Story of the Eye..

Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille was born in Billon, Puy-de-Dôme, in central France. "I belong to a turbulent generation, born to literary life in the tumult of surrealism," Bataille once defined his background. His childhood was a nightmare. Bataille's mother, Marie-Antoinette, attempted suicide several times, but none of her desperate acts succeeded. Bataille loved his father, Joseph-Aristide, who suffered from general paralysis due to syphilis. In 1913 he went mad and died three years later. "What upset me more was seeing my father shit a great number of times . . . ", Bataille later wrote. At the age of fifteen Bataille left school for a period; until then he had not been a good student, but after taking up studies at a boy's school in pernay on the Marne, he completed the first part of his baccalaurat. On the eve of World War I, Bataille converted to Catholicism. In 1916-17 he served in the army, but was discharged because of tuberculosis. Ill health and bouts of depression troubled Bataille all his life. As a young man, he befriended, and was much influenced by, the Russian existentialist, Lev Shestov.

Founder of several journals and literary groups, Bataille is the author of an oeuvre both abundant and diverse: readings, poems, essays on innumerable subjects (on the mysticism of economy, in passing of poetry, philosophy, the arts, eroticism). He sometimes published under pseudonyms, and some of his publications were banned.

Intially attracted to Surrealism, Bataille quickly fell out with its founder André Breton, although Bataille and the Surrealists resumed cautiously cordial relations after World War II. Bataille was a member of the extremely influential College of Sociology in France between World War I and World War II. The College of Sociology was also comprised of several renegade surrealists. He was heavily influenced by Hegel, Freud, Marx, Marcel Mauss, the Marquis de Sade, Alexandre Kojève, and Friedrich Nietzsche, the last of whom he defended in a notable essay against appropriation by the Nazis.


The Acephale

Fascinated by human sacrifice, he founded a secret society, Acéphale, the symbol of which was a decapitated man. According to legend, Bataille and the other members of Acéphale each agreed to be the sacrificial victim as an inauguration; none of them would agree to be the executioner. An indemnity was offered for an executioner, but none was found before the dissolution of Acéphale shortly before the war. The group also published an eponymous review, concerned with Nietzsche's philosophy, and which attempted to think what Jacques Derrida has called an "anti-sovereignty". Bataille thus collaborated with André Masson, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Caillois, Jules Monnerot, Jean Rollin and Jean Wahl.


Illustration by Bellmer

Bataille drew from diverse influences and used diverse modes of discourse to create his work. His novel Story of the Eye (Histoire de l'oeil), published under the pseudonym Lord Auch (literally, Lord "to the shithouse" — "auch" being short for "aux chiottes," slang for telling somebody off by sending him to the toilet), was initially read as pure pornography, while interpretation of the work has gradually matured to reveal the considerable philosophical and emotional depth that is characteristic of other writers who have been categorized within "literature of transgression." The imagery of the novel is built upon a series of metaphors which in turn refer to philosophical constructs developed in his work: the eye, the egg, the sun, the earth, the testicle...



I read this book, when i was 21 and it opened a whole host of writers and styles to me i fell in love with the raw graphic emotional landscapes he sculpts with his descriptive prose., all with strong roots in the surrealist/subversive nature of the style, some of my other favourites are Alistar Crowley and early william burroughs straight through to the strong Beat style of Karouac and Ginsburgh. More to come on all these writers...

AGENT B