233

IV. The Erotic Image

In a wife I would desire
What in whores is always found
The lineaments of Gratified desire.
William Blake

When a seventeen-year-old Breton first visited Paul Valry, to whom he boldly

announced his intentions of becoming a poet, whereupon the older man gently asked
him why, Breton offered the no-doubt never before offered reply that certain lines of
poetry (he cited Rimbauds But how salubrious is the wind as an example) induced
in him a sensation he could not accurately describe, but which he compared
finding between them, he said, only a difference of degree to erotic pleasure.200 It
was in keeping with Bretons sublimated image of eroticism that, recalling this story
some twenty years later, in his article La beaute sera convulsive (1934), he
compared this sensation of erotic pleasure to a feather of wind across the temples,
rather than some other part of his anatomy.201 Bretons response, nevertheless,
which already singled him out for the role he would go on to play in the intellectual
life of France, set the tone for a generation of poets and artists who would seek to
distance themselves from the utilitarian and functionalist theories of art that would
increasingly dominate the avant-gardes of Europe in the inter-war period. And while
he would remain in fundamental disagreement with Breton over the nature of the
sexuality which, as the leading theorist of surrealism described it, presided over
this convulsive beauty, perhaps no-one took up the implications of this statement
with greater conviction than Bataille, who throughout his life sought to situate the
work of art in relation to eroticism.
If she had lived to see its publication in 1939, Laure would no doubt have
dedicated Le Sacr to Leiris, just as Leiris, the previous year, had dedicated Miroir
de la tauromachie to her memory. To complete the triangle, the following year
Leiris dedicated Lge dhomme to Bataille, naming his friend at the origin of his
book. It took Bataille nearly twenty years to return the compliment, however,
dedicating Lrotisme to Leiris on its publication in 1957, and specifically citing his
1938 work as the forerunner of his own efforts. In the same year Bataille also
published Le Bleu du ciel, the novel he had written during his visit to Masson in
1935, and which he now dedicated, no doubt because of this, to his old friend.
200.
The line of poetry is from La Rivire de Cassis (1872). See Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works,
Selected Letters; a bilingual edition, translated, with an introduction and notes, by Wallace Fowlie
(Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 128-131.
201.
See Andr Breton, La beaut sera convulsive, Minotaure, no. 5 (May 1934); reprinted as the
opening chapter of LAmour fou (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1937); collected in Oeuvres compltes;
dition tablie par Marguerite Bonnet, avec la collaboration de Philippe Bernier, tienne-Alain Hubert et
Jos Pierre; vol. 2 (Paris: ditions Gallimard, 1992), p. 678.

234

Although published in the final years of his life, therefore, both these publications
look back to the years of Batailles life with Laure, and to the community of friends
in which they lived. Indeed, in the preface to the last of the three books he published
that year, La Littrature et le mal, Bataille explicitly situated his mature work in
relation to the turmoil of his youth (OC IX, 171). In this light, the dedication of
Lrotisme, in particular, appears as a tribute to the shared interest obsession
would be a better description in the mysteries to which, during the 1930s at least,
Bataille and Leiris were in accord in believing eroticism alone offered the key.
One of the earliest expressions of both this obsession and this accord was the
article Leiris published in the final issue of Documents under the obscure title Le
Caput mortuum ou la femme de lalchimiste (1930).202 To accompany this article
Leiris reproduced three photographs of a naked woman, her head enclosed in a
leather mask and in the largest image her neck bound in two large studded
leather collars (plates 34 and 35). They were sent to him by William Seabrook, the
American writer, adventurer and amateur ethnographer who, according to Man Ray
who had introduced him into the Surrealist circle paid young women
considerable sums of money to wear these collars while chained naked to the
staircase of the luxurious suite he retained in the Htel Place de lOdeon whenever
he visited Paris. Seabrook by all accounts seduced by the striking beauty of Lee
Miller, with whom Man Ray was living during these years invited the couple to
join in these games; and although both declined, Man Ray who was not adverse to
a bit of sadism, and perhaps in recompense for this uncharacteristic failure of nerve
accepted Seabrooks commission to design a high silver collar for his wife,
Marjorie Worthington. She subsequently wore it to a society function, apparently
causing something of a sensation. Judging by their grainy evidence, it was a similar
but less elaborate collar, together with a leather mask made in America to
Seabrooks specifications, that was worn by the women in these photographs, and
which precipitated the article Leiris wrote to accompany them.203
This was not the first time Seabrooks name had appeared in Documents. In
November of the previous year Leiris had written a review article on the French
translation of The Magic Island (1929), Seabrooks somewhat sensationalist account
of Haitian voodoo practices, accompanying it with a photograph of the author
crouching beside a voodoo altar, his forehead painted with a cross of blood marking
his initiation into the cult the first white man, according to Leiris, to be accorded
this honour.204 In his review, Leiris speaks of voodoo sacrificial rites in terms of an
202.
See Michel Leiris, Le Caput mortuum ou la femme de lalchimiste, Documents, no. 8 (1930),
pp. 461-466.
203.
See Man Ray, Self Portrait, with an afterword by Juliet Man Ray, and a foreword by Merry A.
Foresta (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1963/1988), pp. 154-156.
204.
See William Seabrook, The Magic Island (London: Harcourt, Brace and Company, Inc., 1929);
translated by G. des Hons as LIle magique (Paris: Firmin-Didot, 1929); reviewed by Michel Leiris, LIle

Plate 34. William Seabrook. Leather mask and collar, 1930. Photograph. Reproduced in Michel
Leiris, Le Caput mortuum ou la femme de lalchimiste. Documents, no. 8. (1930).

Plate 35. William Seabrook. Leather mask, 1930. Photograph. Reproduced in Michel Leiris, Le
Caput mortuum ou la femme de lalchimiste. Documents, no. 8. (1930).

235

hallucinatory identification between the human sacrifier and the animal victim, and
compares them to what he calls the sensual rites celebrated each night in the great
cities of the world. Indeed, Leiris argues that the virtue of Seabrooks book lies
precisely in his refusal to distinguish between mysticism and eroticism seeing in
both what Leiris describes as the intense desire that every man must have to shatter
his limits, even if it means merging with beasts, plants or mineral forms, losing
himself in the great shadow of the beyond, more real and more living than he.205 No
doubt it was this that accounted for the notoriety Seabrooks book enjoyed among
both present and former Surrealists. A photograph by Boiffard from around this time
captures Max Morise reading a copy; and in the same issue of Documents as Leiriss
review article Bataille refers to Seabrooks book in his Dictionnaire entry on
Abattoir, recalling the authors regret that, although the orgiastic life to which
Leiris refers has survived in the cities of North America, the sacrificial blood, he
writes, is absent from the cocktail mix (OC I, 205). It was to this convergence of
eroticism, mysticism and sacrifice that Leiris would return in his later article on Le
Caput mortuum, where he affirms the conviction he shared with Seabrook that one
of the only valid tasks a man can hope to accomplish, he writes, is the abolition, by
whatever means (mysticism, madness, adventure, poetry, eroticism...), of that
unbearable duality that has been established, thanks to our current morality, between
body and soul, matter and spirit.206
It was against this background of mutual interests and shared inclinations that
Leiris met with Seabrook during the latters visit to Paris in April 1930, in the course
of which he was told a story Seabrook had picked up while travelling through
Arabia and which would subsequently form the central part of his article. In this
story, a young monk and dervish endowed with mystical capacities beyond his years
is invited by his master to attain the final stage of the mystical way. If he succeeds,
his master tells him, he will see the face of God. Horrified at such a prospect, the
young monk initially refuses, but finally accedes to his masters wishes, and is sent
to pass a night of meditation in a ruined mosque some distance from the monastery.
Throughout the night the young monk recites the prayers and performs the rites
according to his masters instructions. In the morning, haggard and ravaged by his
experience, he is sought out by his master, who asks him whether he had seen the
face of God in the night. The novice replies yes, he has indeed seen the face of
God, but cannot describe it. Pressed by the older monk, however, and trembling with
fear, the young monk finally confessed that the face he had seen had been his own.
This was the story Leiris recalled when, in the following summer of 1930, he
received Seabrooks photographs from New York, and suddenly understood, he
Magique, Documents, no. 6 (November 1929), pp. 334-335.
205.

Michel Leiris, LIle Magique, p. 334.

206.

Michel Leiris, Le Caput mortuum ou la femme de lalchimiste, p. 462.

236

writes, why one takes such profound enjoyment [jouissance] (at once erotic and
mystical...) from the simple act of masking or negating a face.207 Through this
negation, Leiris argues, the masked woman is made far more disquieting, far more
mysterious, finally acquiring what he calls a disturbing generality. Insofar as the
resulting image is invested with what he calls an increased intensity, Leiris relates
this substitution of the general (woman) for the particular (a woman) to both erotic
and religious fetishism. But since the figure for which the body of the woman
stands, he says, is also that of nature, or the external world in general, which the
masking of her face places us in a position to dominate, this substitution, he writes,
allows us to satisfy both our desire for power and our fundamental cruelty. In this
act of masking, therefore, Leiris finds what he calls a simple and universal erotic
mechanics [mcanique rotique] (a phrase he takes from Rimbaud) the key to
which he discovered in Seabrooks story.208 Just as the young dervish had
substituted his own face for that of God, so the womans erotic partner, by masking
her face, is able to substitute his own. For Leiris, this is a natural and bestial
process enacted on the body of the woman: once masked, the womans face, the
sign of her individuality, is erased; her eyes, the instrument of her gaze, are rendered
blind; and her mouth, reduced to an open wound in her head, becomes the bloody
maw of an animal. Leiris calls this mechanism a true eroticism which is to say,
he writes: a means of escaping the self [sortir de soi], of breaking the bonds
207.
Michel Leiris, Le Caput mortuum ou la femme de lalchimiste, p. 463. The question of who
actually took these photographs has received several conflicting answers. Although Leiris clearly
attributes them to Seabrook, they have also been seen as the work of Man Ray, or even of his assistant,
Jacques-Andr Boiffard, at that time the staff photographer for Documents. In Rosalind Krauss and Jane
Livingstons exhibition catalogue, LAmour fou: Photography and Surrealism (New York: Abbeville
Press, 1985), one of the photographs in Leiriss article is attributed to Boiffard, although no source for this
attribution is given. Leiris, however, who only met Seabrook once, specifically writes that Seabrook sent
him these images, presumably from New York, in the summer of 1930. And while Seabrook
commissioned Man Ray to design the collars, Seabrook himself, according to the title page of The Magic
Island, was responsible for the numerous photographs that accompany this book, one of which was
included in Leiriss review article. Man Ray, certainly, to accompany his account of his association with
Seabrook, included several photographs of naked women, bound and gagged. There also exists a
photograph taken by Man Ray around 1929 that shows Seabrook standing next to Lee Miller, who is
wearing one of these collars. Recently, however, this question has been answered by Janine Mileaf, who
quotes a letter from Seabrook to Man Ray authorising Louis Aragon on whose behalf Man Ray is
writing to make copies of the images from the negatives held by Leiris. Michel Leiris, Seabrook
writes, has my best mask negatives in Paris including the one about which you enquire and some better
ones with exclusive permission to publish a choice of them in Documents. He has written that they, or
some of them, will appear in an early issue (Seabrook to Man Ray, August 22, 1930; quoted in Janine
Mileaf, Between You and Me: Man Rays Object to Be Destroyed, Art Journal, vol. 63, no. 1 (Spring
2004), p. 20). As Mileaf concludes, if Man Ray had taken these photographs he would certainly have
retained the negatives himself, and in any case would not have had to ask Seabrooks permission to use
them.
208.
The phrase is from Illuminations: Her solitude is the erotic mechanics; her lassitude the
dynamics of love (Arthur Rimbaud, Illuminations (1872); collected in Complete Works, Selected Letters,
pp. 222-223).

237

imposed on us by morality, intelligence, and custom.209 As we have seen, it is

precisely this mechanism that Bataille had identified as binding the sacrifier to his
victim; and just as Bataille had, Leiris relates it here to the erotic relation, which he
identifies, because of this, as essentially sadistic. Like the sacrifier who identifies
with the victim at the moment of its death, through this erotic mechanism the sadist
experiences his own negation in that of the masked woman. Deprived of her
individual identity deprived of her head the acephalous body of the woman is
transformed, through its violent alteration, into the object in which the sadistic
subject, like the mystic before God, escapes the limits of the self. It is significant,
therefore, that the woman in these photographs, as Leiris remarks, is masked as an
executioner, since her role here oscillates between that of victim and sacrificer or,
more accurately, because in the identification between them this distinction is lost.
Leiriss article, therefore, can be seen as a companion piece no doubt arising
from the same shared conversations to Batailles article on La mutilation
sacrifielle, which immediately precedes it in Documents, and whose conceptual
framework it shares. Indeed, much of what Leiris writes here, especially about the
architecture of the human body, had been thought through by Bataille in his entries
for the Dictionnaire, and in particular the entry that had appeared three issues
earlier titled Bouche.210 Insofar as it has been transformed, in the course of the
evolution of the Homo genus, from being the organ of predation to the organ of
locution, Bataille identifies the human mouth, as he had the big toe, as a sign of
mans elevation above his base, simian form; and he argues for a corresponding
regression from man back to animal whenever fear or suffering, he writes, turn the
mouth into the organ of lacerating cries (OC I, 237). Like Leiriss article, this short
text was illustrated with a photograph by Boiffard of the open mouth of a woman;
and Bataille who, like Leiris, appears to have written his text in response to the
photograph must have been struck by the similarities between these images. At
some time, perhaps in memory of Laures Berlin years, he even came to acquire
copies of Seabrooks photographs referring to them over thirty years later in the
letters he exchanged with Lo Duca leading up to the publication of Les Larmes
dEros.211 What is most striking about Leiriss article, however, and the point I want
to take up, is that in order to account for this universal erotic mechanics, he does
not refer, as one might expect of a former Surrealist, to Sade; nor, despite his
reference to fetishism, to Freud; or even, as Bataille himself had, to Mauss; but to
the unlikely figure of Hegel. Concluding his article Leiris writes:

209.

Michel Leiris, Le Caput mortuum ou la femme de lalchimiste, p. 466.

210.

See Georges Bataille, Bouche, Documents, no. 5 (1930); collected in OC I, 237-238.

211.

See Batailles letter to Lo Duca of 13 July, 1960 (OC X, 719).

238

Beautiful as the Hathor cow, the woman masked as an executioner or like a

decapitated queen rises up; and her partner, standing directly before her with his
face become that of a god, admires her body, made still more magnificent by the
absence of a face, which makes it at once more truthful and more ungraspable,
gradually transforming it into a sort of obscure thing in itself, enticing and
mysterious a supreme residue, which can take on the colour of the most ideal or
the most sordidly material value, the thing in itself as enigmatic and attractive as a
sphinx or siren the great universal matrix to which the old Hegel, when he
conceived of it as the product of thought, and precisely of thought which recoils to
the point of pure abstraction, of the empty I which takes for its object this empty
identity with itself, gave the sobriquet caput mortuum, a term borrowed from the
ancient alchemists, who applied it to that phase of the work when everything that
seems rotten is regenerated.212

Leiriss reference here is to Hegels Encyclopaedia Logic, and the pages in

which the philosopher addresses Kants concept of the thing in itself [Ding an
sich].213 For Kant, who argued that only the world of appearances can be known,
the thing in itself is the thing independent of its relation to the perceiving subject
precisely, a substance without a subject and as such constitutes the negative limit
of thought. By making this distinction between noumena and phenomena, however,
between the thing in itself and the object of sensual perception, Kant left open a
space for an ultimately unknowable other of thought. For Hegel, therefore, who
sought to surpass this inadequation between thought and being, subject and object,
the thing in itself is what he calls a philosophical shibboleth: if it is unknowable, he
argues, it is only to the extent that thought, having abstracted all the properties of the
thing, having drained it of all subjective determinations, leaves nothing left to be
known. For Hegel, accordingly, the thing in itself is the product of thought which, as
Leiris quotes him here, recoils to the point of pure abstraction. What Kant posited
as an absolute other, apparently impervious to the power of human understanding to
abstract its object from the totality of the real, is within the dialectical reality
understanding posits merely the subject which takes for its object this empty
identity of itself, and which Hegel, in order to designate this stage of its emergence,
called the pure I. Hence its conceptual appropriation by Leiris. Just as the thing in
itself is a representation of the pure I of non-reflective consciousness, so too the
headless body for the sadist, like the face of God for the mystic, is the external
object in which consciousness, within the dimension of desire, seeks its certainty of
self, and in whose negation, therefore, the subject sees its desire realised.214
212.

Michel Leiris, Le Caput mortuum ou la femme de lalchimiste, p. 466.

213.

See G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, 44.

214.
Although his reading of this article leads him to a distinctly Bretonian image of desire as an
empty vessel waiting to be filled by a future collective liberty, see Neil Cox, Critique of Pure Desire, or
When the Surrealists Were Right, in Jennifer Mundy, ed., Surrealism: Desire Unbound (London: Tate
Publishing, 2001), pp. 245-273.

239

Although they acknowledged his role in the discovery of this dialectical

reality, the Surrealists held Hegel guilty of betraying the revolutionary potential of
his youthful Romanticism (Phnomenologie des Geistes) for the role of state builder
(Philosophie der Rechts) and philosophical totaliser (Enzyclopaedia). It is
significant, therefore, that in describing the erotic effect of negating the womans
face, Leiris draws attention to the old Hegels description of the thing in itself as
the caput mortuum. Literally translated as dead head, this term was used by
medieval alchemy to designate the residue, as opposed to the sublimate, of the
process of distillation. And insofar as he refers to the poles to which the thing in
itself may be drawn a determination he describes as its colour Leiris clearly
equated this supreme residue with what he and Bataille were beginning to call the
sacred. But for Bataille, this proved a particularly persuasive language with which to
formulate his theory of the image, since it was the language of alchemy that had
been adopted by the Surrealists in order to formulate their own theory of the image
as the metaphorical sublimate of this process. From this comes the significance of
Leiris referring to Rimbaud who is at the origin of its adoption by surrealism to
describe the erotic mechanism. But Bataille too, over a quarter of a century later, in
the introduction to Lrotisme, would quote Rimbaud in order to describe the
movement this mechanism effects. This introduction, which began as a paper
delivered to the Cercle ouvert under the title Lrotisme et la fascination de la
mort, ends with the first stanza of Rimbauds poem LEternit, which was later
included by him, in a new form, in the famous pages from Une saison en enfer titled
Alchimie du verbe. In doing so, Bataille was acknowledging, once again, his debt
to surrealism, whose allegiance to Rimbauds alchemy of the verb was for its
proposition that poetry or more accurately the poetic image is arrived at through
a process of metaphorical transmutation, in which the material of everyday
communication becomes the language of poetry. Eternity, writes Rimbaud. It is
the sea run away with the sun (to emphasise this alchemical metaphor, in the later
form of the poem run away [alle] is changed to mixed [mle]).215 In its
reformulation by Pierre Reverdy, which Breton quoted in the Manifeste du
surralisme, this process became a dialectical model: The more the relationship
between two juxtaposed realities is distant and true, wrote Reverdy, the stronger
will be the image the greater its emotional power and poetic reality.216 And
although, by the time Breton wrote the Second manifeste, this dialectical
reconciliation of opposites had become the movement of sublimation (a feather of
wind), it still took its poetic formulation from the process of distillation through
215.
The stanza Bataille quotes reads: It has been found again. / What? Eternity. / It is the sea run
away [mixed] / With the sun. See Arthur Rimbaud, LEternit (1872); reprinted in Alchimie du verbe,
Une saison en enfer (1873); collected in Complete Works, Selected Letters, pp. 138-139; and 198-199.
216.
Pierre Reverdy, LImage, Nord-Sud, no. 13 (March 1918); quoted in Andr Breton, Manifeste
du surralisme (Paris: ditions du Sagittaire, 1924); collected in Oeuvres completes, vol. 1, p. 324.

240

which a solid substance is converted, through heating, into a vapour which, upon
cooling, re-solidifies. In medieval alchemy a period of interest to both Breton and
Bataille it was believed that through this process base matter could be transmuted
into a refined sublimate, and therefore gold, the purest of metals, could be created
from base metals. Hence the famous phrase, later inscribed on his tombstone, from
Bretons Introduction au discours sur le peu de ralit (1925): I seek the gold of
time.217 But the creation of gold was itself a symbol for the transmutation of the
base elements of mans nature precisely those elements Bataille was most
interested in into a higher state of spiritual evolution. Which is why Breton, in the
Second manifeste, in the context of Rimbauds alchimie du verbe, compared the
Surrealists experiments with language to the alchemists search for the
Philosophers Stone: each being the mediating agent for their respective
transmutations.218 But although Leiris, a former member of the Surrealist group, in
order to account, in Reverdys terms, for the emotional power and poetic reality of
Seabrooks photographs, refers to this process of alchemical transmutation, he does
not choose the sublimate, but rather the residue, of this process. And this is
significant, because it was in just these terms that Bataille, in his article LEsprit
moderne et le jeu des transpositions, which appeared in the same issue of
Documents, not only launched his critique of the transpositional character of the
Surrealist image, but articulated, in opposition to Bretons sublimatory model, his
designation of that which, existing beyond the realm of the image, is the residue of
this movement. In terms similar to those used by Leiris a few pages earlier, and
which look forward to his definition of the work of art in Lascaux, Bataille
concludes this article by writing:
Nevertheless, if it is impossible to attribute to some images something other than an
episodic interest, they can help in letting one vaguely surmise what would remain if
one suppressed, step by step, every kind of transposition. And if it is not a question
of truly succeeding in representing this residue, if no-one cares to make use of it
simply in order to respond to the necessities of artistic expression, it is no less true
that any work that responds, for good or bad reasons, to these sad but inescapable
necessities, will naturally be classified according to whether it contains more or less
of what such residue has of horror. Not that this new point of view can ever be
isolated: it can only be added, as always, to the others. But since any given work is
addressed, as much as to the tastes of well-informed amateurs, to the unhappiest or
most dissimulated emotions of man, it could easily be understood, without insisting
otherwise on this point, that a completely other reason than the faculty of losing
oneself in the most incredible or marvellous game of transpositions has driven one to
paint or to write. (OC I, 274)
217.

Andr Breton, Second manifeste du surralisme, p. 819.

218.
See Andr Breton, Le Chateau toile, Minotaure, no. 8 (June 1936); reprinted as the fifth
chapter of LAmour fou; collected in Oeuvres compltes; vol. 2, p. 763.

241

If sublimation, as we have seen, is the movement by which mans fear of

death is suppressed, the psychic residue of this movement is the repressed link
between eroticism and death. It is the repressed residue of this transposition,
therefore, in both the image and its readings, that I want to look at in the images that
have proved so influential in the rethinking of surrealism over the past twenty or
thirty years, and which invite to us to dwell in that night onto which eroticism opens.
I am thinking in particular of the photographs of the female body by Man Ray,
Jacques-Andr Boiffard, Brassa, and through the substitute of a doll Hans
Bellmer. Perhaps the key image here is Man Rays Anatomies, a photograph from
around 1929 that focuses on the neck and shoulders of a naked woman (who may be
Miller herself): her head thown back on itself, exposing the flesh of her throat to the
soft focus of the camera; her face lost behind the raised jaw, sharply silhouetted
against a black ground (plate 36). As the writing about this image exemplifies,
approaches to these photographs essentially divide into two camps: on the one hand,
a post-structuralist appropriation of Batailles notion of the formless, which is
mapped onto the human body through the mechanism of its rotation; and, on the
other, a psychoanalytic reading of fetishism, in which the specifically female body is
transformed into the signifier of the phallus it lacks.219 But insofar as it ignores the
iconography of ecstasy that informs these images, and which has a long history in
the representation of the eroticised body from Fuselis gothic images of
nightmares to Charcots nosographical portrait of the hysteric the former reading
sublimates this erotic history within a semiotic model of transgression; while the
latter, like every attempt to apply the mechanism of fetishism to the visual image,
suffers from the fact that, once posited, everything falls under its logic of
disavowal.220 While taking it as given, moreover, both these readings, in their
eagerness to theorise their respective mechanisms, have closed their eyes to the
erotic effect of these images, which are typically regarded, when at all, as the
historically contingent expression of a specifically male, and implicitly sexist,
subjectivity, which is variously represented as either failing in its struggle against, or
naively colluding with, a patriarchal sexual order.221 Of course, Breton himself
219.
The former reading was first formulated in Rosalind Krauss, Corpus Delicti, in Rosalind
Krauss and Jane Livingston, LAmour Fou: Photography and Surrealism; with and essay by Dawn Ades
(New York, NY: Abbeville Publishers, 1985), pp. 55-100; perhaps the most representative example of the
latter is Hal Foster, Violation and Veiling in Surrealist Photography: Woman as Fetish, as Shattered
Object, as Phallus, in Jennifer Mundy, ed., Surrealism: Desire Unbound, pp. 203-222.
220.
The semiotic model of transgression is drawn from Barthess celebrated reading of Histoire de
loeil. To the transgression of values, which is the declared principle of eroticism, writes Barthes,
corresponds if it is not founded on a technical transgression of the forms of language (Roland
Barthes, La mtaphore de loeil, in Hommage Georges Bataille, Critique, no. 195-196 (AugustSeptember 1963); collected in Essais critiques (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1964); and translated by Richard
Howard as The Metaphor of the Eye, in Critical Essays (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press,
1972), p. 000.
221.

For the more nuanced versions of this position, see Mary Ann Caws, Ladies Shot and Painted:

Plate 36. Man Ray. Anatomies, 1929. Photograph. Published in Photographies 1920-1934. Paris,
1934.

Plate 37. Man Ray. Minotaure, 1933. Photograph. Reproduced in Minotaure, no. 7 (June 1935).

242

authorised such a reading when, in Les vases communicants, he lamented the

impossibility of reciprocal love under capitalism.222 But as the Recherches sur la
sexualit revealed, Bretons sexual mores such as his desire to close down the
brothels of Paris were quite exceptional among the Surrealists.223 The ensuing
charge of misogyny levelled at surrealism that at the heart of its affirmation of
lamour fou lurks a violent repression of what, in relation to what is posited as a
traumatised male psyche, remains a traumatic female body is founded, however,
on the premise that the object of this violence is an other opposed to and distinct
from the self.224 But if we accept Batailles assertion that the enjoyment
[jouissance] the self experiences in negating the other is only comprehensible when
one perceives that what is at stake is the destruction not only of the object but also of
the subject that the pain and suffering the sadist inflicts on the body of the other is
only transformed for him into pleasure if he experiences it in his turn it becomes
apparent that what these images respond to, and which is at the origin of their erotic
effect, is a drive, not to protect the self from the other, but to escape the limits of that
self as Leiris argued through a mechanism that is both erotic and sacrificial.
This is nowhere more apparent than in what is, perhaps, the most brilliant and
successful of these images, Man Rays Minotaure (1933) (plate 37). Appearing on
the title page of the June 1935 issue of Minotaure, this photograph shows a naked
woman whose raised arms and head, hidden in shadow, transform her side-lit torso
into the head of a bull. Ingeniously effecting the mythical combination of man and
animal in a composite being, in no other image is the erotic effect of headlessness
more explicitly linked to that return of man to animal by which Bataille defined the
movement of transgression. This is not an effect of the rotation of the human body
from a vertical to a horizontal axis; its resulting formlessness; its metamorphosis
Female Embodiment in Surrealist Art, in The Art of Interference: Stressed Readings in Verbal and Visual
Texts (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1989), pp. 111-134; and Hal Foster, Fatal Attraction, in Compulsive
Beauty (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1993), pp. 101-122. Foster, however, who is
writing about Bellmers photographs of La poupe, unfavourably contrasts the misogynist effects they
produce, the sexist fantasies they exacerbate, with what he imputes are their liberatory intentions as if
such intentions were the aim and, more importantly, the measure of these images.
222.
Only a radical social change, Breton wrote, whose effect would be to suppress, along with
capitalist production, the conditions of ownership proper to it, could lead to the triumph, on the level of
real life, of reciprocal love (Andr Breton, Les Vases communicants (Paris: ditions Cahiers libres,
1932); collected in Oeuvres completes, vol. 2, p. 150).
223.
See Jos Pierre, ed., Recherches sur la sexualit, janvier 1928 - aot 1932 (Paris: ditions
Gallimard, 1990); translated by Malcolm Imrie, with an afterword by Dawn Ades, as Investigating Sex:
Surrealist Research 1928-1932 (London and New York: Verso, 1992). Only the first two discussions of
the twelve engaged in were published at the time, in La revolution surraliste, no. 11 (15 March 1928),
pp. 32-40.
224.
For examples of these charges, see Susan Rubin Suleiman, Transgression and the Avant-Garde:
Batailles Histoire de loeil, in Subversive Intent: Gender, Politics, and the Avant-Garde (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1990); and Whitney Chadwick, ed., Mirror Images: Women, Surrealism
and Self-Representation (Cambridge, MA, and London: The MIT Press, 1998).

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into an animal; or its confusion of sexual difference: these are the photographic
effects through which the semantic architecture of the human body is violated. But
this violation first implies the interdiction by which the body becomes imprinted
with what Blake called the lineaments of desire. From this derives the poverty of
the view that attempts to recuperate surrealism for a liberal sexual politics, of which
the pretty lollipop of the 2001 exhibition at Tate Modern was an example.225 If
surrealism has taught us anything, if it has one legacy above all others, it is that
desire is never unbound, that what defines human desire as such are the
interdictions that man is unique in observing, which bind it, structure it, and within
which alone it is realised. Headlessness which is not peculiar to Surrealist
photography, but has a wide currency in erotic imagery, drawn as it is from an
almost universal presence in religious representations of sovereignty is the
dominant trope of this interdiction: through the suppression of facial feature, through
the concealment of the human face beneath an animal head, and through the
resulting formation of composite beings of precisely those mythical, imaginary,
ideal beings which populate prehistoric art and Ancient myth alike, and in which
animal and man, deity and devotee, victim and sacrifier, are united in death. This is
not to say that headlessness is a universal trope which would be, in any case, an
unsustainable notion but that human pleasure is inseparable from the violence of
transgression. It is the animality of being both his own and that of the other that
man touches in eroticism, in which he returns to a lost intimacy with the world. But
it is a return, as we have seen, that is denied to animals, which are as ignorant of
interdictions as they are of death. The transformation effected by Man Rays
photograph of the body of a woman into the head of a bull is not only a
morphological shift (from man to animal) but also an economic one: from the time
of labour, during which interdictions are observed, to the time of play, in which they
are transgressed. And like the corrida, it is a game that ends in the death of the
225.
The exhibition Surrealism: Desire Unbound, was held at the Tate Modern, London, between
20 September 2001 and 1 January 2002, and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, between 6
February 2002 and 12 May 2002. In her catalogue essay, the exhibitions curator, Jennifer Mundy,
concludes with what she affirms is the Surrealists attempts to see love, sexuality and desire as
uncensored or unbound (Jennifer Mundy, Letters of Desire, in Surrealism: Desire Unbound, p. 53). As
an exhibition, the Tate Modern show had many qualities, but the spirit of the Surrealist adventure was not
among them. Surrealism, it seems necessary to recall, was never an art movement or, at least, it wasnt
until the period of its decline, from around 1933 at the earliest, when the movement swapped the political
intransigence of Le Surralisme au service de la revolution for the glossy pages of Minotaure, to 1938 at
the latest, when the Exposition internationale du surralisme distracted a suitably scandalised Parisian
bourgeoisie from events across the Rhein. Any attempt to represent Surrealism as an avant-garde
movement that fails to take its recuperation into the dominant culture as its point of departure will only
serve that recuperation as did the Tate Modern exhibit. The particular attempt to recuperate Surrealisms
interrogation of human desire into the sexual liberalism of the 1960s is symptomatic of this failure. No
doubt it is also a failure of the movement itself; but this needs to be foregrounded, not concealed by the
discreet lighting and platitudinous wall-plaques of the gallery space. An example of the latter was the
translation repeated, moreover, everywhere these days of French homme by English human being,
as if the two were equivalent, or the liberalism of the latter an answer to the questions raised by the former.

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animal. What defines these photographs, therefore, and which is not reducible to
their formal tropes, is the violence they do to the female body, of which the masking
of the woman in Seabrooks photographs is only the most literal example. It was
under the cover of this mask that Bataille addressed the mechanism of this violence
in an undated article from the 1930s that was also submitted to Minotaure, but
returned with a request to shorten its length (Bataille, apparently, didnt
acquiesce).226 In terms which recall those formulated by Leiris to describe the erotic
effect of this masking, but which could just as well be a description of the shifts in
Man Rays photograph, Bataille writes: When what is human is masked, there is no
longer anything present but the animality of death (OC II, 403); adding: The mask
is choas become flesh. It is present before me like a semblance of myself
[semblable], and this semblance, which stares at me, has taken on the figure of my
own death (OC II, 404).
As we have seen, in the next few years Bataille would go on to place the trope
of headlessness at the centre of the secret society of Acphale, in which capacity it
became the very emblem of sovereignty. It was to the specifically erotic effect of
this masking, however, that Bataille returned some twenty years later, shortly after
completing his study on Hegel, when he addressed what, after the representation of
animals and the representation of man, is the third form of Upper Palaeolithic art,
which is reserved for the representation of woman. Some of these representations,
like the Venus of Laussel, are bas-reliefs, but most by far take the form of small
figurines carved from stone or ivory. Bataille had already touched on this art form
on several occasions, including in both Le passage de lanimal lhomme et la
naissance de lart and Lascaux; but he addressed it most directly in his unpublished
article La Vnus de Lespugue (1957). Initially titled LImage rotique, this
article was written by Bataille for Gense, a periodical projected by Patrick
Waldberg but never launched. Batailles focus in this text is the so-called Venus of
Lespugue, one of the most famous of the prehistoric representations of the female
form (plate 38). These small figurines small enough, significantly, to be held in the
hand belong to the Upper Aurignacian or Gravettian period, which is to say,
between 25,000 and 20,000 B.C., and therefore predate the Lascaux paintings by up
to ten thousand years. Nevertheless, like the representations of the almost
exclusively male figures that adorn the walls of prehistoric caves, these equally
exclusively female figurines are also subject to the alteration of the human form.
Within the variations on their striking formal homogeneity, this alteration of the
female form takes two forms, both of which they share with the male figures. First,
although never masked, as their male counterparts are, with the heads of animals, the
faces of these figurines are either deprived of feature or else suppressed altogether,
and some of them, Bataille observes, are even acephalous. The exception that proves
the rule is the beautiful ivory head of the Venus of Brassempouy, but this is the only
226.

See Georges Bataille, Le masque; collected in OC II, 403-406.

Plate 38. Venus of Lespugue, c. 25,000-21,000 B.C. Mammoth ivory statue, height 15cm. Muse de
lHomme, Paris. Reproduced in Georges Bataille, Les Larmes dEros. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert,
1961.

Plate 39. Venus of Willendorf, c. 24,000-22,000 B.C. Limestone statue, height 11cm.
Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna. Reproduced in Georges Bataille, Les Larmes dEros. Paris: JeanJacques Pauvert, 1961.

245

representation of the human face from the Upper Palaeolithic to have been
discovered, and in this respect only serves to demonstrate that the skill necessary to
render a human face was not lacking in prehistoric man. The rule itself is most
forcibly observed in the Venus of Willendorf, perhaps the most famous of these
figurines, whose entire head is incised with ridged and granulated circles (plate 39).
That this effacement is deliberate rather than an omission becomes apparent when
this absence of facial feature is compared with the attention and detail given to the
genitals of these figurines. And although he acknowledges that they come from far
too distant a past, and constitute far too rare a document, for such a claim to be
incontestable, it is this effacement, Bataille argues, that reveals the properly erotic
character of these figurines, and the second characteristic they share with the male
figures.
Just as the engraved or painted male figures are typically ithyphallic which
is to say, depicted with an erect penis the carved female figurines are invariably
shown with enormously enlarged breasts, hips and buttocks. However, rather than
viewing this formal emphasis, as prehistorians tend to, as a faithful representation of
what would have to be the steatopygic figure of prehistoric woman, Bataille sees a
deformed idealism whose movement of alteration is still at play in contemporary
art. Since it emphasises the reproductive functions of the female body, this
deformity is usually attributed to the proposed status of these figurines as fertility
symbols. But like the interpretation of the composite male figures as hunters masked
in the heads of their prey, this is a view which, once again, reduces these works to
magical intercessors not in the hunt, this time, but in the reproduction of the
species, and the female body, therefore, to its animal attributes rather than its human
qualities. For Bataille, in contrast, the formal emphasis upon those parts of the
female body which, within the visual field of the image and the tactile field of the
carved object, most clearly differentiate it from that of the male, is the sign not only
of the interdiction to which man, who effaces himself behind the mask of an animal,
submits his sexuality, but of what he calls the rule between the sexes (OC IX, 350).
This, he says, is that properly erotic relation within which the female subject offers
herself as an object to the desire of the male subject, while at the same time
observing the interdiction on the possession of that object which the male subject
must overcome in order to realise his desire, and in whose overcoming the female
subject, it might be said, has been forced to realise her own:
Above all, masculine desire is directly aroused when the female sex is open to
aggression. In the same way, to the degree to which feminine desire would be
susceptible to being directly aroused by a masculine image, ithyphallic man would be
its object. But, in principle, a man does not seek to attain a woman by becoming the
object of her desire, by proposing himself as this object. In principle, it is a woman
who offers herself to the desire of a man. Following which, by decision, force or ruse,
often in making a show of his prestige, this man must overcome a resistance which,

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on the part of the woman he desires, is accompanied by a first movement of

provocation. (OC IX, 350).

Once again, therefore, the relation Bataille describes here is governed by the
polarities which, according to Freud, dominate our psychic life, and which
determine the formation of a properly human sexual instinct: the opposition between
subject and object, activity and passivity, pleasure and unpleasure; and like Freud
before him, Bataille sees the active subject of this relation, at least in principle, as
male, the passive object, again in principle, as female, and the pleasure itself as
fundamentally sado-masochistic. But as Bataille argued in his presentation to the
Collge de sociologie, unlike the immediacy governing animal appetite, human
desire, if it is to retain its human character, must pass through a mediating term, a
sacred nucleus, which is the object of an interdiction for the community. Within the
erotic realm, the privileged form of this object is the female body. The necessity of
this object, through which the psychic investment in the erotic relation is mediated
for both sexes, is the key to what Bataille asserts is the erotic significance of these
figurines, which he compares, once again, to the language of flowers. It so
happens, Bataille writes of the flower, that the sex itself is clearly delineated, but
the corolla blossoms around the specialised organs without highlighting them to the
detriment of the flower itself (OC IX, 350). To the extent the blossoming breasts,
hips and buttocks of these figurines are invested with a sexual character, in other
words, this character is secondary. It is only at the moment of its realisation,
Bataille writes, beyond the rich signification of the whole image, that desire is
drawn to the sex proper (OC IX, 350). It is in this formal emphasis, therefore, that
Bataille sees the earliest evidence of the eroticisation of the female body as the
privileged object of that desire. Since any part of the body may become the object of
an interdiction, rather than just the genitals alone, this deviation of the sexual instinct
from its reproductive ends (from the genital) is not only the seedbed from which
eroticism rises, but the source of the feelings of attraction and repulsion that are
focused upon the genitals, which continue to provoke the emotional ambivalence
which, as Leiris said, is the psychological sign of the sacred.227 But it is only under
the force of this interdiction that the female body is eroticised in Leiriss terms
fetishised as the object of desire. As Bataille said, the simplest violation of this
interdiction and the one most committed in the Surrealist representation of woman
is that of nudity, which is not a return to animal nakedness (the negation of the
227.
It is in this context that Bataille, as an epigraph to the manuscript of LHistoire de lrotisme,
and again in the chapter on La beaut from Lrotisme, would quote Leonardo da Vincis observation
that: The act of copulation and the members employed are so repulsive that, were it not for the beauty of
the faces, the adornments of the participants and their unbridled passion, nature would lose the human
species (Leonardo da Vinci, The Notebooks, 2 vols. Edited, translated, and with an introduction, by
Edward MacCurdy (London: Jonathan Cape, 1938), vol. 1, p. 106; quoted by Bataille in OC VIII, 8 and
OC X, 144).

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negation) but the denuding of the clothed human body (the transgression of the
interdiction). In accordance with this mechanism, which heightens desire to the
degree to which it prohibits access to its gratification, the erotic effect of this nudity
is only increased when the face of the female form is concealed or suppressed
altogether. And although it is unclear whether nudity was the object of an
interdiction for the peoples who made these figurines, the effect of this effacement,
as in the masking of the male figures, is to deny the humanity of woman to the
benefit of her animality to propel her, in other words, in a procession of bison, deer
and horses, into the realm of the sacred. So while this visual denial, in
psychoanalytic readings of the image, is equated with the repression of sexual
difference in the psyche of the male infant to which end the plenitude of the
fetishised object (breasts, hips, buttocks) comes to substitute for the absence of the
maternal phallus for Bataille and for Leiris too this fetishism is not substitutive
for a lack that would have to precede its symbolisation, but constitutive of the
difference on which that lack is predicated, introducing as it does, between the body
and its possession, the time of desire. In this understanding of the term, fetishism
to paraphrase Aragon and Breton on hysteria is not a pathological phenomenon,
and can properly be called erotic, to the extent that through it the human subject, in
anticipation of its object, places the flesh of the world, and the human body first of
all, under the signifier of its desire. If, under the force of the interdiction, the
fetishised object (breast, hip, buttocks) is isolated from the rest of the body thereby
rendering it useless it is this violation of the integrity of the body which, as in the
mechanism of sacrifice, removes the victim from the order of utility and returns it to
the realm of the sacred (of useless expenditure and violence). Far from being the
disavowal of the other, therefore, fetishism is the mechanism by which the object of
desire transient, changeable, and constantly in the process of formation and
dissolution is constituted as such.
Bataille had addressed the constitution of this object a few years earlier in the
manuscript to LHistoire de lrotisme, where he sought to situate eroticism in
relation to Hegels dialectic of the emergence of self-consciousness in opposed and
unequal figures.228 As Hegel argued, in its emergence from the pure I of nonreflective consciousness, desire, as the original structure of the relation of the
consciousness of self to the other, is only satisfied by the negation of its object
which is to say, by its destruction, transformation, and assimilation. The object of
desire, however, must bring this negation about itself, as its desire. For desire to be
properly human, therefore, the object of desire must be another desire, in which the
subject of desire must awaken a desire equal to its own. So although the object of
desire initially appears as other to the subject, when that object incarnates itself as
228. See Georges Bataille, LHistoire de lrotisme: III. Lobjet du dsir, in LHistoire de lrotisme;
reprinted in OC VIII, 119-128. Although Bataille returned to these pages in Lrotisme, they have lost the
unblinking clarity of the earlier manuscript.

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desire, Bataille argues, the opposition between self and other dissolves: not in the
recognition of the self by the other mutual or otherwise in which Hegel saw the
ultimate satisfaction of desire, but in the communication between subject and object
in which the limits of that self dissolve. What Bataille identified as the desire to
possess the object, therefore, is only the precursor to the loss of that object in the
moment of its enjoyment [jouissance]. Desire is the desire for the object, eroticism
the loss of that object.
Pulled between the figures of wife and prostitute, the object possessed and the
object lost, the observation of the interdiction and its transgression, and, finally, love
for a sacred being and its debasement and violation these two tendencies
constitute the totality of the erotic world. Indeed, in no other realm of experience
does the polarity of the sacred more clearly manifest itself. In marriage, as in an
orgy, there is no positing of the object, since arousal is immediate unmediated by
the object like that of an animal; and like that of the animal, it responds not to
human desire but to biological need. As Bataille reminded his audience at the final
meeting of the Collge de sociologie, this is the reef on which the union of lovers
founders. At the opposite pole to which, therefore, the prostitute is the object in
which that loss takes form the beauty of which is the form in which the response
to the desire to possess the object appears in all its convulsiveness. Bataille had said
as much to his audience that evening. The more beautiful a woman is, he declared,
the more her laceration, her loss, or simply her nudity, is desirable (OC II, 369).
And twenty years later, in the chapter on La beaut from Lrotisme, he would
explicitly situate beauty as a moment in the dialectic of desire. Beauty is desired so
that it may be sullied, he writes. Not for itself, but for the joy savoured in the
certainty of profaning it (OC X, 143).229 If the possession of the object of desire,
however, is only the precursor to its loss, the condition of possessing that object is
the turning of the object into a thing like the animals whose image prehistoric man
evoked on the walls of his caves, and why those animals were both the object of
desire pursued in the hunt and the thing reduced to the state of food. It is necessary,
in effect, Bataille writes, that a being be envisaged as a thing if desire is to
compose a figure that responds to it (OC VIII, 124). Protestations to the contrary
notwithstanding (in matters of erotic reaction, Bataille dryly observes, there is
nothing humanity has not persisted in denying), it is by this figure, and not by the
being of the other, that a properly human desire is aroused. What directly excites
the body of animals, Bataille writes, reaches men through symbolic figures (OC
VIII, 128). Not only must it be passive in response to that desire, therefore, but the

229.
Once again, Bataille is paraphrasing Sade, this time from Justine: It must not be supposed that it
is a womans beauty which best stirs a libertine mind, he writes; it is, rather, the species of crime that the
law has associated with the possession of her (Le Marquis de Sade, Justine, ou les Malheurs de la Vertu
(1791); translated by Richard Seaver and Austryn Wainhouse as Justine, or Good Conduct Well Chastised,
in Justine, Philosophy in the Bedroom and Other Writings (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 680).

249

object of desire, Bataille writes, must, in effect, limit itself to being nothing more
than this response, that is to say, to no longer existing for itself but for the desire of
the other [le dsir de lautre] (OC VIII, 124).
This relation which in Hegels dialectic is that of slave to master, but also of
masochist to sadist is an effect of the violence from which eroticism, insofar as it
is bound to the movement of transgression, is inseparable (of what Leiris calls our
fundamental cruelty); but again, only the interdiction at the origin of this violence
can invest the human body with the psychic resonance necessary to make of it the
object of a properly human desire. Given this violence, however, the question
repeatedly asked and not only of surrealism is why it is the specifically female
body that is the privileged object of desire the answer to which is the history of its
representations, the particular meanings of which, as Bataille argued, can only be
explained by that history. But like that of mastery and slavery, of which it is a part,
this is a history of the relations of power, of domination and subjection which is
why only now, when that history is reaching its conclusion, is the identification of
woman with this object beginning to be challenged less by the liberation of
women from woman than by the demands of the market. Capitalism, as we have
seen, cannot afford to recognise such essential differences as gender. Hence the
conditional tense in which Bataille speaks of the image of ithyphallic man being an
object he describes as masculine rather than male, for a desire he describes as
feminine rather than female.230 But for as long as man has been the subject of the
interdiction which is to say, for as long as he has been a man woman has been
the privileged, although certainly not the exclusive, object of desire. Indeed, insofar
as desire, as Hegel argued, is the necessary and original structure of the relation of
self to other, woman as the diremption of the myth of the original, whole and
complete man into the dualism of sexual difference is a creation of that desire, and
will perhaps disappear with it. Rather than Kojves whole man in whom the
opposition between master and slave has been sublated, the truth of man, therefore
his erotic truth, what makes him a man is woman, the image of which illuminates
and is illuminated by that of sacrifice.
Because man is the subject of the interdiction, sadism, which is a formation of
this subjectivity, is a fundamental component of his sexual instinct. But like the
master with the slave, sadism turns the other into a thing, to be used as such. It is this
transformation that is effected in Bellmers photographs of La poupe, which
consciously draw on the history of images of sacrifice, from the martyrdom of Saint
Sebastian (an image that Bataille reproduced in Les larmes dEros) to the crucifixion
of Christ (plates 40 and 41). Tumescent like the prehistoric figurines, dismembered
and reconfigured according to the metonymy of desire, these fetish objects are an
230. Bataille writes in LHistoire de lrotisme: masochism . . . is in my view only an alteration of the
sexual disposition, the man displaying feminine behaviour before a woman of masculine behaviour
unless it responds to an excess of sadism, in which the cruelty of the subject is finally turned against
himself (OC VIII, 144-145).

Plate 40. Hans Bellmer, La poupe, 1935. Photograph. Published in Les Jeux de la poupe. Illustrs
de textes par Paul luard. Paris: Les ditions Premires, 1949. Reproduced in Georges Bataille, Les
Larmes dEros. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1961.

Plate 41. Hans Bellmer, La poupe, 1935. Photograph. Published in Les Jeux de la poupe. Illustrs
de textes par Paul luard. Paris: Les ditions Premires, 1949.

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object-lesson of seemingly infinite variation in the erotic mechanics by which

woman, reduced to a thing, is recomposed, through the mediation of the image, as
the figure of desire. If it is by this figure that human desire is aroused, it is in the
transformation of its object into a thing that consciousness draws near to its own
death. This is the violent heart of eroticism, the dark night onto which it opens,
which descends upon even the most liberal image of human desire, beats in even its
most elevated expressions. Only when it has been turned into a thing, however, can
something be lost; which is what occurs when the animal pursued in the prehistoric
hunt, the object of desire, is reduced to the state of food (from bull to beef, pig to
pork; but also, the body of a beloved wife into the debased flesh of a prostitute), and
why the hunter, like the sadist, identifies with the animal at the moment of its death.
Bellmer was not alone in being fascinated by this widely accepted but little
understood relation between coitus and eating, which finds its clearest expression in
the sacrificial meal. But insofar as sadism seeks the annihilation of the self in the
other in whose punished flesh, the instrument of his transcendence, the sadistic
subject seeks the incarnation of his own desire this is precisely the substitution that
Bataille identifies at the origin of the attenuation of the spirit of sacrifice by a will to
mastery. Hence its failure ever to satisfy the desire of man. It is for this reason that
sadism is the sexual mode par excellence of the commodity, with which the image
of woman, as Bellmers photographs exemplify, has become so closely linked.
In the arena of the spectacle, the commodity casts its deathly pallor over the
being of the other, transforming it into a thing. In this respect, the commodity form,
which distances as it seduces, is perfectly attuned to the rhythm of desire. For the
object of desire, capitalism produces the form of the commodity, the desire for
which is recreated in the moment of its consumption. The commodity is the very
pornography of desire. Unlike the tiger, therefore, which destroys its object in
consuming it, the consumer is only a moment in the cycle of production. Indeed, as
the subject of capitalism, the consumer is merely a means to an end which is the
escalation of production therefore subordinate to that production, whose excess is
accumulated in the commodity. Although the cost of the commodity, therefore, is
quantified by the totality of the relations of production that constitute the market, its
value is still qualified by the labour that produced it. To borrow Batailles formula:
what labour is in time, the commodity is in space. Because of this, the consumption
of the commodity lacks access to the qualitatively distinct time of expenditure,
remaining circumscribed by the economy of labour. But if the commodity is the
accumulation of labour, eroticism is its expenditure; and it is here that Bataille
locates mans freedom: not in the infinitely deferred future of satisfied desire but in
its captivation in the present.
It is for this reason that the sado-masochistic opposition, which marks the two
poles of the attitude of consciousness to others, is the unsurpassable horizon of
desire: since the sublation of the opposition between master and slave would mean

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the end of desire in post-historical happiness. It is on this, of course, that the

commodity preys. To this promise of happiness, therefore, which is only the empty
contentment of possessing the object, Bataille opposes the lacerations of eroticism,
in which the death of man in the satisfaction of his desire is revealed to
consciousness. As Freud argued, however, the will to mastery in which the death
drive initially expresses itself is only cathected with the libido, and thereby placed in
the service of the sexual function, when it takes itself as its object, giving rise to a
primary masochism that is at the origin of eroticism. Insofar as he is the subject who
turns himself into an object who exists, in other words, not for himself but for the
desire of the other the masochist is the most human of beings; or, rather, to the
extent that all desire is sado-masochistic, masochism is the most human of
perversions. While the sadist desires only the inert object, whose independence he
must negate if his own desire it is to be incarnated in it, the masochist desires the
desire of the other seeks to awaken in the other a desire equal to his own. Like the
opposition between master and slave, therefore, the relation between sadist and
masochist is reversed. Since the sadist can only experience pleasure in the suffering
he inflicts on others, and the masochist can only experience pleasure in the suffering
inflicted upon him, that suffering turns into pleasure, in both the self and the other,
and sadism becomes masochism. Unlike the unequal relation between master and
slave, however, each does to the other what he does to himself. Indeed, it is precisely
this reciprocation of pleasure, rather than the disavowal of difference it is repeatedly
claimed to be, that is effected by the doubling of forms in Bellmers photographs, in
which the punished object is both self and other.231 It is here, therefore, where
satisfaction and laceration coincide with pleasure, that the surplus labour
accumulated in the commodity, like the mass of energy contained within the atom, is
released in the expenditure of eroticism.
As Leiriss reference to a universal erotic mechanics makes clear, the erotic
relation this opposition describes is not reducible to the historical contingency of the
subject, Freudian or otherwise, only the terms of its engagement. As such, however,
it is necessary to correct Batailles qualification of the subject of this relation as
either male or female, even in principle. Insofar as it describes the field of relations
within which our subject positions are organised, the erotic relation determines the
passage, not from animal to man which is at the origin of this relation but from
nature to culture. There is, accordingly, no essentialism to its coordinates neither a
male nor a female subject only active and passive positions within the play of
sado-masochism that have predominantly, but not exclusively, been equated with
masculine and feminine subjectivities. This, however, is only an attempt to
legitimate as natural and given the eminently cultural and historically fluid
231.
This often-repeated claim is a staple of Bellmer studies. Besides the texts already sited in this
section, see Sue Taylor, Hans Bellmer: The Anatomy of Anxiety (Cambridge, MA and London: The MIT
Press, 2000).

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constructions within which the different modalities of the human subject are woven.
Since it responds to a human desire and not an animal need, the same contingency
obtains for the object of desire. As Freud argued, there is only one sexual instinct
which is to say, other sexualities exist only for those who wish to ground the
infinite perversity of human desire in nature. But pleasure is an economic, not a
biological, determination. Indeed, it is the historical and cultural contingency of
these coordinates that constitutes the importance of this relation for a theory of the
erotic image. But insofar as the erotic relation is that within which human desire is
realised, what is up for grabs what is left to be struggled for are our entries into
this relation, and what we realise while were there. The relation itself is what we
are.