Torture photos
Torture photos
Abandoned and, in his eyes, equally betrayed by his colleagues, Bataille began work on his mystical riposte to St. Thomas, the Summa Atheologica,
a three volume corpus, where war, religion, and an atheological
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iconography would again fuse, not in historical time or in the world of politics, but in Bataille himself. The question for Bataille was not, however, simply about displacing politics to inner experience, but also reconstructing an aesthetic around the inner, an interiority that would replace the full Catholic aesthetic with a world of representation that fully engaged the harrowing ecstasy experienced before an absent god; an aesthetic of wounded subjectivity becoming the wound that was the Earth—of ruined men ruining themselves in the midst of historical ruins. Bataille would sacrii ce and sacralize himself, and, inspired by Angela de Foligno (Hollywood 2002:60–80) and St. John of the Cross, become the void that was superior to a humiliated god who could only be an atheist. The aesthetic was participatory and, far from a simple act of apprehen- sion, it entailed that one use the image as a pivot for the experience of self-wounding.
One cannot separate Bataille’s religious and political sensibilities from his development of the apophatic aesthetic, insofar as all three sites were (un)grounded in the experience of their very impossibility. What began in religion would be diverted to the political, only to culminate in the mysti- cism of “inner experience,” which was both a retreat from politics and religion and their most radical reconi guration. It was also a reconi gura- tion of the senses and sens. Bataille’s search for political community were, thus, relegated to an internal drama that coni rmed and compensated for his lack of agency, a lack that in inner experience he would cease- lessly enlarge. But regardless of whether we interpret inner experience as a politics or the l eeing of politics, one cannot deny that it is a place of translation; through inner experience, formlessness is thus translated on political time and the liquidation of the images attached to the dialectical movement of history.
Bataille’s mystico-eroticism was neither calculated, rule-bound, nor something to be learned. However, it did include ascetic–aesthetic prac- tice which Bataille described as the entrance into the “alternation of exal- tation and depression, emptying existence of its contents”; the quest for the empty-zero state deprived of agency which is a healing structure (Bataille 1961:39). Moreover, in replacing compensatory morality with the sacrii cial, he inadvertently replaces the Republic with the wound, the symbolic representation with tearing. Durkheimian morality, replete with its transcendent totemic structures, could not instantiate the “wound, the pain necessary to communication” and thus real sociality (ibid.:50). In other words, if “the crucii xion is the wound by which the believer com- municates with god” (ibid.:51), in God’s humiliated absence, communi- cability can only be engendered through a wounded humanity, divorced from consistency, morality, and rest; but like the community formed around the abject body of Christ, we too had to disclose our abjection. The method was violence and a dramatization that mimicked the move- ments of sacrii ce, where one “breaks internally with the particularity
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that encloses me in myself” (ibid.:57). Aesthetic experience therefore also includes the overcoming of the representation of selfhood, upon which all acts of perceiving are mistakenly predicated. And dramatization is intrin- sically aesthetic insofar as, following Kalliopi Nikolopoulou, it “emerges in conjunction with visuality . . . Bataille draws on its acoustic and tactile aspects. The wind howls in our ears and strikes our bare skin. Visual, acoustic, or tactile, dramatization is the contestation of language in the domain of affect” (Nikolopoulou 2009:99), Bataille refused to close Hegel’s circle and become the sage who secretly feared madness. He aspired to become the remainder of logos, the secular, and the knowable—the remainder of art.
It is also in Le Coupable, the i rst volume of the summa, that we i rst encounter Fo Chou Li, the would-be assassin of Prince Ao Han Oaun, who, upon being caught was sentenced to Leng Tch’e or the Torture of
a Hundred Pieces. 9 Bataille was haunted not only by the severed limbs
of Fo Chou Li, but also by the executioner who carefully performed the amputations (Bataille 1961:63). It is not clear if Bataille knew if he was looking at a photo that resembled the crucii xion but the photo was the key to the method of dramatization that Bataille would elaborate in the second volume of the Summa, L’Expérience intérieure (original 1943/1955), where, liberated from his solitude, he would also argue for the authority of experience.
Inner experience opposed all dogmatism and the servitude attached to both confessional and mystical state in favor a bondless confrontation with God as Nothing and the God of Nothing that was revealed through fever and anguish. A variation of Loyola’s exercises, dramatization forced one “to go beyond what one naturally felt” (Bataille 1951:28) and enter the dark labyrinth of experience, where Ariadne’s string was cut (ibid.:45). Denuded through the sacrii cial violence of inner contestation, “man” was overcome by the negative and bereft of desire; “inner experience is the contrary of action” insofar as “action is entirely dependent upon project” (ibid.:59). Existing in a void, he is the “being who dies” that l ees the limits of the “being who lives” and achieves the sovereign summit by becoming the “vertiginous hope, burning fever, where the limit . . . is pushed back” (ibid.:86). Inner experience is catastrophe, not salvation (where being goes nowhere).
However, while ecstasy had no intrinsic object, Bataille would stare at the Chinese torture victim who he used as the “point of dramatization:” “I i xate on a photographic image—or sometimes the memory of it—of a Chinese man who must have been executed in my lifetime . . . the patient, chest l ayed, twisted, arms and legs severed at the elbows and at the knees. His hair standing on end, hideous, haggard, striped with blood, beautiful as a wasp . . . I write ‘beautiful’” (ibid.:139–40). Hollywood argues that while Bataille engaged in dramatization and reconi gured the War into the war of inner-experience, he was also using the image of the
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Chinese torture victim as a “stand in for those victims of Nazi violence” (ibid.:62). However, in sacrii cing himself vis-à-vis his identii cation with the torture victim, the question of his complicity with the executioner is also posed. Bataille’s abiding interest in sacrii cial communities from his early perversion of Mauss and Hubert to the failed experiment of Acéphale attest to not only a will to victimhood, but a wrestling with internal sadism as well. Far from liquidating the sadistic and masochistic in the act of identii catory jouissance, Bataille incarnates both tendencies simul- taneously. Whether considered as pacii sm, abnegation, or the search for
a new aesthetic communal ground, Bataille was confronting more than Nazi victims in L’Expérience intérieur. In 1947, he later wrote: “We are not simply the possible victims of executioners: the executioners are like us . . . Our potential is thus not simply for pain, it also extends to passion for torturing” (Bataille 1988:266).