巴代伊《眼睛的故事》中演示的情色觀

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(1)國立師範大學英語學系. ! 碩士論文 ! Master’s Thesis ! Department of English ! National Taiwan Normal University ! ! ! !. 巴代伊《眼睛的故事》中演示的情色觀. ! ! ! !. Bataille’s Notion of Eroticism as Illustrated in Story of the Eye. ! ! ! ! ! !. 指導教授：賴守正教授 Advisor: Professor Lai Shou-Cheng 研究生：陳慧真 Hui-zhen Chen. ! ! ! ! !. 中華民國 105 年 8 月 August 2016.

(2) 摘要. !. 本篇論文旨在以巴代伊於《情色論》中闡述的情色觀，來詮釋他的短篇小說《眼睛的. 故事》。在巴代伊眼中，情色是人「有意地踰越存在界限，而造成的不平衡」。這意味著故意迷失自我、故意不知輕重、與故意失去現實感。這些種種的故意失序，帶來失去生命的危險，但對巴代伊而言，卻導向一種他稱為「神聖接續」的境界。在這種境界中，人的存在融入了無始無垠的宇宙，有如水存在於水中。他終身所有的關懷與追求，都與之有關。. 在第一章，我試圖用巴代伊「異質學」的概念，解釋《眼睛的故事》看似毫無章法的. 敘事手法，並探討《眼睛的故事》的情節如何演示自我意識、合宜舉止、現實感的全盤消融。在第二章，我根據《情色論》中，『情色與宗教系出同源』的說法，介紹巴代伊思想中「神聖接續」令人費解的雙重面相：崇高純潔，和汙穢下流。兩種層面都以各自的方式，通往巴代伊追求的「神聖接續」。我分別列舉宗教文獻中的記載和《眼睛的故事》情節，說明兩種層面的相似性。在第三章，我說明自我界限的消除，反而凸顯內在本有的神聖接續。. ! !. 關鍵字：極限經驗、情色、神聖接續、異質學、排泄學、內在經驗、喬治·巴代伊、眼睛的故事、情色論.

(3) Abstract This thesis intends to interpret Bataille’s novella Story of the Eye with his notion of eroticism: “the disequilibrium in which a being consciously calls his own existence in question” (Eroticism 31). This questioning involves a general sense of loss, including the loss of the sense of ego, the sense of propriety, and that of reality. These losses endanger a being’s existence, but they also promise a sacred state which Bataille terms as la continuité de l'être (“continuity of being”). In this continuity a being is emerged in “the universal flow of all that is” like water in water. This thesis is divided into three chapters. In Chapter One, I explain how Story of the Eye manifests the loosening of the sense of ego, propriety, and reality, with Bataille’s notion of heterology. In Chapter Two, I introduce the dualistic facets of la continuité de l'être — the elevated and the defiled. Both facets bring forward sacred continuity. I will support Bataille’s assertion that “religious and erotic passions are of one origin” by enumerating evidences from religious documents and scenes of Story of the Eye. In Chapter Three, I explain the nullification of ego as the way toward la continuité de l’être which is immanent for a being.. ! Key words: eroticism, l'erotisme, la continuité de l’être, heterology, scatology, inner experience, limit-experience, immanence, Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye, Histoire de l'oeil.

(4) Acknowledgement I still cannot believe I have finished this thesis. The whole task of composing it has been like surpassing an insurmountable mountain from the very beginning to the very end. Too many times I thought there is nothing more for me to continue writing, and that I will either give up or die. It is with the aids from many of my beloved people that the completion of this thesis becomes possible. First and foremost, I would like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Professor Lai Shou-cheng. For me, he is like the catcher in the rye who stops me from falling into despair. Without his kindness, encouragement, and guidance through the long period of my study, I would never finish this thesis. I would like to thank my committee members Professor Liang, Sun-Chieh and Professor Chen Chao-ming too. They point out many of the inadequacies of my writing. And their encouragements and comments are invaluable to me. My utmost appreciation is to my parents. Their unconditional love and faith in me over all the years of my study supports me all the way until now. I will always be grateful for being their daughter, as much as I will always try my best to make them proud..

(5) Table of Contents Introduction. 1. Chapter One Bataille’ Heterology in Story of the Eye. 8. 1. Experience Instead of Discourse. 9. 2. Sensuality Instead of Propriety. 20. Chapter Two Dualism of the Sacred: its Holy and Defiled Facets. 34. 1. The Pure Sacred. 35. 2. The Impure Sacred. 38. Chapter Three Ongoing Undifferentiation. 54. 1. Nullification of the Ego. 54. 2. Continuity Among Oppositions. 57. 3. Immanence in the Sacred. 62. Conclusion. 66. Works Cited. 70.

(6) Chen 1!. Introduction Story of the Eye is a novella about a teenage couple’s erotic exploration. On their way wandering through southern France, Spain, and Italy, they undertake various erotic activities with various partners. These activities involve transgression of many taboos, including sodomy, fetish, voyeurism, homicide, coprophilia, necrophelia, sacrileges to Catholicism, and many “misconducts.” These activities get more violent when the story approaches to its end. The story begins with the encountering of the protagonists—the narrator and Simone. At their first sight of each other, both of them feel an erotic anxiety. They then start an affair, living furtively in Simon’s bedroom, practicing odd games with peculiar toys — eggs and urine. This love life is later joined by Marcel, an incarnation of obedience, who goes schizophrenic and hangs herself after several transgressive erotic games. The couple later travel from France to Spain, in order to run away from the police’s investigation after a frantic party. In Seville, they watch a game of bullfight, in which Simone shows a strong inclination for exhibitionism, fetishism, and necrophilia. They then go to the church where Don Juan is buried. In the church they victimize a pious young priest. After playing amorously upon their victim’s body, causing his mental breakdown, the protagonists practice erotic asphyxiation on him. They then pull his eye out for masturbation. Afterwards, they travel else where to continue their erotic practices. Commenting on Georges Bataille’s novella Story of the Eye, Surya describes once its storyline as “thrown on the table like dice, obeying a logic that eludes us even as it forces us to pose the question [of whether the story is simply thoughtless]?” (Surya 100) With the non-sequential occurrences of tortures and deaths, the protagonists’ obsession with fecalphelia, erotic asphyxia, necrophilia without explanation, Story of the Eye seems a random compilation of oddities— readers can hardly tell whether there is cause-and-effect or development usually expected in a novel. Furthermore, the work is difficult to be classified in terms of style, and can hardly be read without uneasiness. Not only is its development odd and illogical, but the protagonists’ unseemliness are.

(7) Chen 2!. almost always inexplicable. Surya concludes that “none of ‘its contemporary books’ can even come close to matching either [its] violence or… frenzy” (Surya 104). Although critics including Roland Barthes and Julia Kristeva have written about Bataille, both of them neglected the center of Bataille’s thought — eroticism (Richardson 16). In his “The Metaphor of the Eye”, Barthes elaborates on transformations of “the Eye” which produces various meanings when situated at different contexts in Story of the Eye (Barthes 239). Kristeva agrees with Bataille’s idea of “heterology” in her affirmation of “movement[s] preceding discourse and the subject” (Kristeva, Bataille 240) in the universe. She agrees that science, knowledge, and philosophy are established by exclusion of everything other than symbols1 and therefore are always . incomplete. However, her discussion remains far from the erotic turbulence which Bataille continuously probes in his study. Most critics, while discussing Bataille, limit their exploration within the interrelations of language, neglecting “the most intense” issue and “the loftiest peak of man’s spirit” (Eroticism 273). Until now few researches have been made on Story of the Eye with its author’s own notion which he in different occasions terms as “heterology,” “scatology,” “sacred sociology,” “interior experience,” and at the final period of his life, “eroticism” (Hollier 75). Each term implies a different characteristic of his notion. And the variability of names suggests the instability and intangibility of what Bataille explores—desires and violent impulses. I perceive Story of the Eye as Bataille’s endless strive to challenge man’s existence2, on the . ground of his ideas about eroticism, a notion that is is not to be understood as states or attempts of sexual desire, but rather, one involving inner, inexplicable powers that force a being to lose his stability. In Story, he continuously explores the boundaries of being, and this exploration causes the disequilibrium of existence. Ultimately, individual boundaries are loosened; a transcendental state. 1 ! In. her essay on Bataille, she directly quotes from L’Erotisme, “I have sacrificed everything in the search for a point of view from which the unity of the human spirit may emerge” (Bataille 240). 2 !. The book mirrors the mind of its author. It is a result of Bataille’s psychotherapy under doctor’s prescription (Surya 99)..

(8) Chen 3!. of continuity replaces individual distinctness. Story may be perceived as the experimental exploring of the limits of all possible kinds, particularly about existence. Watching these turbulences, its readers feel uneasy because their sense of propriety labeling them as proper human beings is menaced as badly as the protagonists. This thesis intends to interpret Story of the Eye with Bataille’s central idea — eroticism, a being’s deliberate “calling into questions” of his own existence (Eroticism 31). Although he considers no form of deliberate work is sufficient to show “the outermost reaches of human life”, he elaborates on “the extremes of [the] subject” by various terms (Eroticism 259). And his novella Story of the Eye provides a reflection of his mind enabling his readers to imagine what he tries to convey. The idea of “calling [one’s being] into question” is related to a yearning for “death” or “continuity”; both allow an individual to transcend his individual separateness (Eroticism 13). In the meantime, the calling also suggests certain “loss of self” because those boundaries constituting the person’s individuality would be dissolved in the process of merging (Eroticism 31). Although the drive for transcendence has always been repressed ever since the primordial human beings evolve from animal to man (Eroticism 30), the modern man is nonetheless fascinated by possibilities to destroy the balance of his own being. Such desire drives him toward “transgression,” the breakthrough of individual limitations. When Bataille says man “consciously calls his own existence in question” (Eroticism 31), he refers to the anxiety that drives man to transgression. The anxiety comes from individual being’s awareness that he will cease to exist and perish away. Such awareness makes him anxious. He longs for merging into “the continuity of all existence with which [the whole universe] is… one” (Eroticism 22). He is always driven by a wish to break through personal limitations prescribed by physical and social conditions, in order to connect with the universal continuity (Eroticism 15). The beginning of taboo marks the beginning of civilization. Man is different from animals by reason. His civilization begins when he starts to regulate his violent impulses so that a stable.

(9) Chen 4!. environment needed for developing civilization is ensured. “Man is an animal that denies himself” (Eroticism 39). He has to deny his violent impulses so that he becomes from animal to man. “He begins [to become man] by self-denial” (Eroticism 39). Yet his inner impulses never really perish. The repression of impulses becomes taboos, and then “the object of taboo [is removed] from our consciousness” (Eroticism 38). It must be noticed that to transgress taboos is nothing like returning to animal violence: “ [transgression] is violence still, used by creature capable of reason“ (Eroticism 65). In Chapter One, I will explain the abnormalities3 in Story of the Eye with the idea of . heterology. Although some of the undertakings in the book can be framed by terms such as fecalphilia, necrophilia, Sadism, and others related to sexual deviations, there are something other than what these terms encompass, something that outflows the definitions. For example, Simone’s “mania for breaking eggs” (Story 10) evolves into multiple forms so deviant and awkward that the episodes about eggs and egg-shaped eyes become almost surreal. Moreover, it often confuses the readers that Bataille narrates on and on about odd events without giving any reasonable explanation. I will begin by introducing scenes of abnormalities in Story of the Eye. Then, I will explain the notion of heterology which initiates the concept of breaking through thresholds of all kinds. Heterology as illustrated by Bataille is the state entirely unrelated with the anything based on ideas. His “continuity of being” is achieved through the disregard of “forms”— breaking through thresholds opens possibilities to a universal communion in which all individual existences links together. I will explain that the absurdities, the disorder, the violence in Story open the door to Bataille’s state of unity with the universal one, which occurs after transgressing the boundaries of death and ego. More importantly, the chaos which is usually taken as “nothing,” affects upon every aspect of man’s living more than he envisions. The heterogeneous that is not to be assimilated by 3! The. “abnormalities” in the novella include Simone’s fondness of breaking fresh eggs with her private part (Eye 10), her pissing on her mother (11), the protagonists’ infatuation in urine, eggs, eyes, intercourse beside a corpse (50), Simone’s desire to sit on peeled balls(62), Simone’s placing of human organs in her private part (83)..

(10) Chen 5!. science or philosophy, leads the way to a sublime existence — unity with the cosmos. In this unity, descriptive languages are demolished. Actions and experiences, instead of the explanation and interpretation of them, replaces discourse that reduces unlimited possibility to homogeneous utterances. In Chapter Two, I argue that the infinitely “low” state explained in Chapter One comes parallel with religiously elevated state. Both states are of one origin, manifested in dual facets; both reach la continuité de l’être. The sacred, another term for la continuité de l’être, can be manifested in various aspects, such as religious bliss, the monarch’s sovereignty, and unbounded violence. Among these manifestations, I compare religious sacredness with its repellent counterpart to show that the end of the holy and the defiled are one. Both facets requires expenditure. And the more generous the spending, the more sacred effect follows. The goal of the spending is the universal continuum wherein distinctive individuality melts away. To provide evidence for Bataille’s saying that religious and voluptuary passions are one (Eroticism 7), I use documentations about Catholic testimony, ancient Aztec sacrifices, and Herman Hesse’s religious novel Siddhartha. These materials show how the spending of useful resources leads to the sacred, and that in both the lofty and sully, there exists possibility for continuum with the universe. My explanation will show that Bataille’s exploration of the defiled deeds in Story of the Eye is the vestige of his wandering toward the low sacred. Bataille elaborates that in the Aztec society, consumption is more important than production, and that expenditure brings glory equivalent to the sacred. He begins by analyzing the Aztec mythology, and then move on to introduce the relationship between the victim and the sacrificer, in order to show that expenditure is of religious importance. The Aztec mythology encourages its people to value violent death, as the more extravagantly one spends, the more glory he gains in return (Accursed 1:23). The wars and sacrificial rituals are the Aztec people’s way to reach the divine unity with the universe..

(11) Chen 6!. In Chapter Three, I argue that the release of the idea of ego as the way to merge solely to the universal immensity. In the pure facet of the sacred, Jesus sacrifices himself, so that the entire human race is redeemed, elevated to paradise. In the impure facet, the Aztec sacrificial ritual enables man to experience universal one in silence by killing — tossing the victim into the universal immense void. The killing of a fellow creature similar to himself would make an individual understand the universal flow beyond his limited perception. Then, I explain that the contradiction of the pure and impure is nullified in this immense universal flow. My argument comes from the mystical experience of a Christian, as well as an epiphany depicted by Herman Hesse. By showing examples from the high to the low sacred, I wish to show that in Bataille’s ideas, the low has equal significance with the elevated. I will explain the idea of “immanent immensity,” which is another term for la continuité de l’être. “Immanent immensity” is framed out to oppose the primacy of utility. In the common course of life, a thing is given a value for the future profits it brings. This results in the alienation of a thing’s value and its immanent value. And man in this context becomes a slave himself. He at this moment exists only for a later moment, unable to enjoy the present. Bataille’s idea of immanence defy this endless deferral of value, asserting the inner value in things. “Immanent immensity” suggests that universal immensity lies within man himself. As long as he is willing to discard the obsession of ego, social norms, and taboos, he immediately becomes the universe himself. Behind the fear of death, if he dares to cross over it, he becomes the opening “to everything that can be.” With infinite possibility, he makes himself the “being at the pinnacle of being” (Eroticism 274). Story of the Eye is “not a result of work” (Hollier 102), but a record of Bataille’s ideal being’s active pursuit of sovereign existence. In the turmoils Story represents, the “continuity of being” is disclosed. The protagonists endlessly quest the farthest possible boundary — of social norms, death, sanity, until the last breath of their victims. One by one, the young martyrs in the story — Marcel, Granero, Don Aminado are demolished in exchange for something greater than.

(12) Chen 7!. themselves and their torturers. In these writings, there is a sense of Bataille’s sacredness which his readers might experience as the participants of a sacrifice.4 Through experiencing the agony and . anxiety in the novella, the experience of death becomes an experience transcending death. . 4 !. Bataille describes the onlookers’ states of mind, “[i]n sacrifice…the victim dies and the spectators share in what his death reveals… [which is] sacredness. This sacredness is the revelation of continuity through the death of a discontinuous being to those who watch it as a solemn rite. A violent death disrupts the creature’s discontinuity; what remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one.” (Eroticism 22).

(13) Chen 8!. Chapter One Bataille’s Heterology in Story of the Eye “Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death—precisely the perspective of poetry—and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility. Only the useful, the real, have a serious character. We are never within our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us. Indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights. —Bataille, The Impossible. This Chapter aims to explicate the oddities in Story of the Eye with Bataille’s notion of “heterology,” a term foregrounding those commonly taken as turmoil and disorder. Heterology, or “eroticism”, interpreted as “the disequilibrium in which a [man] consciously calls his own existence in question”, refers to a predominant aspect of man’s experience that is not to be incorporated by science, philosophy, or any other sort of discourses (Eroticism 31). To put it in another way, the heterogeneous is “something one can have no idea of” and “something that is ‘like nothing else” (Hollier 88). This implies the difficulty to define heterology. To find the heterogeneous in Bataille’s works, it is manifested as violence, pleasure, laughter, horror, etc. — those to be experienced instead of described. These aspects matter much more than the so-called scientific or philosophical truths for man, according to Eroticism. I propose that Bataille accentuates the heterogeneous by actions about oddities. By representing nonsensical actions without transition, he emphasizes experiences — particularly those which can hardly be defined, rather than discourses. By doing so he means to escape limitations of all sorts. Among the turmoils hence produced, there reveals a supreme state of being — la continuité de l'être (“continuity of being”), an experience transcending all sorts of bounds. Those nonsensical sexual activities in the novella manifest.

(14) Chen 9!. Bataille’s ceaseless exploration for the most intensive possible experiences, leading toward a sovereign existence.. " 1. Experiences Instead of Discourse According to Hollier, the heterogeneous refers to those unthinkable, those which would “not give itself to being known”, “not a matter of science”, and those “constantly overflow the category of objectivity”. Unlike science which is “by definition only applicable to homogeneous elements,” the heterogeneous “do not intervene in the same areas as science” (Hollier 88). In other words, the heterogeneous would not subject itself to homogenization; it escapes the definition and regulation of discourses and science. Based on this character, Bataille represents the heterogeneous by depicting a series of actions and materials. For example: Upon my asking what the word urinate reminded her of, she replied: terminate, the eyes, with a razor, something red, the sun. And egg? A calf’s eye, because of the color of the head (the calf’s head) and also because the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball. The eye, she said, was egg-shaped. She asked me to promise that when we could go outdoors, I would fling eggs into the sunny air and break them with shots from my gun, and when I replied that it was out of questions, she talked on and on, trying to reason me into it. She played gaily with words, speaking about broken eggs, and then broken eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable (Eye 38-9).5 . In Story of the Eye, he represents the protagonists’ actions in a way with full determination but no sign of aim, resulting a strong sense of nihilism:. 5!. Bataille’s contemporary surrealists utilize similar technique to inspire those which are not to be expressed by language. With those juxtapositions of utterly irrelevant objects, Story somewhat is correlated to its contemporary surrealist productions in the late 1910s and early ‘20s. The novella’s juxtaposition of random concepts and images resembles surrealist works of art..

(15) Chen 1! 0. Simone and I, our clothing lost, were forced to leave the château, fleeing like animals through the hostile darkness, our imaginations haunted by the despondency that was bound to take hold of Marcellele again, making the wretched inmate almost an embodiment of the fury and terror that kept driving our bodies to endless debauchery…isolation of lewdness, weariness, and absurdity (Eye 31). As he asserts in another critical essay, this sense of uncertainty is based on the end he is after, “what [the protagonists are driven into] is not important…because these things are, actually, nothing” (Literature 18). The “nothing” here refers to those which do not subjugated to any form of discourses. And although this nothingness seems to result in chaos, it nevertheless implies freedom from all discursive or ideological boundaries. Hence, his degeneration into nothingness may be perceived as a deliberate approach to an unbounded existence. 1.1 Erotic Oddities as the Heterogeneous Bataille astonishes his readers with a collage of sensual experiences and oddities. Take the “Eye” in Story’s title for example, Simone’s improvisational tricks on globular organs seem unable to be sorted out by any method. These ball-shape organs — eggs, eyes, testicles, whether endowed with sensual or spiritual significance in common discourses, are treated grotesquely or even horrifyingly in various contexts. For instance, throughout Chapter Two, eggs are employed in the protagonist’s dawdling: That was the period when Simone developed a mania for breaking eggs with her ass. She would do a headstand on an armchair in the parlor, her back against the chair’s back, her legs bent toward me, while I jerked off in order to come in her face. I would put the egg right on the hole in her ass, and she would skillfully amuse herself by shaking it in the deep crack of her buttocks. The moment my jizm shot out.

(16) Chen 1! 1. and tricked down her eyes, her buttocks would squeeze together and she would come while I smeared my face abundantly in her ass. Very soon, of course, her mother, who might enter the villa parlor at any moment, did catch us in our unusual act… “Pretend there’s no one there,” Simone told me, and she went on wiping her ass… A few days later, however, when Simone was doing gymnastics with me in the rafters of a garage, she pissed on her mother, who had the misfortune to stop underneath without seeing her. The sad widow got out of the way and gaped at us with such dismal eyes and such a desperate expression that she egged us on, that is to say, simply with Simone bursting into laughter, crouching on all fours on the beams and exposing her cunt to my face, I uncovered that cunt completely and jerked off while looking at it (Eye 10-11)… [Simon] would sit for a long time, gazing at the eggs. Then she would settle on the toilet to view them under her cunt between the parted thighs; and finally, she would have me flush the bowl. Another game was to crack a fresh egg on the edge of the bidet and empty it under her: sometimes she had me stripped naked and swallow the raw eggs from the bottom of the bidet. She did promise that as soon as she was well again, she would do the same for me and also for Marcelle (Eye 36). Then in the auditorium of a bullfight ring, the fetish for the eggs is transformed to a dead bull’s raw balls: It really was totally out of the question for Simone to lift her dress and place her.

(17) Chen 1! 2. bare behind in the dish of raw balls. All she could do was hold the dish in her lap… and she sat there, keenly involved, despite everything, in the disembowlments of horses, followed, as she childishly put it, by “loss and noise,” namely cataract of bowels… The events that followed were without transition or connection, not because they weren’t actually related, but because my attention was so absent as to remain absolutely dissociated. In just a few seconds: first, Simone bit into one of the raw balls, to my dismay; then Granero advanced toward the bull, waving his scarlet booth; finally, almost at once, Simone, with a blood-red face and a suffocating lewdness, uncovered her long white thighs up to her moist vulva, into which she slowly and surely fitted the second pale globule — Granero was thrown back by the bull and wedged against the balustrade; the horns struck the balustrade three times at full speed; at the third blow, one horn plunged into the right eye and through the head. A shriek of unmeasured horror coincided with a brief orgasm for Simone, who was lifted up from the stow seat only to be flung back with a bleeding noise, under a blinding sun; men instantly rushed over to haul away Granero’s body, the right eye dangling from the head (Eye 63-4). From those games related to eggs, eyes, orgies, urines, excrements, blood, to uncanny events of bullfight, the abuse of the priest — Bataille’s incidents are often too immediate immersion into obscene circumstances that his audience are left in anxiety (for having no clue about where he is going). One after another, he presents disturbing, if not abhorrent episodes. His readers have to endure an “unwilling suspension of disbelief,” despite being appalled, so as to be able to read on. It seems he has few intention to make his book agreeable. 1.2. Discursive Premium as the Heterogeneous.

(18) Chen 1! 3. Bataille’s writing aims to “spill over” the boundary of ideas6. For example, the protagonists’ . fondness for eggs and Simone’s urination on her mother exceed the common category of sexual aberration. Their dalliance with eggs illustrates the notion of “agiology” (Bataille, Sade 12) — the premium portion not to be circumscribed by ideas. It is men’s common mode of thinking to attribute everything with a cause. They can therefore keep everything understandable and reasonable, ensuring the mass of the universe is sorted as a system. But beyond the system they construct for everything, there are more grandeur unknownness that remains silent and invisible. Within the shelter of ideas, a cultured man would “feel at home in a clarity which gives it an impression of mastery”, but this illusion of ideas is based on nothing more than what men can cognate (Hollier, Dualist 124). One fact is too often ignored: those other than the perceivable are never recognized. “Agiology,” or “heterology” refers to those which “ideas” can not enclose. The heterogeneous is what Bataille wishes to portrait in Story of the Eye. Since the heterogeneous is out of the reach of ideas, he adopts a style eluding ideas, too. Bataille recounts the difficulty of capturing the effluence of meanings: “[i]t has been impossible for me to describe [the heterogeneous] without contradictions and without going over the same ground more than once a collection of erotic situations which are anyway nearer one another than these deliberate attempts to distinguish between them would have one suppose” (Eroticism 146). And according to Encyclopedia Acephalica he edited, “[Bataille’s] ideas do not exactly form a coherent philosophical system” (Encyclopedia 20). In his preface to Literature and Evil, Bataille announces, “[t]urmoil is fundamental to my entire study” (Literature 3). But immediately following this, he declares his ambition, “[b]ut the time has come to strive towards a clarity of consciousness.” Faced with such ambiguity, if not impossibility, Hollier’s strategy to describe “the heterogeneous” is exclusion — for him, the heterogeneous is “like nothing else,” having no way to be understood (Hollier 98); and. 6 !. This idea comes from the term “agios,” which Hollier perceives as “analogous to the double sense of sacer" for its twofold sense of being both defiled and holy (Hollier 98)..

(19) Chen 1! 4. “[the heterogeneous] connects laughter and touch…, [and is] deprived…of speech”; “cannot employ language [because otherwise it would be] on the track with philosophy”; “not a result of work” (Hollier 100-2 )7. He poses the question: “what about silence and night in relation to ideas?“ . to illustrate the “non-relational relation” between the heterogeneous and ideas — they have nothing to do with each other (Hollier 101). In a word, the heterogeneous refers to what is beyond the frame of ideas. As Hollier put it, if there appears a term to describe the heterogeneous, it will be assimilated into the system of ideas and become “on the track with philosophy” (Hollier 100). Men have the “desire” to categorize the obscene in certain forms, and also the unwillingness to place the “indecent” into “forms“ (Hollier 101). Hollier draws example from Plato’s Parmenides to illustrate a human mind’s inner conflict which the heterogeneous is like: the sense of both “repulsion” and “desire” when confronted by obscene objects. In this dialogue, Socrates is asked to tell Parmenides about “[the] things… [that] have an idea (or form, depending on the translation).” According to Hollier, this is an act of defining “the limits of idea” (Hollier 99). For [ideas of similarity, of one and of many, the just, the beautiful, the good, and of the man], Socrates “answers affirmatively.” But as for the “scatological set”, those “that would really seem ridiculous — hair and mud and dirt, for example, or anything else which is utterly worthless and trivial”, Socrates hesitates and “turns away… with all possible speed and returns to his refuge” (Hollier 99). It is the mode of man’s mind to request “everything that exists [to] have its corresponding form,” and this initiates “a contradiction that Socrates finds frightening”. “If he would talk nonsense his disgust would disappear” — because to be able to “talk about” presupposes the object-in-discussion been taken with significance, hence no longer trivial. “One must not think about things one has no idea of” because otherwise the certainty of the universe would be questioned. “[I]t is the anguish of Socrates, his disgust and his flight that infer scatology… If he could talk nonsense his disgust would disappear: neither hair, mud, dirt, or pleasure would make him laugh any more,” Hollier concludes 7!. “Theoretical heterology does not exist; any project of heterological theory is just the most ordinary of ruses used by theory as a cover for attaining its own goals, which are the assimilation of the other” (Hollier 88)..

(20) Chen 1! 5. (Hollier 101). In the entry he writes for Encyclopedia Acephalica, Bataille shows respect to the heterogeneous by annotating “worthless” matters. In his narration, the very character of being “formless” becomes the focus here. The hierarchy of ideas over the unverifiable is reversed. For example: Spittle: Spittle bears closely on erotic manifestations, because…it plays havoc with the classification of organs…daily [sullies] the visible sign of intelligence… Spittle is finally, through its inconsistency, its indefinite contours, the relative imprecision of its colour, and its humidity, the very symbol of the formless, of the unverifiable, of the non-hierarchized. It is the limp and sticky stumbling block shattering more efficiently than any stone all undertakings that presuppose man to be something — something other than a flabby, bad animal, something other than the spittle of a raving demiurge, splitting his sides at having expectorated such a conceit larva: a comical tadpole puffing itself up into meat insufflated by a demigod (Encyclopedia 80). Big Toe: “The big toe is the most human part of the human body, in the sense that no other element of this body is so differentiated from the corresponding element of the anthropoid ape…Also, the function of the human foot consists in giving a firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud….But whatever the role the foot plays in his erection, man, who has a light head, a head raised to the heavens and heavenly things, regards it as spit, on the pretext that he has this foot in the mud (Encyclopedia 87). Bataille’s obsession with the object “eye” may be generated from his wish to subvert what is commonly sublimated. In the entry he writes for the term “eye”, he elaborates the mainstream elevation of notion “eye” in a sarcastic tone: Usually endowed with a sense of beauty and.

(21) Chen 1! 6. significance, convention of “the eye” include: “l'œil d'une œuvre”(the look/eye of the work), “(I treasure it/him/her like the apple of my eye)”, “Pour vis beaux yeux” (for your beautiful eyes) (Encyclopedia 44). And in Story, this idealized icon is tainted by urines, blood, amid private parts of human body (Eye 93). It is no longer the elevated, but the filthy that is mostly sketched. Defiling of the elevated icon creates abhorring effects. The “acephale” figure embodies Bataille’s idea of the irrational over ration (Encyclopedia 12). It stands in contrast with the common notion that the head leads other parts of the body, ideally toward a sublimated state. Disregarding the assumption that the head is the most elevated part of man, Bataille implies it is “the base,” or the corpse that dominates human’s existence: Although within the body blood flows in equal quantities from high to low and from low to high, there is a preference in favour of that which elevates itself, and human life is erroneously seen as an elevation…with their feet in the mud but their heads somewhat approaching the light, men obstinately imagine a tide that will elevates them, never to return, into pure space. Human life requires…this rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from ordure to the ideal, and from the ideal to ordure, a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot (Encyclopedia 87). This entry shows Bataille’s attempt subvert the “dignity” usually envisioned upon man. In Hollier’s words, he “not only “tackle[s] man low,” but is also [determined to ignore] anything not low” (Hollier 78). A statement from Le Coupable illustrates another envision of his, representing an unproductive, prodigiously absurd existence, a spendthrift toward an futile end: ”abruptly I feel I have become an erect sexual organ, with indisputable intensity… The idea that my very body and my head were no more than a monstrous, naked, and blood-swollen penis seemed so absurd to me that I thought I would collapse in.

(22) Chen 1! 7. laughter. Then I thought that such a stiff erection could only end in ejaculation: the comic situation became literally intolerable… [F]rom the bottom to the top of my head a burst of light passed—as voluptuous as the passage of semen through the penis (qtd. Hollier 84-5). Being unseemly, this statement nonetheless portraits the aimless violence of erotic impulses dominating the body, with the head’s guiding function eliminated. The priority of sanity over sensuality is subverted. Besides, both the Acephale and the above figure imply fusion — man is released from ration insulating him with the cosmos one. The precedence of the upper above the lower part of the body is reversed—”as above, so below,” and “as below, so above” (Encyclopedia 12). The opening in Acephale’s trunk welcomes the unnamable heterogeneity outside; its body acts and experiences without reason’s guide. As Bataille remarks himself — his ideal personality is one that “think[s] the way a cock would think if it were at liberty to demand what it wants” (Hollier 105)8. . Bataille’s aim is to emphasize impulses escaping from restrictions, including social norms, bodily limitations, scientific and philosophical discourses that aims to eliminate violence, pleasure, horror and anguish in man. A scholar must be “disinterested” and “dispassionate,” independent of emotions. This leads to the ignorance of passionate aspect of man’s experiences. As Bataille remarks, “I have long been struck by one thing. The true philosopher must devote his life to philosophy…Superiority in one field bought at the expense of relative ignorance in other fields” (Eroticism 253). Ever since the presumption of reason over the emotional is formed, man is deprived of the right for those which cannot be reduced to the homogeneous. In order for producing uniformity (for the sake of discussion), whatever is other than the consistency has to be eliminated. Precision and 8!. The figure of the acephale is an advanced version of the reversed renaissance ideal pentagram, which is transformed from an ideal pentagram with “the five-pointed star always upright, with the topmost triangle pointing to heaven, for it is the seat of wisdom” (Hartmann 168). “A reversed pentagram, with two points projecting upwards, is a symbol of evil and attracts sinister forces because it overturns the proper order of things and demonstrates the triumph of matter over spirit” (Lévi 66)..

(23) Chen 1! 8. unified standards are the foundation of science. Based on this foundation, knowledge can be accumulated and improved. Without simplification and exclusion, scientists could never clarify anything. And the mass of the universe will remain a mysterious turmoil. Science henceforth eliminates those which cannot be reduced as numbers or signs; what cannot be placed within the system of classification is referred to as “nothing” or “not worth discussing.” It then appears that science has assorted everything into a systematic spectrum serving as an all-inclusive foundation for more advanced researches.9 But in the meantime an invaluable price is paid—man takes a great . amount of experiences for granted, having half-knowledge about themselves. Moreover, scientific method do not always takes everything into account. For example, the science of economics, based on a group of economic models, is notorious for incorrect prediction. Forecast differs as many as economists. Computers can outmaneuver human chess masters; but when playing on real chessboard (instead of using the computer as interface), robotic arms often fails to position the chess pieces. The common reason for these failures is that science only functions well in ideal conditions free of unwanted factors. Unwanted substances and conditions must be cleaned up to create a pure environment which is often rare. Throughout the process of any scientific experiment —from assumption to consequences , everything is artificial creation. A legend of the history of mathematics shows that what scientist considers self-evident is very likely the result of exclusion of what cannot be reduced to ideas. The Greek mathematician Pythagoras considers irrational numbers as in conflict with the rule of a well-balanced universe10. . For this reason he forbids the discussion of negative numbers in his school in order to keep this. 9!. Hollier specifies blind spot of science: “Science develops as a process of pure assimilation, an assimilation that would not be followed by any excretory phase”…“Science…eliminates any difference that is not logical, or reduces it to a specific difference, a difference defined by the possibility of [man]. Difference must be reduced, diminished, and strung together by logic”…“Theory does not know or encounter its other. The other escapes it. But it is primarily because this other does not give itself to being known, because it has nothing to do with theory. There is…only homological theory; a theory of the other would change nothing, since it would not break with the space of theory but just come down to the same thing once more” (Hollier 86-7). ! 10. “The Pythagorean world view … was based on an extreme admiration for the arithmos—the intrinsic properties of whole numbers or their ratios—and their presumed role in the cosmos. The realization that there exist numbers, like the Golden Ratio, that go on forever without displaying any repetition or pattern caused a true philosophical crisis… What is clear is that the Pythagoreans basically believed that the existence of such numbers was so horrific that it must represent some sort of cosmic error, one that should be suppressed and kept secret” (Livio 4-5)..

(24) Chen 1! 9. “cosmic error” secret.11 He even has Hippasus, the supporter of irrational number, drowned at sea . so that he would not disclose the secret (Michaelides 27). Scientific findings are acquired at the expense of ignoring what cannot be understood by human minds. As another intellectual field constructed upon ideas, philosophy gives too little attention to sensational experiences. As work, philosophy requires discipline which brings man away from his violent impulses. Philosophy has to ignore man’s passionate moments and is therefore insufficient in providing a sound investigation of the whole of humanity’s experience. The moments of violent impulses and discipline are mutually exclusive. Bataille takes extreme experiences to highlight this problem, The experience of extreme states of being…dislocates us and excludes calm reflection, its essence being to put us “beside ourselves.” It is difficult to imagine the life of a philosopher continually or at least fairly often beside himself. We come back to the essential human experience dividing time into working time and sacred time” (Eroticism 260). Philosophy neglects the heterogeneous. In order to formulate a discourse, it has to disregard whatever it cannot use as ideas. Those disregarded, taken as “nothing” or “irrelevant” are driven to the shadow of the night. Extreme sensual experiences are among those neglected as non-relative to rational discourses. But can philosophy claim its authority over knowledge if what philosophy grasps is based only on a part of the man’s total experience? Can philosophy provides solutions for man if it does not know the entirety of human being who is comprised of both man and animal’s elements? The oddities in Story — those remain outside the definition of ideas and the classification of mental diseases or sexual aberrations, hint that Bataille is not only trying to escape the confinement. ! 11. Irrational numbers refer to numbers which cannot be represented as a ratio of integers, therefore 0.75 is a rational number because it is equal to 3/4, while a circle’s circumference π is an irrational number. The golden ratio φ, and the square root of two, and all square roots of natural numbers, are irrational numbers..

(25) Chen 2! 0. of ideas, but also bringing to light extreme states of existence. Philosophy is insufficient in containing the totality of man’s experience. By smearing the clarity the system of language builds, Bataille tries to disclose the long-forgotten states of instinctive existence occurring in moments related to death and birth — the moments of continuity. The heterogeneous leaks from the fissure among orders. What he means by “disequilibrium is poetry” (Eroticism 24), is that the loss of forms makes jouissance possible. As Hollier puts it, “Philosophy’s precise function lies…in this empire of theory where all the ideological practices limiting language to an instrumental function are gathered… Philosophy’s task is to demonstrate that there is nothing threatening about them, either because they are not, in fact, foreign at all, and do not escape science’s jurisdiction; or because they have no reality, that nothingness, for example, is strictly saying nothing at all, etc. What is essential is that nothing exists outside of a theoretical horizon; nothing escapes examination in the distancing that is the basis of theory; nothing exists that cannot be mentioned, that has no name, that cannot be subsumed into some conceptual abstraction. What is essential is to preserve continuity at any cost…even, by reducing the unknown to no more than a distant province of the known, or the infinite of the finite.” (Hollier 88-9) 2. Sensuality Instead of Propriety Bataille considers that philosophy should be “the sum of the possibles in the sense of a synthesis” (Eroticism 254). By saying so he wishes to retrieve the attention on those long-neglected sensual aspects in intellectual researches. Opposing the rejection on those which cannot be reduced to ideas, he devotes passion on the study of undefinable conducts. In Story of the Eye, the sentiments he shows can hardly be conceived by common sense. This is because his ambition is to “[measure] the immensity of the void that yawned before us” (Eye 40). In another word, his purpose is to explore as much as possible man’s unfathomable instincts. Hence those conforming to.

(26) Chen 2! 1. propriety has to be irretrievably misplaced in the novella. Bataille would not allow his readers a break during those ceaseless turmoils because if he provides “a place where the soul protects its peace”(Hollier 88), his narrators would had fallen into theories which he opposes. What is proper has to be continuously disrupted. With few pauses, he creates continuous stimulation to the senses, especially in the aim of challenging propriety. Among these oddities, there is an aggravated power so overwhelming that readers feel as if they are carried on burdens of uncertainty while they read. The irregularities in his plots extend so aimlessly that the protagonists indulge in the loss of direction12. His aim is to ensure that none of their activities are productive and that none of these . endeavors leads to a sublimated state which propriety promises. 2.1 Threshold of the Self In his trance, the narrator in Story of the Eye recounts, it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection, and if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars…without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness (Eye 33). These words recapitulates Bataille’s life-long subject matter: incessant indulgence until one loses his sense of self, immersing into the universal flow of all time and space. For Bataille, this is an ultimate salvation in that one’s limited existence is hence replaced by the unceasing universal unlimitedness. Its means is to waste life away enthusiastically without reservation, and endlessly challenging the limits of existence. After death, a being is dissolved into the universal continuity, as if it is a star hanging in the celestial vault, much more outlasting than the transient human being. ! 12. The sense of desperation both in the novella and his Eroticism— the ceaseless “[assent] to life until death” (Eroticism 11)—until all vitalities sustaining life is squandered away, may be traced back to the author’s childhood experience. It seems Bataille tries to avoid one aspect of life by indulging totally in another—the first aspect being “the real world of utility,” the other of “violent pleasure, horror and death” (The Impossible). In the second part of the novella, he explains his conversion from a pious Catholic to a renouncer of God: while the German troops invaded , his mother and he had to abandon his blind, paralyzed father, leaving him to die alone. It is said that his father died miserably, crying madly for his children. Bataille therefore comes to understand that human beings are all relentlessly in a state “blind, immeasurable…abandoned on the globe like my father”(Eye 101). He then loses his faith, believing that man is in actuality abandoned by God, destined by nothing other than chance: “No one on earth or in heaven cared about my father’s dying terror”(Eye 101). He fights for such misery by imagining his father’s fighting with death— ”Still, I believed he faced up to it, as always. What a horrible pride”…”(Eye 101)..

(27) Chen 2! 2. The young couple’s debauchery aims to lose their propriety and merge with the universal void. In another words, they let go of themselves to become continuous with the immensity of the universe. Bataille’s way to the highest kind of existence involves a wish to death; in his words, it is a drive to “go beyond the world” (Encyclopedia 14)13, a wish for the “loss of the self,” mentally and . physically. It involves a drive to ceaseless challenge the limit of existence14. As Hollier explains, . The erotic effect can be defined as the loss of what is proper: the simultaneous loss of cleanness in filth and of one’s own, proper identity in an expropriating violation. Being is dissolved, carried away by the action of dissolute existence. Eroticism opens being to a slippery action where they give themselves over and are lost, where their excess leaves them wanting (Hollier 74). The erotic wish is related to the destruction of the body’s boundary. The body’s frame stops it from overflowing or losing its individual distinctness. Skeletons and skin assemble all bodily parts in proper position, making livelihood possible. But these organs limit the body simultaneously — to “frame” is both to put something inside a structure that holds it and to express something in words — this suggests that utterance and exclusion are inter-dependent. Jouissance stops the body from proper function, opening the body’s interior to welcome the immense universal unity. Man’s fear for death — one stringent restrictions binding him, keeps himself safe and sound. With the fear, he would not cross any boundaries that harms his being, e.g. to drive in a car without break, or to strangle himself to the point of death. Yet, to be able to transcend all sorts of boundaries, the audacity for death is required. The body’s form has to be eliminated in order for jouissance to take place (Hollier 82). Bataille’s interpretation of the word “threshold” in Encyclopedia illustrates the horror to ! 13. The Sacred Conspiracy, which prefaced the first issue of Acéphale, contained an appeal to go beyond the world: “It is time to abandon the world of the civilized and its light…A world that cannot be loved to the point of death, in the same way that a man loves a woman, represented only self-interest and the obligation to work” (Encyclopedia 14). ! 14. Bataille defines his notion of eroticism as “the disequilibrium in which the being consciously calls his own existence in question” (Eroticism 31)..

(28) Chen 2! 3. break through one’s bounds. Adopting a jocular tone, the heterogeneous as those outside the certain and finite are nonetheless threatening: The threshold is the node which separates two opposing worlds, the interior and the open air, the cold and the warm, the light and the shade. To cross a threshold is thus to traverse a zone of danger where invisible but real battles are fought out (Encyclopedia 84). A threshold both protects the being from harm and limits his possibility. What is beyond the threshold is scary because it is unknown — people are ambiguous toward to what is on the other side of the threshold : As long as the door is closed, all is well. To open it is a serious matter: it is to unleash two hordes, one against the other, it is to risk being caught up in a fray… This goes to show that the threshold, that is to say the doormat, of which it is the visible sign, is indeed a thing of dread, because there one must manifest or cast aside one’s qualities (Encyclopedia 84). The horror of tackling with the unknown is encountered by a drive to cast oneself away. Despite the regulation of his senses, man could not help but squander away excess energy, resulting a disequilibrium of his existence (Eroticism 104). Simone’s sudden “strong urge to relief herself completely” (Eye 38) forebodes death, and moreover, an annihilation of the culture based on the repression of impulses. In Eroticism, the author says man has an anxiety that his being will perish one day, while paradoxically, death is the way to transcend death. This anxiety and urge toward death interact in many episodes in Story: Granero risks his life until death in a bullfight. Don Aminado is strangled to death for the pleasure of the protagonists. Both victims have explored the limits of their lives. Although to indulge themselves into the unknown results in destruction, the onlookers and the victims are henceforth merged with a silent immensity through daringly stepping across their lives’ boundary. For example, the scene of Don Aminado’s death demonstrates.

(29) Chen 2! 4. Bataille’s erotic effect. In crossing over life’s boundary, there are desperation and ecstasy: First I am going to tell you a story," Sir Edmund said to him sedately. "You know that men who are hanged or garroted have such stiff cocks the instant their respiration is cut off, that they ejaculate. You are going to have the pleasure of being martyred while fucking this girl." And when the horrified priest rose to defend himself, the Englishman brutally knocked him down, twisting his arm. Next, Sir Edmund, slipping under his victim, pinioned his arms behind his back while I gagged him and bound his legs with a belt. The Englishman, gripping his arms from behind in a stranglehold, disabled the priest's legs in his own. Kneeling behind, I kept the man's head immobile between my thighs. "And now," said Sir Edmund to Simone, "mount this little padre." Simone removed her dress and squatted on the belly of this singular martyr, her cunt next to his flabby cock. "Now," continued Sir Edmund, "squeeze his throat, the pipe just behind the Adam's apple: a strong, gradual pressure." Simone squeezed, a dreadful shudder ran through that mute, fully immobilized body, and the cock stood on end. I took it into my hands and had no trouble fitting it into Simone's vulva, while she continued to squeeze the throat. The utterly intoxicated girl kept wrenching the big cock in and out with her buttocks, atop the body whose muscles were cracking in our formidable strangleholds. At last, she squeezed so resolutely that an even more violent thrill shot through her victim, and she felt the come shooting inside her cunt. Now she let go, collapsing backwards in a tempest of joy (Eye 79-81)..

(30) Chen 2! 5. The dead body is an object of fetish because of reasons related with limitation and continuity, too. First, the loosening of his body’s limitations allows a man to reach his supreme state of being. Inferring the facial expression of a tortured Chinese criminal, Bataille argues that extreme pleasure is similar to extreme pain — the slowly killed man’s facial expression is similar to that of a person feeling ecstasy. Bataille concludes that the loosening of body’s boundaries leads to jouissance. More importantly, discharging the body’s frame is connected with death which links everything as a continuity — a person’s body erects moderately when alive; when he dies, he perishes away into the grand void, the continuity that links the whole universe. His proper form as a man vanishes, replaced by the silent continuity. A corpus’ completely loosened muscles that no longer exert indicate the dissolving of their master’s controlling power. There is no longer a will over the body. The postmortem half-way open mouth, eyes, and distorted limbs are signs of complete loosening of muscles—a state of absolute relaxation that could not be reached by any living person. This absolute relaxation opens the way to the continuity once thoroughly guarded by the body’s form. The body is an empty vessel open to “the universal flow of all that is”. Second, the corpse insinuates to the onlooker that his individual distinct being will be replaced by the continuity with the cosmos. The horror caused by the corpse and the sorrow for the diseased relative form a bizarre feeling. According to Bataille, the man’s terror for a corpse comes from his knowledge about his own destiny acquired at the sight of the corpse: What we called death is in the first place the consciousness we have of it. We perceive the transition from the living state to the corpse that is, to the tormenting object that the corpse of one man is for another. For each man who regards it with awe, the corpse is the image of his own destiny. It bears witness to a violence which destroys not one man alone but all men in the end (Eroticism 44). The corpse suggests both the body’s form and its void. Death makes it clear that the body is a vessel once contained but empty for now. Faced with this ambiguity, man has to cope with the anxiety that.

(31) Chen 2! 6. his once-beloved is now a source of horror. The erstwhile dear being now becomes an unfathomable void. It would not respond as used to when talked to or touched. This is frustrating and overwhelming enough for the living ones. The emotional incongruity between the absolutely convincing immobility and the onlooker’s inner drive to get close to the beloved dead one makes the onlooker dizzy. As another major victim in Story, Marcelle's insanity is directly linked with the loosening of her sense of ego. Her pleasure comes from the same origin as her shame: she is aroused because she is aware of her transgression of her own proper being. Transgression makes everything about her at a loss: her sense of self and her behaviors are in turmoil. Psychologically forced (by the young couple) to abandon herself, she is casted in the state of loss, free from worldly obligations. In this sense, she is made to reach a sacred realm which Bataille considers parallel to religious sacredness (Eroticism 7). The more pious she is, the more degenerated she feels. The befouling of her purity unties her mundane bounds. As the narrator of Story says: Marcellele’s smile, her freshness, her sobs, the sense of shame that made her redden and, painfully red, tear of her own clothes and surrender lovely blond buttocks to impure hands, impure mouths, beyond all the tragic delirium that had made her lock herself in the wardrobe to jerk off with such abandon that she could not help pissing (Eye 21). Being struck of her proper identity, her purity fulfilling the protagonists’ wish for defilement, Marcelle is transported into a lawless state that Bataille longs for. (Eroticism 145). Excrements serve as reminder of the body’s threshold as they are once part of the body but are separate from it now. Moreover, excrements are signs of death, along with urines and other bodily fluids, in that their overflow indicate the perishing of the person’s will. The excrements smear the body’s boundaries, allowing whatever outside to enter. Since the body now is an empty vessel, it is open for communication. Once controlled by the person, the fluids are now free to flow.

(32) Chen 2! 7. out of the body’s openings. The appearance of these liquids outside a carcass suggests the total unleashing of the self into nothing. For the person, the carcass, excrement and urine are “the nothing from me” (Nietzsche 22 )15; they cause Socrates’s confusion, anguish and repulsion because . they are formless16. And this “nothingness” is what Bataille endeavors to fuse himself with — the . deliberate pursuit of loss, and the appeal to go beyond the world. Excrements as nothingness represent the unleashing from all sorts of boundaries—-worldly obligations, social rules (the taboo of dirtiness, nudity, etc.), and the body’s form. 2.2 Threshold of Propriety Commenting on the limitation of narration in Sleeping Beauty, Bataille says, In order for the fairytale to be self-contained, the storyteller of the Sleeping Beauty would not let her be “awoken covered in a think layer of dust; nor have they envisaged the sinister spider’s webs that would have been torn apart at the first movement of her red tresses… Maids of all work… are perhaps not completely unaware that they are contributing every bit as much as the most positivist of scientists to respelling the injurious phantoms that cleanness and logic abhor (Encyclopedia 42-3). Foregrounding the dusts and spiderwebs ignored in the fairytale, Bataille shows that propriety is the result of exclusion of those not conforming to “cleanness and logic.” In another entry he writes for the word space, he emphasizes a limitation of men’s perception and their imagery effort to cover up this insufficiency: ! 15. In order for protecting themselves from diseases, human beings inherited an instinct to be afraid of corpse and excrements. People who avoid the filthy tend to thrive than those who do not. In Bataille’s words, people deny these scatological materials as null: “Excrements is the dead part of me I have to get rid of, by making it disappear, finally annihilating it” (Nietzsche 22). ! 16. “In the dialogue bearing his name, Parmenides would like for Socrates to tell him what things, according to him, have an idea (or form, depending on the translation): for example, is there an idea of similarity, and idea of one and of many? Is there an idea of the just, the beautiful, the good? Is there even an idea of man, and idea of fire or of water? To the first two sets of examples offered by Parmenides, Socrates answers affirmatively and without hesitation, but faced with the last group, having to do with physical beings, he admits to some confusion, which Parmenides, with a new set of examples, will further increase. Here is this last, “scatological” set: “And what about these, Socrates—they would really seem ridiculous—hair and mud and dirt, for example, or anything else which is utterly worthless and trivial. Are you perplexed whether one should say that there is a separate form for each of them too, a form that again is other than the object we handle?” (Hollier 99).

(33) Chen 2! 8. Unfortunately space remains a lout, and it is difficult to enumerate what it engenders. It is as discontinuous as it is devious, to the utter despair of its philosophical-papa…Without one’s being able to say why, it seems that an ape dressed as a woman is no more than a division of space. In reality, the dignity of space is so well established and associated with that of the stars, that it is incongruous to assert that space might become a fish swallowing another… Space would of course be far better off doing its duty and fabricating the philosophical idea in professors’ apartments! (Encyclopedia 75-7) By saying so Bataille highlights the issue that man weave out connections and similarities for the boundless nature beyond their perception. For every discontinuous incident, man has to give it a cause in order to “make sense” out of it. As Hollier interprets, “science…puts [ripped up thoughts] together, laying bridges that will cancel out the rift” (Hollier 92). Hence there results in a fundamental issue of knowledge — interdependency within an enclosed system symbols: Not only language, but the whole of intellectual life is based on a game of transpositions, of symbols, which can be described as metaphorical. On the other hand, knowledge always proceeds by comparison, which connects all known objects to one another in relations of interdependency…And if I see a dog running, it is just as much the run that is dogging (Encyclopedia 61). Absurdity is the state of language or situation losing its proper form17. In the entry of the word . “formless,” Bataille asserts that it is a word serving to “declassify”18, and then he further rejects the . notion that “everything should have a form” (Encyclopedia 51). When he says that philosophy imposes a “frock-coat” on “what exists” (Encyclopedia 52), he is suggesting that the world should ! 17 ! 18. The word “idea” and “form” are synonymous in Ancient Greek language, compatible in translation (Hollier 99).. Bataille’s interpretation of the term “formless” indicates his aim to “declassify, requiring in general that everything should have a form” (Encyclopedia 51). “For academics to be satisfied, it would be necessary, in effect, for the universe to take on a form. The whole of philosophy has no other aim; it is a question of fitting what exists into a frock-coat, a mathematical frock-coat. To affirm on the contrary that the universe resembles nothing at all and is only formless, amounts to saying that the universe is something akin to a spider or a gob of spittle” (Encyclopedia 51-2)..

(34) Chen 2! 9. get rid of these limitations so as to retrieve the repressed heterogeneous that remains unknown. The threshold between obscenity/normality reveals the limit of ideas. It is exactly the obscene that indicates where ideas, as to propriety, stop to function. In order to get rid of the bounds of ideas, Bataille aims to explore the lower, and if possible, those “lower than the lowest” (Hollier 102). His ambition has no limitation. “Obscene words are themselves obscene realities” (Hollier 106). These straight-forward dictions in Story are free from the world of ration. They are in the realm of the violence. By unlimited employment of plain dirty words, Bataille keeps on challenging the confinement of propriety, bringing his audience endlessly to the lower. The scene of the streetwalker in sir Edmund’s pigsty19 illustrates the loss of propriety20. First . . of all, the streetwalker wears only cami-knickers, baring herself to external surroundings. This is similar to the move of stripping naked before sexual intercourse, as well as depriving the victim of his life in a sacrificial ritual, according to Bataille’s idea of eroticism; both conducts make communication possible by taking barriers off (Eroticism 17-8). When the streetwalker “collapses,” her being as a disclosed discontinuity is open, and she is free to dissolve into external turmoils, linking with the universal oneness. This scene has the same erotic effect with a sacrificial ritual or sexual intercourse in that the individual discontinuous participants are thus released from their enclosed discontinuity, reaching a state of sacredness. As Bataille concludes, obscenity “is our name for the uneasiness which upsets the physical state associated with self-possession (Eroticism 17). The streetwalker lives in a special kind of freedom similar to that of animals or the underworld people: poverty exempts a streetwalker from social norms — she knows she lives like a pig, and is not ashamed of it (Eroticism 134-5). ! 19. “Sir Edmund had a cramped, windowless pigsty, where one day he locked up a petite and scrumptious streetwalker from Madrid; wearing only cami-knickers. she collapsed in a pool of liquid manure under the bellies of the grunting swine. Once the door was shut, Simone had me fuck her on and on, in front of that door, with her ass in the mud, under a fine drizzle of rain, while Sir Edmund jerked off” (Eye 55). 20 !. Bataille’s contemplation on the notion of the filth may be traced back to his childhood experience. Since childhood, he attends his paralyzed, blind father. The experience includes “[sees his] father shit a great number of times” (Eye 99). The boundary of cleanness and filth which is clear in other households is very often blurred for the young Bataille. And this childhood experience is also the origin of “the eye” and the “bull’s gland” in Story. He therefore is given a chance to meditate upon one of the most important, but often neglected issues in humanity’s experience..

(35) Chen 3! 0. Pleasure, laughter, violence, the filth, the trivial, are those ideas “have nothing to do with,” but the experience of these has the power to make man transcend the “humdrum world of existence” (Hollier 100)). Their fundamental “uncontainable difference” as the heterogeneous aspect of humanity’s experience is an important part of man that he cannot escape from (Hollier 103). Pleasure could only be experienced, not meditated upon. The pleas for pleasure does not actually effect upon pleasure. No matter defended or not, pleasure never ceases to be. It silently lurks somewhere in humanity like the pulse of his heart. In Accursed Share, Bataille illustrates the mysterious quality of man’s physiological response — between the outer experience and his physical response, there seems to be no assured mechanism guaranteeing the manifestation of a person’s emotions. For example: “the paradox of happy tears… which a happy event provokes as readily as misfortune” shows that people know little about the cause of tears (Accursed I 204). “Marcelle’s smell, freshness, touch, and her reddening for shame” (Eye 21) provoke the protagonists in Story in the same way. She is unforgettable to them (after she was locked in a sanitarium) not because of something that forms an idea, but because of something formless. It is possible to say that the protagonists miss her because of something “automatic, instinctive, unlearned.” These automatic instincts do not form a theory. In Story, Bataille represents a similar occasion about bodily reaction without explaining: [Simone] came back affectionately and said in a gentle, dreamy voice: “Listen, [Marcelle] won’t be able to help pissing when she sees us…making it.” Hearing this, the narrator reacts automatically: I felt a hot, enchanting liquid run down my legs, and when she was done, I got up and in turn watered her body, which she complaisantly turned to the unchaste and faintly murmuring spurt on her skin (Eye 20). The process between the narrator’s hearing and responding is speechless and mysterious. No interpretation for this mechanism can promise absolutely correct reason. This is one of the examples.