"All it takes is to imagine suddenly the charming little girl whose soul would be Dali's abominable mirror..." If I had to imagine Bataille's"charming little girl" she would be the blonde, demonic child that appears at the end of Fellini's short film Toby Dammit. An incarnation of Satan holding a large red ball which is really Toby's head lost in a wager. She would bear the names: Simone, Marcelle, Lazare, Dirty, Eponine, and of course Marie.
How does one explain Bataille's body of work, which like all bodies, physical and metaphorical, is assumed to be unified but contains on the one hand the jerking off of an encephalitic dwarf and on the other a critique of the Marshall Plan.
Perhaps it is necessary to reconstruct the image of the "body" of the work. In Bataille’s case we could begin by severing the Cartesian head that thinks with a "clear and assured consciousness of that which is useful in life." The body of the work no longer a seamless whole, composed of a series of discourses revealing a full positivity but a body like the image of the Acephale; headless, sacred heart in its right hand, dagger in its left, self-mutilating, a labyrinth of entrails, the skull of genitals. The bowels are a labyrinth where food finds its soul to be shit. The night is a labyrinth where Marie...
No comments:
Post a Comment