August 19, 2003
Sontag: Regarding the Pain of Others#14
Rick's fourteenth post on Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others continues the concern with Bataille. Rick links to a Van Gogh's painting of old peasant boots, but I will leave that to another post, since I want this use this one to bring Bataille into play since he provides another, and more interesting, way to talk about mutilated bodies.
In this particular post Rick gives us Sontag's comments on this photo that looks to be akin to human sacrfice:
Sontag says:
“Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at the sight of this excruciation (the photo of 'death by one hundred cuts'). But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation – a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility, which regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime. Something to be fixed. Something to be refused. Something that makes one feel powerless.” (pp. 98–99)
Sontag's interpretation of Bataille concurs with my own on this photo made when I commented on Rick's thirteenth post here. As I mentioned there, the eroticism associated with the sexually submissive (not the sex slave) approaches this sense of suffering as something more than just suffering, as it is also a kind of transfiguration.
The experiences of Dirty Whore are more than a breaking taboos of bourgeois society. They involve something to be refused---(denied an organism by the man as master;) suffering (through the pain), being powerless (though being bound and a fucktoy for men) and a sense of pain linked to sacrifice and exaltation. The writing of the experiences of sex and violence over at Dirty Whore Diary are by someone who enjoys rough sex and dominant men. This is very different to the modern sensibility that regards suffering as something that is a mistake or an accident or a crime as in the Law and Order sex crime shows on free-to-television.
Dirty Whore's experience is closer to Bataille's understanding of pain connected to ecstasy: being sexually turned on from being humiliated and used. Consider this post:
"Because I spend my days as an aggressive, dominant, slightly bitchy, straight-laced professional, it turns me on to be treated as a filthy gutter whore sometimes. In the right mood, pain excites me. Bondage always does; the feeling of helplessness makes me wet and sets my hips churning every time. Humiliation, if followed by redemption, is an emotional rollercoaster that I'll ride on now and then."
This sexual exuberance for Bataille is what prevents us from being reduced to things that are used bureaucratic systems and corporations. It is an other world. For Dirty Whore the dominant /submissive world is where she can be antithesis of the in-control feminist she is when at work.
The emphasis in this other world is on the experience of being pushed to the physical limits. It indicates a violence of the disturbance; or a crack in the system. Bataille writes in his book, Eroticism:
"The violence of death and sexual violence, when they are linked together, have this dual significance. On the one hand the convulsions of the flesh are more acute when they are near to a black-out, and on the other a black-out, as long as there is enough time, makes physical pleasure more exquisite. Mortal anguish does not necessarily make for sensual pleasure, but that pleasure is more deeply felt during mortal anguish."
And what of transfiguration? Well Dirty Whore in the above paragraph speaks of the pain associated with humiliation, when followed by redemption, leading to emotional rollorcoaster. The religious language is there in the use of 'redemption', meaning something like deliverance from an ' X' through suffering. I write 'X' as a placeholder since Dirty Whore is not referring to a Christian understanding of redemption as a deliverance from sin through suffering, or as an atonement for guilt. I'm not sure what she means. It may mean feeling possessed, appreciated, safe.
In another post she speaks of "liking the pain as a man slowly enters me [in the arse] then I slip into a strange animalistic trance as he starts to move. I'll beg for him to fuck me harder." Animalistic trance refers back to the mystics. In other postings she refers to atonement in the sense of reparation given for an injury or wrong. God is dead here a religious language is beign used to express the expriences of sex and violence.
That then is the world Bataille inhabits and writes about. His world was the Parisian brothels of pre-1940. He wrote at a time when eroticism was considered a sin by Christianity. His texts are written by a man about his experiences with women as objects of desire and as a prey to men's desire. Bataille's writings represent the beginning of the sexual revolution that took off in the 1960s abnd have an historical feel to them.
In contrast, Dirty Whore is living after the sexual revolution. She lives outside the brothel world and she is writing about her desires. She says that "I don't really see myself as a whore, and except for a handful of times that I'll tell you about someday, I haven't been one in fact." She says that "I've worked as a stripper, a phone sex girl, and have done some web cam sessions, but those were diversions for me, not definitions." She talks in terms of "the relaxation of societal standards on the Internet that makes people engaged in any alternative lifestyle more likely to speak up." The 'filthy slut' is an identity that she reinvents, creates and enjoys. It is a shaping of her subjectivity.
Bataille reconnects transgression, sacrifice, the sacred, violence and sexuality. in this erotic world we are outside the control of reason; a world based around an experience of something bursting, of the violence accompanying an explosion. He say that the "final aim of eroticism is fusion, all barriers gone." Christianity, in contrast, created a sacred world in which everything horrible or impure had been excluded from.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at August 19, 2003 09:03 AM | TrackBack