Georges Bataille The Dead Man pt. 2

What gender is Bataille's excess? What sex?
About Story of the Eye Roland Barthes says "the erotic theme...is never directly phallic." And Michel Leiris writes concerning the novel's erotic activity; "innumerable possible permutations in a universe so little hierarchized that all is interchangeable there." Bataille replaces the strictures of gender, sexuality and hierarchy, with the orgy of metaphoric chains and their inexorable combinations; eye/egg/testicle.

For example, Simone's vagina transforms from the sex organ which Marcelle and the narrator adore, to the mouth that devours the bull's testicle, and then to the socket for the priest's eye that is the sad gaze of Marcelle. Vagina/mouth/ eye socket. All of the elements of the story go through these changes and experience the random mutations of the basic metaphor. Always in threes, like a perverse parody of the Holy Trinity. The Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. The Eye, the Egg and the Holy Testicle. The hierarchy of gender, the dominance of the phallus broken by metaphor, by a new and obscene grammar.

The Deadman raises the question "What gender is Bataille's concept of sovereignty?" But gender is a poor word when speaking of sovereignty. Gender is a social con­struction, a figure created by the work of discourse. Sovereignty is the story of Marie's escape and transgression initi­ated by Edward's death, by his sacrifice. It is the sacrifice of Edward that opens the possibility of sovereignty and the sacred. Bataille reveals the conditions of sacrifice; "The victim dies, thus the witnesses participate in an element which his death reveals. This element is what it is possible for us, along with religious historians, to call the sacred. The sacred is precisely the continuity of being revealed to those who fix their attention, in a solemn rite, on the death of a discontinu­ous being." The Deadman records Marie's night of sovereignty, her "practice of joy before death." Her useful and everyday world crumbles away, replaced by a life rushing headlong towards death and silence. Along the way towards death preparations with drunkenness, debauchery, and the "little death" of orgasm. Burning with "la part maudite," the excremental, and the heterogeneous, Marie recaptures a life which has been forgotten, repressed by a limited econ­omy of accumulation, equivalence and project. The memory of this sovereignty would be something like the memory involved in the phantom limb of an amputee.

In The Deadman Bataille mixes mortality and dark bur­lesque; the death rattle, orgasm and wail of laughter combine to create a total abjection. Thus it is a sacred text. It is also a Hegelian text. Or rather a text that wrestles with Hegel's imperial system. If Marie is the character of sover­eignty then the Count embodies Hegel's concept of Herrschaft. A laughable, deformed figure that deserves our respect and derision, much like Hegel's system.