In Bataille, as in Sade, as in Lacan, what fascinates us is only talk...

And of course, or probably, no theorist "gets this point," after Bataille, that is
to say, after Lacan himself that is, better than Žižek.

Squared.

What fascinates us is only talk.  

Again: in Bataille, as in Sade, as in Lacan, and this Žižek exploits to a degree that is now marvelously well-known, what fascinates us is only talk, the very idea of the very idea...  With Bataille we speak explicitly  (this is to say: directly) of things Nietzsche only expresses with allusion to ancient mysteries.
In other words, Bataille eroticizes Nietzsche.

Not that Nietzsche lacks his share, assuming there is always such.... 

(and just this when it comes to the gentlemen is rather problematic to assume) ...

Still, still and despite the
fact that men, heterosexually disposed do not regard themselves as objects for women, for the other, to be assessed and judged and so on, Nietzsche has been eroticized, posthumously, a tad homoerotically (for this changes nothing of the above heteroerotic point), and ergo falsified, including, when imposed on his person a certain phallicization, rather as if, certainly this would have been true, Nietzsche were not nearly muscular enough for our fantasies for him.

In this case, the metonymy of the image, despite its profoundly erroneous dimensions, speaks to us: in Nietzsche not as the Übermensch but as "superman" in the 1907 bookplate by Alfred Soder for Friedrich Berthold Sutter, Der nackte Nietzsche im Hochgebirge, which also has been featured as the cover for one key book on Nietzsche and his overall historical reception not to mention blogs and Facebook pages.  

This has also been done more conventionally not with Nietzsche himself but still more from the viewpoint of the subject as such for whom an object, this would be truth, or life, or eternity as Nietzsche also personalizes this speaks to us.  

Thus I am reminded of a the cover of a Hollingdale translation depicting the Sphinx not in stone but in, as it were, soft-porn, almost Vargas girl detail with the one key exception that the sphinx, being a sphinx, was not smiling, lacked a Vargas-girl cream complexion (to the middle-Eastern contrary) and had lidded eyes rather than open, inviting eyes.

 “Supposing truth to be a woman — what then? Is the suspicion not well founded that all philosophers, when they have been dogmatists, have had little understanding of women?” (BGE, Preface)

NB
-- because it has to be said --
the reference to a "Vargas girl" is to the Peruvian artist, Alberto Vargas (9 February 1896 – 30 December 1982), and not, and this not is here fairly significant, to the sixties 'chanteuse,' Chavela Vargas (b. 1911) ...

Where Vargas girls are rather like Frank Frazetta men (nb, again, and always, not boys, and note that Frazetta, for his own part, does a mean Alberto Vargas), Chavela Vargas --- who set the pattern in many ways for k.d. lang, if and to be sure hailing as she does from the Mexico south of the US much rather than the Canada north of the US.



Where, as Nietzsche reminds us, the south always is far more threatening, more dangerous (Goethe knew this), this also means, alas, that we tend not to take account of it.

Alberto Vargas offers us an iconic pattern, echoing so many others who had done so already with the cello and its form, and its voice, sexualizing the outline of the guitar.



And, indeed, Chavela Vargas herself repeats this image.

Chavela Vargas went from the (in retrospect) amazingly easy-to-do, as in not really all that, after all, mindfuck of gendercossings in the sixties to the greatest of transgressions, getting old and singing old, all a challenge to the image of the Dionysian vitality of music.

Aging is the thing, as Nietzsche also reminded us, that counts for us as an offense against our metaphysical dreams, as aging, like, becoming, procreation, death is what life is.





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