#Bataille

[thirdity]

As children, we have all suspected it: perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were "perfectly natural," quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we "possess" this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves. Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us.

Georges Bataille, "The Cruel Practice of Art"

[mobymartin]

Sylvia Bataille, 1938, wife of Georges Bataille, then mistress and later wife of Jacques Lacan

[diana-andraste]

Orient, Pál Funk Angelo, 1952

A kiss is the beginning of cannibaism. George Bataille

[dearorpheus]

to the Bataille girlies of tumblr.com ♡ written by Marguerite Duras and published in La Ciguë in 1958

[doomsayings]

There's a mystery in my crouching here like a beast of prey, flesh gripped by hunger. It's completely absurd: "Is God an animal I'd like to tear apart?" ...But I'm sicker than that. My hunger holds no interest for me. Rather than eat, my desire is to be eaten.

Georges Bataille, Guilty

And there God is waiting to eat him. Later he will go out again, but he will be changed, he will have become different, after being eaten and digested by God.

Simone Weil, Waiting for God

[rendingrocks]

"The need to go astray, to be destroyed, is an extremely private, distant, passionate, turbulent truth."

Georges Bataille

[autoeroticalgolania]

Hans Bellmer / Study for Bataille's Story of the Eye

[criminal-delirium]

Life is whole only when it isn’t subordinate to a specific object that exceeds it. In this way, the essence of entirety is freedom. Still, I can’t choose to become an entire human being by simply fighting for freedom, even if the struggle for freedom is an appropriate activity for me—because within me I can’t confuse the state of entirety with my struggle. It’s the positive practice of freedom, not the negative struggle agains a particular oppression, that has lifted me above a mutilated existence. Each of learns with bitterness, that to struggle for freedom is first of all to alienate ourselves. 

—Georges Bataille. On Nietzsche.

[trees-waiting]

Georges Bataille, 𝘕𝘰𝘵𝘦𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘢 𝘍𝘪𝘭𝘮

[reterritorialisation]

Blue of Noon, Georges Bataille

[loneberry]

From Amy Hollywood’s "Beautiful as a Wasp": Angela of Foligno and Georges Bataille

*

Ecstatic darkness in the void. Angela of Foligno is the original badass.

[thirdity]

Laughing at the universe liberated my life. I escape its weight by laughing. I refuse any intellectual translations of this laughter, since my slavery would commence from that point on.

Georges Bataille, Guilty

[dionysian-sadness]

Artwork pulled from the four Acéphale journals

[diana-andraste]

Exquisite Corpse series, Jake and Dinos Chapman, 2000

‘The painter is condemned to please. By no means can he make a painting an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds, to keep them away from the field where it stands, but even the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors.’

(Georges Bataille, “The Cruel Practice of Art”)

We can’t help but admire at the same time as being revolted by this series. ftp

[dearorpheus]

Do you have any writings abt sex and death, and how they're connected? Thanks if you decide to answer!

hiiiii yes♡ 

first and foremost is Bataille’s Erotism: Death and Sensuality which is expressly about this. everywhere you turn while researching this subject, Bataille will be mentioned. inclusive of this is a foray into religious eroticism/divine love/mysticism and elements of dissolution/continuity, violation and violence, aberration, so on... "There is no better way to know death than to link it with some licentious image." (pdf)

also v central are Freud’s theories surrounding our competing Eros/Thanatos drives, in which (as a very reductive summation) “the death instinct pervades sexual activity”; Freud also touches on dissolution, displacement and 'higher order/form'—you can see here one of the many ways Freud influenced Bataille's theories/writings. ultimately we might agree that the drives, rather than competing, are irreparably intertwined. "Life is displaced death, and death is displaced life." -> I like this article about them, but the source material is his Beyond the Pleasure Principle (pdf) +if you're interested in this, you could further research in sexology, sexual ethics and phenomenology as regarding sexualities linked to death, namely necrophilia, lust murder/sexual homicide, asphyxiophilia (sexual arousal by oxygen deprivation/erotic asphyxiation) and autassassinophilia (sexual arousal from the idea/risk of legitimately—imperatively, not in a fantasy-sense—being killed)

speaking of necrophilia (from Howard Barker’s afterword for Eroticism and Death in Theatre and Performance):

the last two sentences accordant with the modern usage of la petite mort in which the sensation of orgasm is likened to death. literature which comes to mind: M.G. Lewis’ The Monk*, Gabrielle Wittkop’s Le Necrophile, Angela Carter’s “The Snow Child” and “The Lady of the House of Love” as published in The Bloody Chamber, Poppy Z. Brite’s Exquisite Corpse, some of Baudelaire’s poetry...

then getting into more periphery stuff, there’s a lot of theory on the corpse and its sexuality (touched on above) + fetishisation. some theories have to do with executions, others with the sexual aspects of ritual sacrifice, as below in Death Comes To The Maiden: Sex and Execution 1431-1933 by Camille Naish:

more on the former in Julia Kristeva’s The Severed Head: Capital Visions and Nicole Loraux’s Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman

also the eroticisation of the medical venus—for this i heartily recommend Joanna Ebenstein’s The Anatomical Venus which is an absolutely fucking stunning artwork of a book to caress and coo over and cradle as you would a baby and which has a chapter dedicated to ‘Ecstasy, Fetishism and Doll Worship’ that delves into this (and religious eroticism, ne'er shall these subjects be pried apart for individual study it seems, not that i’m complaining)

+supplementary readings into our corpse-like beauty standards, with the heroin chic of the 90s (which has perhaps insidiously returned?) but esp in terms of the consumptive beauty ideals of the fin de siècle x, x etc etc. pervasive and perverted when beauty—an engine of evolution/a vehicle for sexual selection—becomes dictated by icons of illness

other haphazard things which come to mind: Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae (tw for terf rhetoric); Angela Carter’s Sadeian Woman; cause-and-effect death by sex horror trope/generic imperative of post Halloween/‘78 slasher film; death and the maiden trope ofc which is often highly sexualised

*there is a v good essay on this called “Between Life and Death: Representing Necrophilia, Medicine, and the Figure of the Intercessor in M.G. Lewis's The Monk” by Laura Miller

[against-forms-recognizable]

The wealthier society becomes, the more alienated we become from one another, the more offended and fearful we are of one another, the more ashamed we are to actually be ourselves instead of sticking to the sterile platform of civility. The average person's enthusiasm for this hellscape is dystopian.

Skyrocketing rates of depression, loneliness, freefalling rates of relationship formation, dating, sex, and in the middle of this, the mass, delighted at the ability for capitalism to sell them a product like a Ring doorbell to mediate the fear of their fellow human being that capitalism itself produced in them. And for the depression and alienation modernity inculcates? Well, they can sell you therapy. For the loneliness? Look at these dating services, buy a Super Like now! Consume, consume, consume, and they've been trained to love it, to think that this is how it's meant to be.

Life is dirty, impure, offensive, tragic. We have all of these models of what the good, pure, moral person acts like, what the good life looks like - perfect models that do not exist in reality, meaning that other people are always going to be offensive, always going to be irritating, because they are not these ideals but only themselves, which can never embody an ideal.

We start to find being around others distasteful because it produces within us shame at how we are not what we and others demand of us - we are only our unique selves. We hold these ideals in common above ourselves, suppressing any part of us that does not conform to the mandate of the cop in our head that tells us what to do and how to be.

It is here, when we begin to suppress our authentic selves and genuine desires for the sake of what society demands we must be, that we die in life. A life that is not just a continual process of rendering yourself sterile and inoffensive - that is, a thing that is not alive, since life is inherently unclean and wild and 'death' is the process of becoming a thing that is motionless, without ability to give offense, without ability to conflict - requires an embrace of genuine authenticity, of the life that is cheek by jowl with death. The celebration of life as tragedy - of all of the things society tells us our life should not be, that we must avoid, must cleanse ourselves of - this is what it means to truly live.