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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Nietzsche apotheosizes the ‘will to truth’ counter our purer expectations as the will not to be deceived, thus he connects truth with a woman, exposing the desire for truth as a desire like any other.

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This, like, Sade, is literature not practice to repeat a point (or was it a defense?) that David Allison is fond of offering on Sade’s behalf in contrast to the 15th century Gilles de Rais, a criminal virtuoso of excess and transgression arguably beyond Sade’s or even Bataille’s wildest adventures. See Bataille, The Trial of Gilles de Rais

But this is only because we know, because he was a wealthy man and servants talk. There is a world of unchronicled crime, but we should not call it crime, as Nietzsche reminds us: for the practitioner it is only a sin in the consciousness of the same.

One needs to think of it as such.

Who notices the ants one crushes, the gnats one brushes away?

But in the case of eros, consciousness dissolves and returns upon itself, can almost catch iself in the act, horror, edge, frisson.


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Like his reflections on desire, Bataille’s Real occupies the symbolic realm:

the eye, the egg, the testoid oval, the language of the summit, the peak.


And we will always be told that no matter the level of violence/violation there are no crimes at stake. Women when they are not the beloved are prostitutes who exist to be observed, a temporary marriage as Nietzsche once suggested: the bride for the evening, in tatters,
i.e., or otherwise said: she needs the money and can be had.

Bataille collapses whores utterly, reduces them to their being as object for a subject. This even Sartre does not do and Sartre reminds us that public consensus and demand stands on the other side of bad faith. He is at pains to underscore the illusion as a playing at: “the waiter in the cafe plays with his condition in order to realize it. This obligation is not different from that which is imposed on all tradesmen.” [Sartre, Being and Nothingness]

And here we can add prostitutes to the mix as so many tradeswomen and tradesmen. Far from straining the point, the introduction of sex workers illuminates Sartre’s argument:

Their condition is wholly one of ceremony. The public demands of them that they realize it as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they endeavor to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. [Sartre, Being and Nothingness]

A prostitute who dreams or is otherwise distracted is not wholly a prostitute as much as she will seem like the wife or the beloved.

Heaven forbid.


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"The response to erotic desire is, on the contrary, an end.” -- Bataille

Most discussions of desire end here -- especially those on the internet or late night TV.
Bataille goes further, and his meditation is even and unflinching:

The essence of man as given in sexuality — which is his origin and beginning — poses a problem for him that has no other outcome than wild turmoil. This turmoil is given in the little death. How can I fully live the little death if not as a foretaste of the final death. (Bataille, The Tears of Eros)

We all know the meaning of the ‘little death’ (elsewhere writing on sculpture and the sublime in Nietzsche I associate this with the “little god” Nietzsche’s Zarathustra threatens to chastise before the dancing girls who shrink at his approach — exhibitionism alive and well in the 19th century world), and Bataille insists on reminding us that the ‘little death’ and death as such go together. Of course, death is symbolized, literally enough, as death seducing a woman.







Hans Baldung Grien, c. 1510






In addition to Nietzsche, in addition to Sade, Gilles de Rais and other names that are less well known, there is also the influence of Heidegger and due to the background Hegelian sensibility given to them as to so many others in this cultural Parisian milieu by way of Kojève, there is the echo of Lacan:

You will hear, coming from within, a voice that leads to your destiny. It is the voice of desire and not that any desirable being. (Lacan, quotation in de Luca’s introduction The Tears of Eros)

The project here undertakes a review of Bataille’s discussion of Nietzsche with specific reference to desire.

And commentators like to cite Nietzsche where he writes,

“The degree and kind of a man’s sexuality reaches up to the nature of his spirit." (BGE § 75)

As is patent here, what is at stake is already a matter of representation, not feeling, not real desire.

If Bataille can rightly be named the philosopher of the Real as he is (speaking of Lacan’s Real rather than Baudrillard’s), it is also important to add contra Lacan that Bataille’s Real is very much an imaginary or representational affair: profiles in pornography, less a matter of metaphorical than phenomenological profiling.

Even before the internet, the specular project of collective desire as it may be regarded and like Malraux’s Les Voix du Silence [Voices of Silence], Bataille’s Tears of Eros offers an illustration of erotic desire both graphically throughout history but also quite philosophically expressed (provided one can read Nietzsche, and this more of an undertaking than most readers imagine).


That said, Bataille’s Tears of Eros is a serious, scholarly book, an art book, archival book, anthropological resource, philosophical reflection, economy, as much as it is anything else:

Beyond calculated means, we look for the end — or the ends — of these means. … The quest for wealth — sometimes the wealth of egoistic individuals, sometimes wealth held in common — is obviously only a means. Work is only a means. … The response to erotic desire is, on the contrary, an end. (Bataille, The Tears of Eros)