The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity--an unending wealth of many representation, images, of which none belongs to him--or which are not present. This night, this interior of nature, that exists here--pure self--in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head--there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye--into a night that becomes awful.
--G. W. F. Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie"
In his "Critical Dictionary" entry on the "Eye" in the September 1929 issue of Documents Georges Bataille notes the seductive quality of the eye, only to add that "extreme seduction is probably at the limit of horror." (1) As an example of such horror, he cites the eye-slitting scene from Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali's recently completed film, Un Chien andalou:
In this respect, the eye could be related to the cutting edge,
whose appearance provokes both bitter and contradictory reactions;
this is what the makers of Un Chien andalou must have hideously and
obscurely experienced when, among the first images of the film,
they determined the bloody loves of these two beings. That a razor
would cut open the dazzling eye of a young and charming woman--this
is precisely what a young man would have admired to the point of
madness [deraison], a young man watched by a small, sleeping cat,
a young man who by chance holding in his hand a coffee spoon,
suddenly wanted to take an eye in that spoon. (2)
Bataille, of course, shared the Surrealists' fascination with the
eye, but what is interesting here is the ambivalence he identifies
in the eye--the proximity of seduction to horror--and its
relation to the image. Indeed, this passage could easily pass as an
example of Surrealism that transposes the shock of the lacerated
eye from Un Chien andalou to the image of a spoon enucleating an
eye. The proximity of seduction to horror is also evident in the
illustrations that accompanied this entry: for instance, Bataille
juxtaposes an engraving by J.-J. Grandville, First Dream: Crime and
Atonement (1847), with a photograph of the Hollywood starlet Janet
Flynn. The juxtaposition of these images recalls the eye-slitting
scene in the Un Chien andalou, particularly the episode in the
lower left corner of Grandville's etching, where the eye approaches
a collapsing column. Bataille's discussion of the eye seems to
allude to an element of abyssal negativity that not only transforms
the seductive look into the threatening gaze, but provokes acts of
unprecedented violence--violence also evident in the illustration
of the sensational magazine L'OEil de la police (The Eye of the
Police) and Dali's Blood Is Sweeter than Honey.
Despite his aversion to idealist philosophy, there is a distinctly Hegelian aspect to Bataille's discussion of the eye, particularly what Hegel called the "night of the world"--a night glimpsed "when one looks human beings in the eye." (3) Slavoj Zizek, in a discussion of the phenomenological tradition from Immanuel Kant to Martin Heidegger, has recently addressed this aspect in a fascinating account of the deadlock of the transcendental imagination, "the abyss of radical subjectivity announced in the Kantian transcendental imagination." (4) Zizek discusses the aporia of the transcendental imagination as a way to articulate the imagination's role in giving ontological consistency to subjective experience. Whereas traditional accounts describe the imagination as an agency that either passively receives images from the senses or actively posits images, the transcendental imagination cannot be located fully within this structure: it is both active and passive. These two aspects are present in Kant's phenomenology, which nonetheless places the accent on the imagination's power of synthesis, the three-step passage from the diversity of pure intuition to conceptual cognition through the synthetic power of the imagination. However, for Zizek, "Kant's notion of imagination silently passes over a crucial 'negative' feature": that is, "imagination qua the 'activity of dissolution.'" Kant downplays the imagination's destructive potential to focus on its constructive, synthetic power. Hegel, by contrast, acknowledges the violence of the primordial "presynthetic imagination," which contains a negative, disruptive feature that gives it the power to dismember immediate perception into a series of partial objects. At any moment the imagination may open onto an experience of abyssal negativity that would dissolve the ontological consistency of the world into a series of spectral images: as Hegel notes, "here shoots a bloody head--there another white ghastly apparition."
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What do these questions have to do with Surrealism, a movement that seems far removed from the ontological subtleties of Kant or Hegel? The connection is found in Surrealism's valorization of the imagination. (5) The primordial "activity of dissolution" of the presynthetic imagination is operative in Surrealism, not only in the so-called dissident Surrealism commonly associated with Bataille, but also, albeit to a lesser degree, in the practice of orthodox Surrealists associated with Andre Breton. To demonstrate this point I will discuss two works: Max Ernst's collage-cycle La femme 100 tetes (The Hundred-Headless Woman) and Georges Bataille's erotic narrative Histoire de l'oeil (The Story of the Eye). (6) Immediately, it will appear that I have selected examples of so-called "orthodox" and "dissident" Surrealism, inevitably recalling the Breton-Bataille polemic that has assumed a pivotal role in recent accounts of Surrealism. (7) However, my intention here is not to rehearse arguments about Bataille's materialism and Breton's idealism, the uncanny, or the role of the informe; rather, I want to focus on the deadlock of the imagination that both these works seek to render--a deadlock, I would argue, anterior to the question of orthodox or dissident Surrealism. (8) Indeed, both The Story of the Eye and The Hundred-Headless Woman address a deadlock similar to that of the transcendental imagination through the motif of the eye, and it is this motif that links Surrealism with the Hegelian presynthetic "night of the world" and Bataille's characterization of the eye as the limit of horror.
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Georges Bataille originally published The Story of the Eye in 1928 under the pseudonym Lord Auch in a limited edition of 134 copies, with eight lithographic illustrations by Andre Masson. The first-person narrative recounts the lugubrious erotic adventures of two adolescents--Simone and the unnamed male narrator--and their erotic obsession with a series of pale globular objects: a saucer of milk, eggs, bull's testes, and the eye. (9) The narrative is broadly divided into two sections: the first section, set on the Normandy coast, culminates with the death of Marcelle, a young friend of Simone and the narrator. The narrative opposes the impure and debauched Simone to Marcelle's innocence and piety, qualities that are corrupted through contact with Simone's and the narrator's anarchic desire: Marcelle is first interned in an asylum, then driven to suicide after becoming entwined in Simone's and the narrator's erotic obsessions. The second section takes place in Spain, where Simone and the narrator flee after Marcelle's death, aided by Sir Edmund, an English libertine. After a bullfight in which the famous toreador Granero is fatally wounded, his right eye enucleated by the bull's horn, the narrative culminates in a violent orgy in a Spanish church: here the male narrator, Simone, and Sir Edmund kidnap, rape, and murder a priest. Yet these events are merely the pretext for the notorious final tableau: not yet satiated, Simone demands the eye of the unfortunate priest, which Sir Edmund calmly excises and presents to her; the narrator then forcefully copulates with Simone while Sir Edmund rolls the eyeball between their bodies:
Simone finally left me, grabbed the beautiful eyeball from the hands
of the tall Englishman, and with a steady and regular pressure from
her hands, she slid it into her slavering flesh, in the midst of the
fur. And then she promptly drew me over, clutching my neck between
her arms and smashing her lips on mine so forcefully that I climaxed
without touching her and my come [foutre] spat all over her fur.
Rising to my feet, I spread Simone's thighs so that she lay
stretched on her side; I then found myself before what--I imagine--I
had always been waiting for, as the guillotine awaits a neck to
slice. My eyes, it seemed, were standing erect from horror; I saw in
Simone's hairy vagina, the pale blue eye of Marcelle, watching me,
weeping tears of urine. Threads of fuck in the steaming fur managed
to give this lunar vision a final character of disastrous sorrow. I
held Simone's thighs open and burning urine streamed out from beneath
the eye, falling on the lower thigh ... (10)
It is difficult to know what to make of this scene, which seems to confound the conventional Freudian narrative of fetishism and sexual difference. (11) It represents the culmination of the accelerating violence of the preceding narrative, staging an encounter with the real, the flesh from which all life originates, by conflating the eye as the origin of subjectivity (the "window of the soul") with the female genitals as the site of castration and sexual difference. (12)
In the accompanying illustration, Masson has restaged the scene to focus the beholder's attention on Marcelle's eye. He depicts the baroque interior of the church with four figures (Simone, the narrator, Sir Edmund, and the dead priest); the recumbent Simone is flanked by the standing figures of Sir Edmund and the narrator, who lean back in spasms of ecstasy so that their heads are cropped at the eye; the only full head that appears in the image is that of the dead priest, a thin stream of blood flowing from his empty eye-socket, while the only eye that appears is that of the priest, relocated to Simone's vagina, now animated by the memory of Marcelle. The stream of urine that flows from Marcelle's eye, which echoes the emissions of Sir Edmund and the priest, emphasizes the phallic character of the eye motif. Yet there is also something reticent about the eye's phallicism; whereas the phallicism associated with the male characters is highly visible and localized in the central third of the composition, thus emphasizing the horizontal axis of the composition, Simone's phallus is reduced to the oval of an eye. Perhaps the best way to describe this effect is as an instance of anamorphosis, in which the (male) beholder misperceives the size of Simone's phallus because of his position directly in front of the scene; yet, equally, this eye "ejaculates" when the beholder acknowledges its gaze.
It could be argued that Bataille's conflation of eye and female genitals is the consummate operation of the informe, but this operation does not escape a certain economy of meaning. (13) To establish this point I want to introduce an image from Ernst's The Hundred-Headless Woman: Germinal, my sister, the hundred-headless woman. (In the background, in the cage, the Eternal Father). There is a subtle parallel between this image and the final tableau in The Story of the Eye: the figure plays with the eye of a head, placed in her lap over her genitals. Now, admittedly, there is a striking difference between the two images, but both establish an equation between the eye, castration, and the female genitals, a logic reinforced by the figure's exposed breast in Ernst's image. A comparison with Masson's illustration also reveals opposed compositional strategies. Whereas Ernst's collage is structured around the central figure of Germinal, who occupies a large proportion of the composition and looks out at the beholder, Masson's illustration is structured around a central void, with the figures pushed out toward the edges of the composition. Masson depicts the scene as a play of mechanical forces, seeking to render the event in its actuality, while Ernst relies on a psychological reading of the figure as a malevolent girl-child.
At this point it would be easy to object that, rather than establishing any affinity between Bataille and Ernst, this comparison merely reinforces the distance between their respective positions. (14) For is not Ernst's collage an example of the type of poetic transposition that substitutes the idea for material reality that Bataille would criticize in Surrealism? Had not Bataille called for "a direct and explicit questioning of seductiveness, without taking into account poetic concoctions that are, ultimately, nothing but a diversion," and stated: "A return to reality does not imply any new acceptances, but means that one is seduced in a base manner, without transpositions and to the point of screaming"? (15) Even if this point is conceded, what is interesting here is the degree to which The Story of the Eye is already ensnared in the very logic of poetic transposition that Bataille would criticize in Surrealism.
To illustrate this point it would help to draw out some features of the final tableau in The Story of the Eye, particularly its perverse reworking of the Freudian scenario of castration anxiety and fetishism. According to Freud, the basis of a fetish lay in the disavowal of castration: "The fetish is a substitute for the woman's (the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and ... does not want to give up." (16) Bataille's tableau reworks three aspects of this definition:
i. Simone first demands the priest's eye, in effect symbolically
"castrating" the priest's corpse; then she literally substitutes
this phallus for the narrator's penis. If her desire is related to
castration, it is a desire for the severed organ, detached from the
order of nature; that is, her desire is expressed on the symbolic
level.
ii. Whereas the goal of fetishism is to disavow the absence of the
maternal phallus, here the narrator witnesses the return of this
phallus. However, this return is as traumatic as its initial
absence. This trauma is registered in a peculiar way: what the
narrator sees lodged in Simone's vagina is not any eye, and
certainly not the eye of the priest--but rather Marcelle's eye.
Indeed, the imagination intervenes at this precise moment,
transforming the dead eye of the priest into Marcelle's living
eye.
iii. This scene also contravenes another convention of the text. On
the first page, the narrator signals his preference for the word
cul (arse) to describe Simone's genitals: "le plus joli des noms du
sexe." (17) Cul represents an infantile confusion between vagina
and anus, a confusion absent from the more explicitly gendered con
(cunt). (18) Like the fetish, cul disavows sexual difference. Yet
in the scene of Marcelle's eye the narrator substitutes the
descriptive term vagin (vagina) for cul.
What Bataille stages here is precisely the deadlock of the imagination. The eye functions as a speculum that not only holds open the abyss of the visceral flesh of the preontological void, but simultaneously returns Marcelle's gaze. The imagination does not simply intervene at the point where the visceral truth of feminine jouissance is about to be unveiled, but it is precisely this intervention that preserves the fantasy of feminine jouissance. Marcelle's eye exists for the narrator; it is how the maternal phallus--if this is what it is--appears to him, not for Simone (for whom it does not appear but is experienced on a tactile level). Indeed, the narrator knows nothing of Simone's jouissance, which remains as opaque as a dead priest's eye. (19) Here Bataille stages the proximity of seduction and horror: the horror of the gaze returned by the eye in Simone's vagina, and the seduction of that gaze being identified with Marcelle's subjectivity.
In 1929 Ernst published The Hundred-Headless Woman, the first of three "collage-novels" he would complete during 1929-33. Like The Story of the Eye, the "narrative" of The Hundred-Headless Woman revolves around the circulation of a series of circular objects like eggs, eyes, spheres, and wheels. (20) Images of blindness and symbolic castration also abound in The Hundred-Headless Woman, but for Ernst they are related to the theme of poetic revelation, a theme addressed in the book's last chapter. Seven of the chapter's eighteen plates were based on the theme of "She keeps her secret," which revolves around images of physical blindness and poetic insight. (21) The plate The eye without eyes, the hundred-headless woman keeps her secret establishes the basic topos: a female figure places her outstretched hand over the eye of a male figure, who is flanked by a child and animals. This basic motif is repeated against different backgrounds in subsequent plates: an egg floating on the ocean, a natural landscape, and a bedroom, suggesting different historical periods. The gesture of enucleation, which first appeared in Germinal, my sister, the hundred-headless woman, represents an obvious allusion to castration anxiety; yet this anxiety plays an ambivalent role in the collage cycle.
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One difficulty with The Hundred-Headless Woman is related to the role of ambiguity in the cycle. Ernst carefully constructed the cycle of images to frustrate interpretation--what Breton called the "will towards complete disorientation" in the book's preface--so that the act of interpretation would continue the process of creation. (22) An example of this strategy is evident in The eye without eyes, the hundred-headless woman and Loplop return to the savage state and cover [recouvrent] the eyes of their faithful birds with fresh leaves, which provides an important clue to the significance of the "She keeps her secret" theme. This plate depicts a male and a female figure surrounded by several gigantic birds, against a backdrop of lush vegetation. The plate repeats the enucleation gesture of the previous plates, yet reverses the gender of the protagonist: the female figure languidly rests amid the vegetation, while the male figure, whose head has assumed simian features, averts his eyes as he extends one hand toward the bird's eye, and places his other hand in the bird's open beak. Although both these gestures recall the threat of castration, the title provides the key to the image, particularly the double meaning of the verb recouvrent, which is the third person plural of both recouvrir (to cover) and recouvrer (to regain). (23) Thus, in the first case the title would read: "The hundred-headless woman and Loplop return to the savage state and cover the eyes of their faithful birds with fresh leaves"; in the second case it would read: "The hundred-headless woman and Loplop return to the savage state and regain the eyes of their faithful birds with fresh leaves"; in the second case it would read: "The hundred-headless woman and Loplop return to the savage state and regain the eyes of their faithful birds from the fresh leaves."
The eye-motif in The Hundred-Headless Woman functions as an image of both revelation and concealment, vision and blindness. If the blinding of an eye is interpreted in a strict Freudian sense in terms of symbolic castration and sexual difference, then the image establishes an equation between vision and the phallus, on the one hand, and blindness and the absent phallus, on the other hand. (24) Thus the first interpretation suggests a scene of castration and blindness: the figure's gesture is one of enucleation, the bird is about to bite his hand, and the title suggests that he covers the bird's eye with leaves. Yet this oedipal gaze is itself a form of blindness that drains the world of mystery and enigma, reducing it to an object of rational knowledge. The second interpretation suggests a scene of poetic revelation: in this context the male figure recovers the bird's eye from the leaves, in effect restoring sight to the blind. (25) This interpretation not only suspends the Freudian allusions to castration, but suggests the existence of other forms of knowledge capable of challenging the proportion and ratio of bourgeois culture. (26)
A number of themes in The Hundred-Headless Woman converge in the following plate, again entitled The eye without eyes, the hundred-headless woman keeps her secret, which depicts a female figure with a large eye in her abdomen looking at an ambiguous, anthropomorphic form set in an industrial environment. The workers in the background carry out their labors oblivious to the foreground, where the female figure contemplates an anthropomorphic form, placing her hand over its head in a repetition of the enucleation gesture. Yet this figure lacks eyes; it is simply an inchoate texture almost devoid of human physiognomy. Once again the significance of the anthropomorphic figure is ambivalent: on one hand it may have been blinded and transformed into stone; on the other hand, its evocative texture recalls Ernst's frontages, suggesting another site of poetic revelation. (27) Furthermore, the association of the eye with the woman's abdomen conflates eye and womb, suggesting the matrix of the female body as the site of poetic revelation, a theme that also recalls the immaculate-conception theme of the opening chapter of The Hundred-Headless Woman.
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A second glance at this image reveals a third figure. Ernst has collaged a beaklike protuberance on the left-hand corner of the eye, so that the eye motif also suggests the figure of a bird emerging from the woman's skirt, like the famous vulture hidden in folds of drapery in Leonardo's Madonna and Child with St. Anne discussed by Freud. (28) Ernst had earlier alluded to this vulture in the painting The Virgin Mary Punishing the Infant Jesus before Three Witnesses (AB, PE, and the Painter). (29) Indeed, in this context the collage exemplifies Ernst's description of the mechanism of collage: by grafting the eye-motif onto the woman's figure, Ernst produces a "fortuitous meeting" between these elements: woman and eye engage in a "pure act like that of love," which engenders the bird. (30) The sexual character of the image is highlighted by the nude female figure swinging from the rafters, who approaches the bird's phallic beak.
In the wake of the foregoing analysis, it is perhaps time to restate my argument that the positions of Bataille and Ernst (and by extension Breton) are complementary rather than antagonistic. Although it is easy to characterize Ernst's use of collage as an example of poetic transposition and contrast it with the uncompromising character of Bataille's writing, to do so would sacrifice what is truly radical in the travail of the image in Surrealism. The key to a profound reading of both the The Story of the Eye and The Hundred-Headless Woman is to recognize the eye as an image of the imagination in its disruptive and constructive aspects, of seduction and horror. The eye is a highly charged object, and the beholder experiences assaults against it viscerally--something readily evident to any spectator of Un Chien andalou. In Surrealism, however, it functions as a veil over the preontological realm of part-objects, the Hegelian "night of the world." Any attempt to rend this veil only results in blindness and castration; yet as a veil the eye also acts as a screen upon which fantasies can be projected, as in the example of Marcelle's eye in The Story of the Eye or in the final chapter of The Hundred-Headless Woman.
Bataille would repeatedly attempt to take the impossible step beyond conceptual thought to disclose the mechanism behind symbolization, the place where the image emerges from the abyss of nothingness. (31) In keeping with the dualistic character of Bataille's thought, he opposes rational knowledge to the immediacy of experience, discovering in the latter something that exceeds the limits of reason (and thus representation). Yet Bataille is unable to articulate this experience directly without recourse to the agency of the imagination, albeit as the "activity of dissolution" that Zizek discerns in the deadlock of the transcendental imagination. In The Story of the Eye, he renders this deadlock through the figure of Marcelle's eye, and it is at this point that Bataille's work is closest to Surrealism. Similarly, in The Hundred-Headless Woman Ernst turns to the image of the eye to render the deadlock of the Surrealist imagination through the theme of vision and blindness. Yet in place of Bataille's attempt to arrest the process of symbolization, Ernst reconfigures the eye on a thematic level as a symbol of revelation, transforming blindness into illumination.
Finally, what does this reading contribute to our understanding of the Breton-Bataille polemic? I believe it demonstrates an underlying affinity between Bataille and Surrealism, the degree to which his thought was consonant with Surrealism. Since the late 1960s discussions of Surrealism have repeatedly emphasized the distance between Bataille and Surrealism. (32) What these accounts share is the assumption that Breton was automatically and innately hostile to anything transgressive. Indeed, it is commonly assumed that Breton rejected The Story of the Eye as an example of the base materialism to which he was constitutionally adverse. (33) Yet, surprisingly, Breton was an enthusiastic reader of the book upon its publication, as recorded in a letter to his wife, dated August 1928:
Just published, in the same collection as Aragon's book [i.e., Le
con d'Irene], is a book by Bataille, by Georges Bataille: Histoire
de l'oeil, par Lord Auch. It is absolutely marvelous. It is not
only the most beautiful erotic book that I know, but it is also one
of the seven or so most beautiful books that I have read .... The
intellectual event of the year. (34)
High praise indeed. This is 1928, the year Maurice Nadeau described as the "year of achievements": Breton had just published Le Surrealisme et la peinture and Nadja, Louis Aragon had published Traite du style, Ernst and Joan Miro had just held successful exhibitions. (35) Yet against these achievements, Breton still describes The Story of the Eye as "absolutely marvelous" and "the intellectual event of the year." If nothing else, this letter underlines the proximity between Bataille and Surrealism. (36)
Many themes in this paper recall recent discussions of the uncanny in Surrealism, but I want to distance my interpretation from these readings. It is not that these readings are incorrect, but rather that they do not go far enough; they succeed in transposing Surrealism from an aesthetic context to a psychoanalytical context, yet evade the socio-political dimension that was always central to the Surrealist enterprise. Nor do I claim that my interpretation escapes the uncanny, since it undoubtedly revolves around failure and repetition. What I'm attempting to do is simply open the terms of the debate, to identify the articulation between the aesthetic, the social, and the political in Surrealism, and, more important, to suggest that Surrealism's failure was as much sociological as psychological. In practical terms this means engaging with the minutiae of historical experience, recovering the contemporaneity of the Surrealist enterprise: that is, to encounter the deadlock of the Surrealist imagination anew with the hope that its promise will one day be redeemed.
I would like to thank Alyce Mahon for the opportunity to present an earlier version of this paper at Body and Soul 2000, the annual conference of the Association of Art Historians in Edinburgh in April 2000, and Robert Lubar for inviting me to present it at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York. I also thank Robin Greeley and Don LaCoss for their comments on the draft. Research for this paper has been partly funded by the School of Architecture and Fine Arts, University of Western Australia, and the University of North Dakota.
The epigraph is from G. W. F. Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie," in Fruhe politische Systeme (Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1974); translation quoted from Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel's Recollection (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985), 7-8; cited in Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), 29-30.
(1.) Georges Bataille, Visions Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. Allan Stoekl, trans. Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie, Jr. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 17.
(2.) Ibid., translation modified. Bataille adds in a footnote: "This film can be distinguished from banal avant-garde productions, with which one might be tempted to confuse it, in that the screenplay predominates. Several very explicit facts appear in successive order, without logical connection it is true, but penetrating so far into horror that the spectators are caught up as directly as they are in adventure films. Caught up and even precisely caught by the throat, and without artifice; do these spectators know, in fact, where they--the authors of this film, or people like them--will stop? If Bunuel himself, after the filming of the slit-open eye, remained sick for a week ... how then can one not see to what extent horror becomes fascinating, and how it alone is brutal enough to break everything that stifles?" Ibid., 19, n. 1.
(3.) Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie," cited in Zizek, 29-30.
(4.) Zizek, 23.
(5.) A link between German idealism and Surrealism can be found in German Romanticism and French Symbolism, two movements that profoundly influenced the Surrealist sensibility.
(6.) Max Ernst, La femme 100 tetes (Paris: Editions du Carrefour, 1930); English translation by Dorothea Tanning, The Hundred-Headless Woman (New York: Braziller, 1981); Histoire de l'oeil par Lord Auch (Paris: 1928), repr. in Georges Bataille, CEuvres completes 1: Premiers Ecrits, 1922-1940 (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 9-78; English translation by Joachim Neugroschel as The Story of the Eye (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982).
(7.) See, for instance, "Corpus Delicti," in Rosalind Krauss and Jane Livingstone, L'Amour fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville Press, 1985); Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Rosalind Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois, Formless: A User's Manual (New York: Zone, 1997).
(8.) The Breton-Bataille polemic is conventionally interpreted on a theoretical level as a conflict between Breton's idealism and Bataille's "base" materialism; I would suggest, however, that the polemic needs to be understood on a sociological level, in which the principal cause was less theoretical differences than Breton's and Bataille's proximity within the cultural avant-garde. This strategy would allow a more nuanced reading of the polemic.
(9.) Roland Barthes has discussed the pivotal role of globular objects in the unfolding of The Story of the Eye in his essay, "The Metaphor of the Eye," repr. in Bataille, The Story of the Eye, 119-27; for a critique of Barthes's essay see Michael Halley, "... And a Truth for a Truth: Barthes on Bataille," in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Leslie Anne Boldt-Irons (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), 285-94.
(10.) Bataille, The Story of the Eye, 66-67, translation modified; Bataille's ellipsis.
(11.) According to Freud the basis of a fetish lay in the disavowal of castration. See Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, vol. 21, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis, 1953-66), 147-57.
(12.) Cf. Jacques Lacan's commentary on Freud's dream of Irma's injection: "There is a horrendous discovery here, that the flesh one never sees, the foundation of things, the other side of the head, of the face, the secretory glands par excellence, the flesh from which everything exudes, at the very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as it is suffering, is formless, in as much as its form in itself is something which provokes anxiety. Spectre of anxiety, identification of anxiety, the final revelation of you are this--You are this, which is so far from you, this which is the ultimate formlessness." Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book II: The Ego in Freud's Theory and in Technique of Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 154-55.
(13.) On the informe, see Krauss and Bois, Formless: for an alternative reading of the role of the informe, see Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressemblance informe: Le Gai Savoir visuel selon Georges Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995); and Pierre Fedida, "The Movement of the Informe," trans. M. Stone-Richards and Ming Tiampo, Qui Parle 10 (1996): 49-62.
(14.) Ernst remained closely associated to the "orthodox" Surrealist group around Breton until 1938, and Breton contributed a preface to La femme 100 tetes upon its publication in 1930; see Andre Breton, "Notice to the Reader of The Hundred-Headless Woman," in Break of Day, trans. Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 45-50.
(15.) Bataille, "The Big Toe," in Visions of Excess, 23. This aversion to poetic transposition was one reason why Documents employed photographic illustration as a counterpoint to descriptive prose, precisely because photographic illustrations appeared to suspend the process of symbolic mediation.
(16.) Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," 152-53.
(17.) Bataille, Histoire de l'oeil, 13.
(18.) The English translation renders cul as "cunt" rather than "arse," thus sacrificing this aspect of the French text.
(19.) Is this not the significance of Marcelle's eye, since when Marcelle succumbed to her jouissance, she rapidly descended into madness and suicide?
(20.) Ernst not only used repetition to confer a degree of unity to the cycle, but the eye-motif lay at the very heart of La femme 100 tetes, its spherical shape the nexus of an extended chain of metaphors. The motif of the eye appears in the globe in Crime ou miracle: un homme complet (pl. 1), the masked face in L'immaculee conception (pl. 12), the globe-fantome (pl. 72, 75, and 76), the spherical object (pl. 108), and the eggs (pl. 132 and 133). This list is by no means comprehensive. On the role of circular objects in The Story of the Eye see Barthes, "The Metaphor of the Eye."
(21.) This is a recurring theme in Ernst's work; see, for instance, Les hommes n'en sauront rien (1923). See Elizabeth M. Legge, Max Ernst: The Psychoanalytical Sources (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1989), and M. E. Warlick, Max Ernst and Alchemy: A Magician in Search of Myth (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
(22.) Breton, Break of Day, 48.
(23.) The original French caption reads: "L'oeil sans yeux, la femme 100 tetes et Loplop retournent a l'etat sauvage et recouvrent de feuilles fraiches les yeux de leurs fideles oiseaux."
(24.) Blindness was also an element of the Oedipus myth: "The blinding in the legend of Oedipus ... stands for castration." Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition, vol. 5, 398, n.1.
(25.) The motif of regaining eyes from leaves recalls the source textures of Ernst's frottages, particularly the nervations of a leaf; see, for instance, "Les Eclairs au-dessous de quartorze ans," pl. 24 of Histoire naturelle (Paris: Editions Bucher, 1926).
(26.) This was the target of Breton's critique of the realist attitude in the Manifesto of Surrealism; see Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, trans. Richard Seaver and Helen R. Lane (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 6-10.
(27.) The three subsequent plates continue the "She keeps her secret" theme, but the aspect of revelation is progressively obscured. They repeat the industrial setting of pl. 138, but the eye motif has been displaced in favor of bodies suspended from the scaffolding. Similarly, the titles have contracted to Elle garde son secret (pl. 139-40) and Elle le garde (pl. 141). Whereas the homophonous phrase "L'oeil sans yeux, la femme 100 tetes garde son secret," which was based on the alliteration of sans, cent, and son, is open to multiple interpretation, "Elle garde son secret" and "Elle le garde" progressively reduce the connotations of the phrase from "She keeps her secret" or "She keeps a hundred secrets" to "She keeps it" or "She keeps him."
(28.) Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood, in Standard Edition, vol. 11, 57-137.
(29.) On Ernst's involvement with Leonardo's vulture, see Werner Spies, Max Ernst-Loplop: The Artist's Other Self (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), 101-06.
(30.) "Je suis tente d'y voir l'exploitation de la rencontre fortuite de deux realites distantes sur un plan non-convenant ... ou pour user d'un terme plus court, la culture des effects d'un depaysement systematique .... La transmutation complete suivie d'un acte pur comme celui d'amour, se produira forcement toutes les fois que les conditions seront rendues favorables par les faits donnees: accouplement de deux realites en apparence inaccouplables sur un plan qui en apparence ne leur convient pas." Ernst, "Au-dela de la peinture," Ecritures (Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 253-56.
(31.) There are clear parallels here with the role of repetition in the work of Lacan: as the missed encounter in which the automaton of representation encounters the tuche of the Real. See Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), particularly 48-64.
(32.) The principal cause behind this reading lay in the polemics on Surrealism in Tel Quel during 1968-73, which valorized the writings of Bataille and Antonin Artaud against those of Breton. This reading would significantly influence the reception of Bataille in the English-speaking world. On Tel Quel, see Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel, 1960-1982 (Paris: Seuil, 1995).
(33.) See, for instance, Foster, Compulsive Beauty, 106, and Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 106.
(34.) Letter from Andre Breton to Simone Breton, dated August 18, 1928, cited in Andre Breton: La beaute convulsive, exh. cat., ed. Agnes Angliviel de la Beaumelle and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine (Paris: Musee national d'art moderne, 1991), 188.
(35.) Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), 143; Andre Breton, Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism, trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York: Marlowe, 1993), 105.
(36.) It is worth noting that Simone Breton shared her name with the protagonist in The Story of the Eye, which may have colored Breton's perception of the narrative. Furthermore, Breton's acrimonious divorce from Simone in 1929 contributed to the polarization of the Surrealist movement into antagonistic factions, since the Surrealists who sided with Simone would also form the nucleus of the "dissident" Surrealist group (Max Morise, Raymond Queneau, Robert Desnos, Jacques Baron, Roland Tual) who would gather around Documents after the publication of Breton's Second Manifesto in December 1929. On Breton's divorce, see Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of Andre Breton (London: Bloomsbury, 1996), 308-24.
Raymond Spiteri is Lecturer in Art History at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He coedited Surrealism, Politics, and Culture (Ashgate, 2003) and is currently working on a study of the Breton-Bataille polemic.