Junk for Code

Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others#13

It was a pleasant suprise to arrive at Rick's thirteenth post on Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others to discover that he too had encountered difficulties as I had done.

There is no photo juxtaposed to the Sontag text. What had troubled Rick?

He had reached the point of Sontag's book (p.98) where Sontag discusses Georges Bataille and his legendary photograph (1910) of a Chinese prisoner undergoing “the death of a hundred cuts”. As with me, the 'I' comes into the foreground. The 'I' was no longer in the background.

Rick says:

"Something has changed now, for me: something important in my understanding and relation with the material Sontag surveys in her small book...For the first time in this process, I imagined all of the photos and works of art I had posted to this point as a kind of gallery, and realized that I had begun to create an exhibition, a very difficult and horrible exhibition, something Sontag had chosen not to do in her book."

Rick reflects on the fact that Sontag had no images in her book other than this Goya that was on the cover:

Rick then says:

"And now another of her questions resurfaces, one I included in an earlier post:What is the point of exhibiting these pictures? But, this time, the question is to myself, an artist whose work often connects with similar issues, one who now finds himself, in this effort, a slightly bemused curator of an on-line weblog exhibition, yet incomplete, of images depicting human suffering, pain or torture."

So Rick elects not to post the Bataille photograph of a Chinese prisoner undergoing “the death of a hundred cuts".

The text by Sontag that Rick includes refers to her judgement that Goya's The Disasters of War are notable exception to her general rule that:

“most depictions of tormented, mutilated bodies do arouse a prurient interest…Goya’s images cannot be looked at in the spirit of prurience. They don’t dwell on the beauty of the human body; bodies are heavy, and thickly clothed.”

It seems we that had reached a tacit taboo. Where to now? We can do a negative dialectic of beauty to grasp the dynamic life inherent in the category of the beautiful; or step through the doors of horror into a world where art has an affinity with death.

Let us choose transgression and step through the doors. But before we do though, we can redescribe Sontag's 'the beauty of the human body' as the erotic. And in this world what seems strange from the outside is normal inside. Yet the insight we gain from this as we stand on the threshold is that the erotic--human sexuality, the world of the body----is constituted by taboos that surround it so as to allow the world of work, family and reason to be constructed. When artists begin to explore it, as Catherine Breillat did with

it activates a recoil that does not step through the door. The door signifies taboo. Hence the ambivalence. Beyond that door lies the world of death and sex, terrifying pleasures, and sacrifice to affirm the continuity of existence. It is a world where reason founders.

To step through the doors of horror we need to break the tacit taboo that keeps the horrible at a distance from us. Here is the photo:

Slow Death by Leng-Tch'e (cutting into pieces):There is true ecstasy in this expression.

Agony and ecstasy. This is a religious way of speaking that mediates on the fundamental contradictions of human existence and engages us at a very personal level. God may be dead as Nietzsche proclaimed but that does not entail the death of religion.

Stepping through the doors of horror is looking at the historical abyss. It is having one foot in the flesh of the orgy and one in the bones of the grave. Should we not try and get a hold on the cruel and schizophrenic nature of late 20th century techno-culture? Looking back we can see that the twentieth was a very cruel century. Why turn away from it? Why not critically confront it?

Many take the easy option here--and say the Soviet gulag was the work of the left; or that the Nazi holocaust was the work of fascists. It was them not us who did all those horrible, evil things. Denial is the option and the horrible is wrapped up in taboo. The 'I' is not involved.

Bataille is the metaphysician of evil specializing in blasphemy, profanation, and horror. I say breaking the taboos because Bataille's philosophy is about what is repudiated by civil society: shit, blood, sacrifice, deviance, violence. With Bataille we are inside the world of horror where the centrality of the erotic to human life is derived from the relation of the erotic to death.

Death is central to human life. Is this not the space of religion?

It is also the space that is explored by film makers confronting their nation's past; or exploring horror as in Ridley Scott's Hannibal.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 15, 2003 05:24 PM | TrackBack