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TRANGRESSION in the AESTHETIC ANTHROPOLOGY of GEORGES BATAILLE, HANS BELLMER, and PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI a Dissertation Su

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TRANGRESSION in the AESTHETIC ANTHROPOLOGY of GEORGES BATAILLE, HANS BELLMER, and PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI a Dissertation Su EROS NOIR: TRANGRESSION IN THE AESTHETIC ANTHROPOLOGY OF GEORGES BATAILLE, HANS BELLMER, AND PIERRE KLOSSOWSKI A Dissertation Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science TRENT UNIVERSITY Peterborough, Ontario, Canada © Copyright by Jeremy Bell 2015 Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program May 2015 Abstract Eros noir: Transgression in the Aesthetic Anthropology of Georges Bataille, Hans Bellmer, and Pierre Klossowski Jeremy Bell The dissertation explores the aesthetic anthropology of Georges Bataille and his collaborators in the Collège de Sociologie, a distinguished group of intellectuals including Roger Caillois, Michel Leiris, Pierre Klossowski, and Walter Benjamin among others. At the dissertation's outset the role, influence, discovery and indeed invention of the Marquis de Sade as the almost mythic prefiguring for so much French aesthetic thought in the period beginning after World War One and up until even the present day is advanced. Before Freud in Vienna, Sade in Paris: the central thematic axis of the following addresses Eros noir, a term for reflecting on the danger and violence of sexuality that Freud theorizes with the “death drive.” The deconstruction of the nude as an object and form in particular in the artwork of Hans Bellmer and the writing and art of Pierre Klossowski comprises the latter two chapters of the dissertation, which provides examples of perversion through the study of simulacra and phantasms. The thwarted pursuit of community in the vacated space of Nietzsche's death of a God is a persistent leitmotif of the following in the account it offers of the thought of Georges Bataille and other members of the Collège de Sociologie. Eros noir, at the fatal cusp between ascendant manifest sex and a latent diminished Christianity, underwrites much of the French intellectual contribution to the symbology of cultural modernism. ii Acknowledgements I wish to express my profoundest thanks to both Jonathan Bordo and Yves Thomas for all of their concern, erudition, and patience throughout this project. Without their aide and guidance it simply would not have been possible. It has been a honour and a privilege to share this work with them both. Additionally, I wish to thank the other members of my advisory committee, Ihor Junyk and Andrew Wernick from Trent University and Harold Mah from Queen’s University. I also wish to thank Hugh Hodges, Constanin Boundas, John Fekete, Stijn De Cauwer, Gregory Kalyniuk, Rachel Cyr, Dilyana Mincheva, Victoria de Zwaan, Alan O’Connor, Nancy Legate, Rosemary Devlin, Paul Ciuk, Mark Allwood, Alin Guindi, and Erin Davidson. I thank Trent University for the privilege of being able to work through the various problems I address here; I thank my mother and father Linda and Gary Bell for all their financial and moral support; and finally I thank Shannon Hayes, without whose unwavering love and kindness the research here could not have been realized. I also wish to thank Feral Feminisms and Toby Wiggins for their own critical advice, as well as permission to print chapter three, an earlier draft of which was originally published as “Uncanny Erotics: On Hans Bellmer’s Souvenirs of the Doll” in Issue 2: Perversity, BDSM, Desire of Feral Feminisms in April, 2014. iii CONTENTS ABSTRACT / ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS / iii TABLE OF CONTENTS / iv TABLE OF FIGURES / v INTRODUCTION – / 1 CHAPTER ONE – Eros noir / 10 CHAPTER TWO – From Community to Its Absence: On Georges Bataille / 41 The Modern Spirit / 41 Heterogeneous Agglutinations / 48 “FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS” / 53 Sacred Sociology / 63 The Absence of Community / 71 CHAPTER THREE – Uncanny Erotics: Hans Bellmer’s Souvenirs of the Doll / 81 Double Sexus / 81 Souvenirs of the Doll – Variations on an Articulated Minor / 90 “Other Influences” / 104 Sexuality is a Machine-Gunnerress in a State of Grace / 110 CHAPTER FOUR – Pierre Klossowski: On Theology and Eroticism / 122 Klossowski’s Counter-Theology / 122 Pornology and Simulacra in Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski / 129 Integral Monstrosity, “the discourse of the pervert” / 136 Questioning the Nude / 152 Living Currency / 156 CONCLUSION / 165 APPENDIX I – Pierre Klossowski – “The Monster” / 179 APPENDIX II – Pierre Klossowski – “The Body of Nothingness: The Experience of the Death of God in Nietzsche and the Nostalgia for Authentic Experience in Georges Bataille” / 182 NOTES – / 203 BIBLIOGRAPHY – / 231 iv TABLE OF FIGURES Figure 1. François Boucher – Diane sortant du bain, 1742. (p. 4) Figure 2. Paul Delvaux – L'Aube sur la ville, 1940. (p. 4) Figure 3. Man Ray – Portrait imaginaire de Sade, 1938. (p. 24) Figure 4. Édouard Manet – Olympia, 1863. (p. 43) Figure 5. André Masson – Acéphale, 1936. (p. 54) Figure 6. Hans Bellmer – “Untitled” from Les Jeux de la poupée, 1935. (p. 83) Figure 7. Hans Bellmer – “Untitled” from La Poupée, 1934. (p. 91) Figure 8. Hans Bellmer – “Untitled” from La Poupée, 1934. (p. 91) Figure 9. Hans Bellmer – “Untitled” from La Poupée, 1934. (p. 98) Figure 10. Hans Bellmer – “Untitled” from Les Jeux de la poupée, 1935. (p. 102) Figure 11. Hans Bellmer – “Untitled”, 1935. (p. 102) Figure 12. Showcase of Lotte Pritzel’s dolls – Munich. (p. 106) Figure 13. Hans Bellmer – La mitrailleuse en état de grâce, 1937. (p. 117) Figure 14. Pierre Klossowski and Jean Paul Reti – Diane et Actéon, 1990. (p. 158) v 1 Introduction “My love to love is love but to disgrace it; For I have heard it is a life in death, That laughs, and weeps, and all but with a breath.” – William Shakespeare – “Venus and Adonis” In Les larmes d'Éros (1961), Georges Bataille’s final and arguably most important work, he outlines the history of human consciousness as seen through art and visual culture’s relation to the conditions of eroticism, describing the fundamental conflict he sees between desire and reason. The expiation or release of satisfied desire, what he elsewhere describes as dépense or expenditure, is set in opposition to the productive or work-oriented character of reason he says. “Of course, it is work that separated man from his initial animality. It is through work” he writes, “that the animal became human.”1 This does not explain the “diabolical” aspect that accompanies our consciousness of death for Bataille however. Looking at the prehistoric cave paintings of Lascaux in southwestern France – where he situates “The Birth of Eros” – eroticism is interwoven with this consciousness of death says Bataille. Distinguishing us from simpler animal life, it is what ties us to an originary sense of guilt that, paradoxically, accompanies the birth of art as well. By examining the “enigma” held in the darkest depths of the “pit” of Lascaux – the image of an ithyphallic man laying prostrate before a wounded bison – he suggest that the fundamental enigmas surrounding birth and death, and sexual difference, the shame accompanying their mystery, are what compel us to transform them through the processes of magic, religion, and art into something else. “At the moment when, 2 hesitantly,” Bataille writes, “the work of art appeared, work had been for hundreds of thousands of years a fact of human life. In the end, it is not work, but play, that marked the advent of art and the moment when work became in part, in genuine masterpieces, something other than the response to the concern for utility.” For Bataille, “man is essentially an animal who works. But he also knows how to change work into play.”2 Moving through antiquity, the beginnings of war, slavery, and prostitution, into the rise of the Dionysian cults, Bataille observes the fundamental adherence of eroticism to the religious; eroticism was first of all religious he shows us. Only with Christianity does it become separated. But of the Dionysian cults specifically, the “religious eroticism” was most poignant. “Dionysiac practices were at first violently religious; it was an enflamed movement, it was a movement of self loss. Yet this movement,” he writes, “on the whole, is so poorly known that the links between the Greek theater and the cult of Dionysos are difficult to locate. But it would not be surprising if the origin of tragedy is in some way linked to this violent cult.”3 His friend and collaborator Roger Caillois extends these observations, emphasizing the drunkenness and ecstasy of the Dionysian cults. For both Bataille and Caillois however, the cults carry a universalizing character. As Caillois observes, Indeed, the essential value of Dionysianism was precisely that it brought people together by socializing something that, when enjoyed in a strictly individual way, divides them more than anything else does. Better yet, for Dionysianism, participating in ecstasy and a communal apprehension of the sacred was the sole cement of the collectivity it was founding; for the mysteries of Dionysos were open and universal, unlike the closed, local cults of the towns. Thus, Dionysianism placed the sovereign forms of turbulence at the very core of the social organism; when they started to decompose, society drove them into the wastelands of its structure’s outer periphery, where it expelled anything that could possibly threaten its cohesiveness.4 3 Where Caillois considers how they emerge from the lower strata of Greek society, Bataille instead looks at the aristocratic and “sober Dionysianism” that was later to compete with Christianity. Historically there is an expiation of violence for Bataille, of eroticism from religious ritual. Its presence does not return until the Middle Ages for him, the representation of eroticism that is. The eroticism of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was “heavy” Bataille says, observing the c.1512 etching by Lucas Cranach of a death by sawing of a man bound upside down by his feet. Mannerism comes to liberate art from this heaviness. It becomes light and airy.
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