Sunday, February 1, 2009

Bataille's fearsome fantasy of eyes, eggs and testicles

This one's not for the faint-hearted: I read Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye yesterday. 

Bataille's perverse surrealism is not just shocking, it reaches down below into the subconscious and wrenches something way down in there. Scary stuff. 

The idea of starting with the eye, so obviously connected with ego, dominance, arousal and everything else metaphysical, and then reducing it to a purely physical fetish object ... that's a superbly wicked and an (inspiringly!) bleak view of reality. From there, the free associations to eggs, testicles and corpses seem just mundane.

I reached Bataille from "The Past is a Grotesque Animal", a superb track on of Montreal's 2007 "Hissing Fauna ...". I'll have to go slowly to keep my sanity, but more Bataille seems inevitable. More of Montreal too.

1 comment:

  1. It's been years since I read that, but I remember liking it. Bataille manages to go into perversion in a much lighter style than de Sade, and almost make it funny, too. I liked the religion references :-)

    Aldapuerta also has a book on the same obsession, "The eyes". He's a bit too much though, compared to Bataille, and probably beyond de Sade, too.

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