Abstract: A short essay in progress on Bataille’s conceptions of “intentionality, violence, exploration, chaos, novelty, death, and opening” in The Story of the Eye. I propose that Bataille’s explanations of sex tacitly and subtly point to an integral phenomena that I will call “opening”. Some of my explications, elaborations, and interpretations.

Opening; The Pursuit of Sexual Pleasure in Bataille’s “Story of the Eye”

Georges Bataille’s Story of the Eye is much more than just titillating quasi-pornographic literature and a story of transgressions in the vein of Marquis De Sade’s writings. It is also much more than just, as Susan Sontag suggests, a “therapeutic” free-essay written with the intent of banishing or pacifying the ghosts of the author’s odd and dysfunctional past – though it is certainly this to a great extent, and this is perhaps Bataille’s understanding of the tacit purpose of his work if we consider his confession that the story was written “with no precise goal” but ended up mirroring many of Bataille’s most traumatic and defining memories in “coincidences” that he later discovered between the plot and his life. However, the aspects that concern me with Bataille’s erotic novel are the theoretical implications of the nuanced outworkings of the plot and what sort of understanding Bataille has of the nature of the conceptual components he is working with. Specifically, my interest lies in how Bataille treats the object of his story: sex, and how he relates sex to intentionality, violence, exploration, chaos, novelty, death, and opening.

Bataille presents the urge for sexual pleasure as an intentional urge towards new relationships with the world. He suggests that in the erratic and novel acts of copulation and producing pleasures of “transgression”, one is gaining pleasure through novel and ultimately Dionysian and irrational relations to various aspects of every part of reality. Though it is not clear whether or not this intentionality of sexual pleasure towards wholly new experience and situated-ness in reality (generally practiced in erratic and chaotic sexual experimentation) lies in causal relationship with physiological aspects of human pleasure, the latter seems downplayed and subservient, or even precluded by, the overwhelmingly singular and unpredictable experiences that result from the pursuit of sexual pleasure in what I have called the Dionysian, erratic, and novel means. I this type of sexual intentionality and action can best be referred to as “opening.” This seems fitting as Bataille’s characters consistently allow bizarre and random sexual urges to carry them into the frenzy of satisfying sexual pleasure that alter entirely their relations to objects, concepts, limits, etc., in comparison to how they interact with them non-sexually. This “opening” is for Bataille a very similar concept to Deleuze’s “decoding” and “deterritorialization”. For Deleuze, desire is a ubiquitous entity that is constructed into the very nature of our discursive realities, and indeed, underlies them. Desire is creative, free, and unbounded, but is channeled and limited in these aspects (i.e. is “territorialized) by societal constructions. For Deleuze, “decoding” the societal territories allows an emancipation of desire and thus allows the formation of novel relationships and transformed reality. The forging of these new relationships is also the result of Bataillian “opening”, and for Bataille its modus operandi is sexual exploration: freely allowing oneself to open up to desire in its most “decoded” and amorphous forms – sexual “opening” is an event by which objects and humans can fall into a state of being “bodies-without-organs” as Deleuze puts it.

of desire: of pulling apart the socially constructed molds and checks for desire and allowing the creative forces of the unbounded desire forge new relationships.

These new or warped or somehow different experiences appear as correlates for any experiences of great sexual pleasure in Bataille’s novel. After experiencing the radical sexual breakdown of their friend Marcell, the protagonists -the narrator and Simone- have trouble finding sexual pleasure except by departing from the memory of their friend’s radical breakthrough experience of openness and madness (p.21). Throughout the novel the “opening” of the charachters must be come more and more radical in order to chase the sexual pleasure that they seek: each exploration must become not only an exploration of new territory, but it must be a new method of exploring new territory. Shortly after their initial sexual encounter, the narrator and Simone are incorporating violence into their explorations and redirecting their sexual intentionalities to other subjects in orgies. With the death of Marcelle, dies a once novel fetish as well[1], and Simone finds that “almost everything bores her” (p.54). This is overcome only by a new and erratic sexual quest that results in Simone’s having sex in the mud of a pigpen, violently convulsing and bleeding from self-inflicted harm. Of course, the continued need for new ways to awaken sexual pleasure climaxes in the ultimate episode of the book in which the sacred is profaned in the name of sex: an almost unthinkable new relationship to the divine is forged via perverting sacred temple objects, seducing/raping the priest, killing the priest and then even thriving relationally off of his death by using his eyeball as a stimulant of sexual pleasure. In this occurance, many new “explorations” take place, but in the end, not only new uses of bodies and physical entities takes place (a novelty of action), but a quasi-ultimate revaluation of the conceptual nature does as well in the urge to deliberately defile symbols of things that stand as objectifications of the attempts to pacify and suppress the exact urges that Simone and the narrator are radically giving into.

There is, of course, a physiological element which symbolizing “opening” and this is, by Bataille’s description, the “cunt”[2]. An “opening” can be a boundary of intentionality within which new relations are formed, new objects are essentially permitted to enter the vacuum of conceptual space; the “cunt” is the fitting physiological equivalent. In the example of Simone we see that her vagina is the physical locus in which the conceptual and objective aspects of “opening” intersect. This is apparent especially when Simone is pleasuring herself via inserting unorthodox objects into her “cunt” and thus her field of relations; those objects are things such as eggs, bull’s testicles, and a human eye.

 

In exploring the various sexual “openings” of the characters in this book, Bataille consistently draws a strong relationship between sexual pleasure and violence; this deserves a special mention as his treatment of violence as one of the radicalizing forces of opening is distinctive in its affinities to the sexual urge itself. I do not wish to overplay this point, but I think there are some distinguishing factors that pair violence and “opening” so closely together and why violence features so prominently in Bataille’s descriptions of the sexual. Violence and sex share many of the attributes of “openness” that I have hitherto outlined: violent actions represent a novelty of action in that they redefine relations between objects in a way that is affective: the forces of violence are felt, just as the felt pleasure of sex correlates with the force of “openness”. The methodology of violence and sex is erratic in that the movements and relations of bodies, motives, and intentions (and with all these the feelings) is in fluctuation during the acts and is improvised to greater or lesser affect and effect. It is precisely in this intention to affect something outside of one (be it person or personified) that sheds light on the intentionality of violent and sexual actions. Everything comes into relation with the acts of violence of sex either in the role of affecting the event or as an effect of these affections[3].

“Opening” and violence ally vividly in the episode of the bullfights. Not only does the crowd react ecstatically to the fights of the most violent bull and lethargically to the “unpugnacious” ones, but Simone’s sexual urges follow the intensity patterns of the violence as well. The initial thrilling fight sends the narrator and Simone off to engage in their own thrills of the flesh, evidently stimulated by the violent death of the bull to quest for their own ecstatic and fragmented ritual in which the “le petite mort” or “little death” of the orgasm is pursued. The fitting climax of this episode is when Simone orgasms from her experimentations with raw bull testicles (noted to be shaped similarly to an eye) and the matador is simultaneously gored to death by the bull: putting out his eye and leaving it to dangle from his head (p.64). The matching of these events in time, and the connotations of similar imagery (eye/bull testicles) draws an ambiguous, but undeniable link between violence->death and opening->orgasm. A further example of the close relationship between violence and opening, death and orgasm can be found towards the very end of the novel. When the priest is overcome with remorse and shame for his role in a series of unclean actions, Simone mounts his prostrate body and begins to choke him: this violence leads him to become involuntarily sexually excited and, as could be expected, his last breath of life correlates with his greatest moment of (in this case involuntary) opening, which is followed by simultaneous orgasm and death.

 

 

 

[1] See section on the violence and death of sex and orgasm: metaphor for the way humans live.

[2] Translation of Joachim Neugroschel.

[3] Or in the terminology of the aforementioned Deleuze, violence and sex share their commonality as revolutionary and radical measures of decoding and deterritorialization.

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