
The final scene in the church of Don Juan, however, depictsthe mostvirulent transgression of The Story of the Eye. If thetext is God relievingHimself, then these final scenes can be read as God voiding His ownAbsoluteness, a gesture reified in the urination of the priest intotheciborium containing the communion wafers which are an embodiment ofthe absentChrist, himself an embodiment of the absent Absolute. Since theritual of theMass includes the expression "the Word is God." The action ofurination hereis then the transgressing of the system of Christian religion thatgrounds thesystems of knowledge in Western culture, that is, the systemsthrough whichwe know our world and which enable us to live within it. But asurinating isthe passing and the making, this transgressive action expends inorder thatthe system can continue to make.
In Simone's intercourse with the dying priest, she attempts tocapturethe totality of the experience of life which can only be gained bydying. Heraction takes place at the limit of life, as this last transgressivescenetakes place at the limit of the prohibition---the violation of themostsacred. Transgression must occur within the system or it would notbe atransgression, as Bataille seeks to embrace the non-meaning of thebank draftwithin the system because to go outside the system would be to beoutside thetotality of coinness and to render the non-meaning meaningless. For a humanto die is to experience the totality of what it means to live, butto die isto move beyond expression. Bataille needs always to be at thelimit whileincluding a gesture toward the non-being on the other side.
Bataille writes at the conclusion of his essay on "The NotionofExpenditure" that "the states of excitation, which arecomparable to toxicstates, can be defined as the illogical and irresistible impulse torejectmaterial or moral goods that it would have been possible to utilizerationally(in conformity with the balancing of accounts)" (128). What hepresents to thereader, in the form of the narrative text, The Story of theEye is a logicalgesture of irrationality which expresses the need of a limitlessloss whichBataille maintains is necessary to remain rationally within thesystem. Bataille's transgressive text transgresses the prohibition againstthetransgressive act, but without text there could be notransgression. Fromwithin the system, however, the gesture must always remain anirrationalgesture of refusal to remain within the system. The text, for thereader aswell as Bataille, is an experience of irrationality, expended inthe readingand the writing.
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