If this were a Western of the sort Slavoj Zizek really loves, the sort Stanley Cavell also hoped to claim as his own (and while we are at it, let’s seize the metonymic rhythm to ask why, given all the enthusiasm for James Stewart and his ilk, no one has managed to write on Orson Welles apart from Houseman’s journeyman
laudatio), and if to keep to clichés, if the scene to be shot were a card game, everything to come is already revealed, this we know, articulated by the shooting angle, shadows and light, lost from the start, the card game is a metaphor for giving away the game, not that such gambits ever made a bit of difference in the original genre. The point is, and this is already evident to us with some familiarity with Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, even if you put the substance of your theme front and center, even if you say what it is that you are doing, there is little danger that you will have any takers.
The topic is not a Western but guns are involved, all the guns in the world one might say, and it is not Zarathustra but it is Nietzsche, Bataille’s reflections on Nietzsche. And far more than Nietzsche, Bataille's theme is, as Derrida will later reprise the move,
woman, that is to say, far more explicitly, desire, eros, sex. And so I ask at the start, just to play my hand as clear as you please: why are women rather than men equated, as objects of desire, with eros, with sex?
Now and to be sure, men can be and are regarded as objects of desire. Yet when speaking of erotic objects we tend to be speaking of such objects as they are objects for men (these can be male or they can be female and even otherwise) and not for women (whether male or female or even otherwise). But it is bad form, I have already violated the rules of the game: one is not to begin with such an observation — it is preferred that one argue for it, take pages and pages to get there, thus de Beauvoir began by talking, like Bataille, of the egg.
To be upfront about objects of desire (whose desire is it to desire? to be desired? Do we simply agree, while knowing better, or as all the world agrees, that desire is desire is desire?), to speak plainly about the erotic in this sense is a transgression, not allowed, rather like lovemaking, as Bataille observes in his late-written
Tears of Eros:
It’s inconceivable! making love is prohibited. Unless you do it in secret. But if we do it in secret the prohibition transfigures what it prohibits and illuminates it with a glow at once both sinister and divine.
Here with this completely unacceptable observation (I question the presumption that is no mere presumption as it also happens to be on display in our collective imaginary register on billboards, newspapers, magazines, TV at any time of the day but especially the night, as well as the internet at every level, but also in art and intellectual culture, art as high as you please, just consider the title (and go ahead and add Stendhals’ meaning) of Alexander Nehamas’
Only A Promise of Happiness but also Bernini’s Saint Theresa as Lacan paraphrases her sigh — She’s coming Jacques Lacan tells us, to Luce Irigaray’s irritation (really now?, Irigaray seems to ask: how can you tell? ‘She’s’ a statue: do you know the rinds and rhythms of stone?).
Saint Theresa, “sigh” and all, is also featured on the cover of the City Lights edition of Georges Bataille’s
Eroticism: Death and Sensuality. The presumption is that “woman,” the female, the feminine, is somehow to be equated with the erotic. Why women? Are they constantly preoccupied with desire or is that they can’t stop thinking about sex? Are they particularly good at the erotic? since when? for whom? Or are we not in fact talking about women as objects of desire? In which case, ditch the preceding question).
If I appear to be following Derrida, at least formally as he begins his
Epérons/Spurs, by saying that “it is woman who will be my subject,” I mean to hold Derrida to a promise he doesn’t stick to, any more than does any one else (and the problem may lie in our language, it is certainly lodged in our thinking). My title is Bataille and Nietzsche (on desire) but my subject is woman (as object). Thus I began above with a patent but oddly enough persistently controversial claim contra woman and eroticism, to which I add a yet more controversial discussion of eros/power, and not à la Foucault (which would be uncontroversial because conventional). By contrast, discussions of women and power tend to be about as unerotic as talk of powerless women can seem to be erotic (to whom?). Note here that the dominatrix plies her trade not for her own sake (though this conviction to be sure is her client’s most deeply held fantasy) but for the sake of the client who is almost always male (I leave unbroached here the question of sadomasochism when it is not for hire but would be inclined to argue that it reproduces the extant power relationships and thereby the extant satisfactions). The question of the erotic as power happens to include and not by accident the question of
respect or esteem as this is the very political issue for women in the academic world.
