We are left with the question whether the rhetoric we have been describing can account for all eroticism or whether it is peculiar to Bataille. A glance at Sade’s eroticism, for example, suggests an answer here. It is true that Bataille’s narrative owes a great deal to Sade, but this is mainly because Sade laid the foundation for all erotic narrative in so far as his eroticism is essentially syntagmatic in character. Given a certain number of erotic loci, Sade deduced all the figures (or conjunctions of persons) capable of bringing them into play. The prime units are finite in number, because there is nothing more limited than erotic material. Yet they are sufficiently numerous to lend themselves to apparently infinite combinations (the erotic loci combining in positions and the positions in scenes) whose profusion is the beginning and end of Sadian narrative. In Sade there is no appeal to metaphorical or metonymical imagination, his eroticism being purely combinatory; but probably this very fact gives it a quite different direction from Bataille’s. Using metonymical interchange, Bataille drains a metaphor, which although double is by no means saturated in either chain. Sade on the other hand explores very thoroughly a field of combinations that are free of any kind of structural constraint; his eroticism is encyclopaedic, sharing the same accounting spirit as prompted Newton or Fourier. For Sade it is a question of tallying erotic combinations, an undertaking that (technically) does not involve any transgression of the sexual. For Bataille it is a question of exploring the tremulous quality of a number of objects (a modern notion of which Sade knew nothing) in such a way as to interchange from one to another the functions of obscenity and those of substance (the consistency of the soft-boiled egg, the bloodshot, pearly colouring of the raw balls, the glassy quality of the eye). Sade’s erotic language has no connotation other than that of his century: it is writing. Bataille’s has the connotation of the man’s very being and is a style. Between the two something is born that transforms all experience into language that is askew (devoyé, to borrow another Surrealist word); this is literature.
Notes
The Metaphor of the Eye
1. “En hommage à Georges Bataille”, in Critique, nos. 195–6, August–September 1963.
2. These terms, taken from linguistics, are now common currency in French literary criticism. Syntagma means the plane of concatenation and combination of signs at the level of actual discourse (e.g. the line of words); paradigm means, for each sign of the syntagma, the fund of sister—but nevertheless dissimilar—signs from which it was selected.
3. I refer here to the antithesis established by jakobson between metaphor as a figure of similarity and metonymy as a figure of contiguity.
THE BEGINNING
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Story of the Eye first published in France as Histoire de l’Oeil 1928
The Pornographic Imagination first published by Martin Seeker & Warburg Ltd in Styles of Radical Will 1967
The Metaphor of the Eye first published in France as
Le Métaphore de l’Oeil in Critique 1963
First published in this edition by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd 1979
Published in Penguin Books 1982
Story of the Eye copyright © J.-J. Pauvert, 1967
This translation copyright © Urizen Books, 1977
The Pornographic Imagination copyright © Susan Sontag, 1967
The Metaphor of the Eye copyright © Roland Barthes, 1963
This translation copyright © Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd, 1979
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-141-91367-4
The Pornographic Imagination
* This is very clear in the case of Genet’s books, which, despite the explicitness of the sexual experiences related, are not sexually arousing for most readers. What the reader knows (and Genet has stated it many times) is that Genet himself was sexually excited while writing The Miracle of the Rose, Our Lady of the Flowers, etc. The reader makes an intense and unsettling contact with Genet’s erotic excitement, which is the energy that propels these metaphor-studded narratives; but, at the same time, the author’s excitement precludes the reader’s own. Genet was perfectly correct when he said that his books were not pornographic.
* Unfortunately, the only translation available in English of what purports to be Madame Edwarda, that included in The Olympia Reader, pp. 662–672, published by Grove Press in 1965, just gives half the work. Only the récit is translated. But Madame Edwarda isn’t a récit padded out with a preface also by Bataille. It is a two-part invention—essay and récit—and one part is almost unintelligible without the other.
Georges Bataille, Story of the Eye
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