an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 5, March-April 2008, ISSN
1552-5112
The Impossible Thought of Lingchi
in Georges Bataille's The Tears of Eros
In Formless: A
User’s Guide (1997), Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss critique a certain
history of modernism. They take Georges Bataille at his word that informe, or formless, is "a term
that serves to bring things down in the world" and describe its “operation” for undoing the
formalisations of twentieth century art.[1] As James Elkins notes in "The Very Theory of
Transgression: Bataille, Lingchi, and
Surrealism," the effect of Formless
has been to inspire artists to practice along the lines it set out, so that it
has become a user's guide not for deconstruction but for its own positive
appropriation.[2] In the final pages of the book Krauss proposes that informe has “its own legacy to fulfil,
its own destiny,” words that tacitly sanction its development in art.[3] What was for Bataille a way of negating the impulse to
classify turns, then, into a history of modern art that is still playing itself
out.
Contesting this theory of transgressive art put
forward in Formless, Elkins turns to
Bataille's publication of photographs of lingchi,
or the death by a hundred cuts.[4] Elkins argues that these devastating photographs,
which were published in Bataille’s The
Tears of Eros (1961) but not in Bois and Krauss’ Formless, out-transgress
Bois and Krauss's transgressive ideas about modern art. The reason Bois and
Krauss did not reproduce the lingchi
photographs is that their extremity would “ruin” the art in Formless, undoing artifice with an
unbearable reality.[5] Yet as we shall see, informe is not necessarily transgression, nor can transgression be
considered apart from Bataille's philosophy of eroticism that is outlined in The Tears of Eros and his earlier text Eroticism (1957).[6] While transgression played a formative role in the
development of poststructuralism and subsequently critical theory itself, its
appropriation from Bataille has all too often neglected this eroticism. For
Bataille did not distinguish the real from artifice, the movement of
transgression from its representations in art and literature. While Elkins
wants to argue that the power of lingchi
is to exceed the power of any art, and so to negate the idea of an art of
transgression, this argument makes a partition between art and lingchi, art and reality, that is not
consistent with a philosophy of eroticism in which such classifications spill
into each other.
When faced with images of lingchi it is difficult not to share Elkins' revulsion. He explains
their effect with the idea that they trap death, a death that lies somewhere
between the victim's moments of suffering and demise, captured over a sequence
of camera shots.[7] What Elkins does not say, but is implicit in his
argument, is that this aspect of the photographs is connected to the precise
method of death at work here.[8] What may be unique to these images is the sheer
extent of suffering that the victims are visibly enduring, and their
documentation of other human beings who are imposing this suffering. Elkins’ attention to the shock that the
photographs contain, and his concomitant reluctance to interpret them, is a refusal
to converse about the pain and cruelty so evident within them.
In an earlier book, The Object Stares Back (1997), Elkins narrated the photographs,
seeing the victim as a woman among male executioners and witnesses. Thinking of
the execution as symptomatic of gender relations, including the possibility
that this was an adulteress being put to death, was what made these images
"difficult to come to terms with."[9] Here the difficulty of the image did not prevent its
interpretation, but was rather dependent upon an investigation of that image’s
content. In his 2004 article “The Very Theory of Transgression,” Elkins
discusses the accounts of physicians and penal theorists who have looked
extensively at the photographs. The methods of these scholars have to do with a
certain kind of looking, one immersed in the particular reason of this or that
specialisation, reasoning away the horror of the images. To this approach we
can contrast a certain refusal to look in Elkins' descriptions of the victim as
being of "indeterminate sex." This shift from specific to
indeterminate gender in Elkins' work here is part of his withdrawal from the
very possibility of interpreting the images.[10]
Bataille suggested another way of looking at lingchi photographs in The Tears of Eros that is not entirely
repulsed by their cruelty. Following on from his earlier text Eroticism in which he argued that death
and sex collapse into each other at moments of orgasm, in ritual or in
sacrifice, The Tears of Eros
juxtaposes Bataille's own writing with images of prehistoric objects, modern
paintings and photography. What unifies these images is their relation to the
author’s philosophy of eroticism. In eroticism, achieved at moments when terms
such as "divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror" blur
together and become interchangeable, one may experience the continuity of life
beyond oneself, relieving the physical tension of discontinuity to which we are
bound by death.[11] It is by such a dissolution that the images
reproduced in The Tears of Eros, including
those of lingchi, may be understood
as a series of contemplations on that continuity. Through this idea of
eroticism we can make more sense of the crowds of onlookers that surround lingchi executions, of the attraction of
looking at extreme suffering.
For Bataille, this attraction lies in a transgression
of those prohibitions by which we structure our lives. Lingchi violates such transgressions, and carries on a tradition of
sacrifice in human societies. Bataille noted that after a sacrifice, "what
remains, what the tense onlookers experience in the succeeding silence, is the
continuity of all existence with which the victim is now one."[12] The evidence of a desire to see lingchi, evidence that lies within the photographs themselves,
suggests there is more to understand about these images than Elkins suggests,
that they are just as compulsive as repulsive.
It is important to note that the differences between
the gazes of Bataille and Elkins upon lingchi
is related not only to the different philosophies underpinning the two author’s
writing but also to the differences between the photographs they publish to
document them. In his essay Elkins refers to the series that psychoanalyst
Adrian Borel is supposed to have given Bataille in 1926, and which are
published in The Tears of Eros.[13] Yet Elkins does not publish these particular
photographs. He illustrates “The Very Theory of Transgression” with a separate
set of images taken in
Figure
1. Photographer
unknown; Lingchi, the cutting of the left leg; date unknown; photograph; book
illustration; Chinese Torture / Supplice Chinois website.
Figure
2. Photographer unknown; Lingchi; date unknown;
photograph; book illustration; Chinese Torture / Supplice Chinois website.
Figure
3. Photographer
unknown; Lingchi, untying Convict's arms; date unknown; photograph; book
illustration; Chinese Torture / Supplice Chinois website.
What Bataille finds in these photographs is something
he describes as “at once ecstatic(?) and intolerable.” Following the word
“ecstatic” with a question mark in parentheses Bataille refers to an expression
in the victim's face that by reason should not be there.[15] Referring to Bataille's discovery of this expression,
the historian Jérome Bourgon writes that:
having viewed over fifty photographs from at least
four different executions by lingchi, we can attest that something
readable as an ”ecstatic” expression is evident only in the two photos
published in The Tears of Eros, and
even then the reading is subjective and questionable.[16]
It is this expression that Bataille is interested in,
an expression that Elkins does not mention, and which is more clearly visible
in those photographs actually published in The
Tears of Eros.
In the original 1961 French edition of The Tears of Eros, one of these images
is reproduced on the scale of a single page (fig. 1). The torturers and
witnesses are all looking at the victim’s left leg being cut off toward the
bottom of its composition. For the viewer of the photograph, the angles of
these legs and the pole to which he is tied point upward to the face, where the
lightness of the sky relieves the darkness below. There the victim's face looks
upward, eyes rolled back, and it is there that Bataille finds the expression of
which he writes. In the second picture on the adjoining page (fig. 2), a large
wound in the victim’s chest sits in the centre of the composition. To relieve
the gaze from this horrific sight the gaze travels upward, toward the end of a
pole that is again propping up the upper part of the body, and to the light at
the top of the image. The face there looks upward, backlit by the open sky,
again with an expression that might be mistaken for ecstasy.[17] It is to these faces that Bataille turns to find the
very contrary of suffering. To cite the
full passage in The Tears of Eros where
he makes this extraordinary claim:
I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of
pain, at once ecstatic(?) and intolerable. I wonder what the Marquis de Sade
would have thought of this image, Sade who dreamed of torture, which was
inaccessible to him, but who never witnessed an actual torture session.[18]
Following this thought of ecstasy with a question
mark, the author places his own observation into doubt. I want to propose that
Bataille here puts into parentheses the impossibility of making such an
observation. It is no coincidence that the Marquis de Sade shadows Bataille’s
thoughts. For Bataille was still struggling with the impossibility of thinking
about Sade at this point in his life, of conceiving the "impossible liberty" that Sade took with the imagination
(original emphasis).[19] In "Sade" (1947), Bataille argues that even
Sade could not tolerate Sade, that it was only by going beyond himself that
Sade was able to write as he did.[20] The intolerability of Sade's ideas, the way that they
pushed past limits of both disgust and reason, are comparable to lingchi. In both cases representation
reveals that what should be impossible can be possible.
Bataille’s thoughts about Sade, published before his
publication of lingchi photographs in
The Tears of Eros in 1961, make an
argument for the necessity of thinking the unthinkable.[21] Giving evidence at the trial of Sade’s publisher in
1957, Bataille defended the necessity for interrogating “the depths of what man
signifies.”[22] In both Eroticism
and “Sade” he puts the demand for
such a thought into practice, in the former with the concept of sovereignty and
in the latter with an argument for a Sade who reveals man as he really is.[23] Thus, rather than having a purely averse reaction to
the lingchi images, in Bataille this
aversion is accompanied by its own interpretation, in a practice of thinking
the impossible that veers between a recoiling in horror and an acknowledgement
of the relevance of this horror for the constitution of man. It is not so much lingchi that is intolerable here as a
thought about lingchi that seems
impossible, because to think it is to transgress the human which is constituted
by the very prohibition of such a thought. Yet for Bataille this impossibility
demands to be thought because it exceeds those conditions that bind human
beings to the discontinuity of death. This sight of ecstasy is evidence of an
"assenting to life up to the point of death," which is the closest
Bataille comes to a definition of eroticism.[24]
If Bataille is haunted by Sade in his gaze upon these
photographs, Elkins’ view of lingchi
is obstructed by the back of a man. In the one image in Elkins’ series where
the victim’s face could be mistaken for having an expression of ecstasy, a man
looms like a shadow in the foreground. The viewer’s gaze upon this photograph
(fig. 4) shifts back and forth between the victim and this figure. Any central
focus in the image is diffused by the overlapping planes of foreground and
middle ground, and by the detail of people standing to the left and right. When
Elkins published this photograph in "The Very Theory of
Transgression," he did not identify this figure in the foreground with the
chief executioner. Bourgon makes this identification, which places this figure
of formidable cruelty in the same line of sight as the viewer of the
photograph.[25] That the torturer occupies much of the frame here,
that indeed he dominates the composition, foregrounds the relations between the
victim and those who surround him. The viewer’s sight of the victim is
therefore accompanied by a self-consciousness about the act of looking, as the
gaze looks upon this figure who is also looking. It is just such an
identification that produces the repulsion from the scene, as if the viewer is
implicitly responsible for the suffering in sight.
Figure
4. Photographer
unknown; Lingchi, Execution of Wang Weiqin; 31 October 1904; photograph; book
and journal illustration; Chinese Torture / Supplice Chinois website.
This self-consciousness about the circumstances of
looking turns up again in Elkins' description of an exhibition of photographs
of lynchings.[26] Hosted by galleries in
The images in The
Tears of Eros which accompany the lingchi
photographs are largely carved, painted or drawn by human hand. This is the
difference between Eroticism, which
does not feature such a wealth of visual production, and The Tears of Eros, wherein writing is subordinated to an abundance
of images. While both are a part of Bataille's history of eroticism, the latter
turns to visual artefacts for its argument. Elkins argues that the radical
incommensurability between the lingchi
and the art works undermines the "orderly concept of transgression"
in The Tears of Eros.[30] Bataille’s
concept of transgression has certainly proved very important for subsequent
scholarship. Yet transgression was only ever a component of his philosophy of
eroticism, which was. the unifying figure of his last two full-length,
non-fiction books, and the means by which the disparate themes of The Tears of Eros, including death,
play, work, religion, laughter, art, sacrifice and transgression, are brought
together.[31] In the conclusion to Eroticism Bataille addressed his readers with the warning that, "If
my reader’s interest in eroticism is of the same order as their interest in
separate problems, this book is of no use to them."[32] Bataille’s choice of illustrations in The Tears of Eros promoted eroticism as
a comprehension of the lived movement within which violence is embedded.
If, as I have outlined here, the specificity of
Bataille's understanding of the photographs of lingchi is the impossibility of thinking about them, a thinking of
art is also put in doubt by Bataille. Although Bois and Krauss declare their
fidelity to Bataille’s readings of everything from Manet to Sade, Formless actually represents an
attenuation of Bataille's work. Bataille's interests ranged far beyond the
boundaries of art. It was always Bataille's strategy to mix art with other
things, publishing ruminations on subjects ethnographic, biological and
otherwise. This is evident in his writings for Documents (1929 – 30) and in the
examples of transgression in Eroticism
(1957) which were material rather than aesthetic, including war, murder,
sacrifice and religious experience. In reducing the scope of informe to art Bois and Krauss reinstate
the idealism that they are attempting to refute, turning from the clutter of
the world to but one of its forms. In Formless, examples of surrealism, abstract
expressionism and conceptualism are reinvigorated so that the effect is to
reaffirm the value of established examples of modernist art. Those distinctions
that serve to delineate art from everything else in the world, distinctions
reinforced by Bois and Krauss in Formless,
as well as by Elkins' argument that the lingchi
photographs render modernist and avant-garde art powerless, are rendered
indistinct by the impossible blurring of what can and can't come into being in
Bataille’s concept of eroticism.
We can turn to the images in The Tears of Eros for an idea of what an art immersed in the
general movement of eroticism would consist of. These images are all
figurative, and depict the human body in transition. The least of these
transitions is the movement between being clothed and nude, or in the throes of
sexual ecstasy. In the vast majority of cases, the transition is disfiguring,
involving some kind of dismemberment or distortion from which a return to form
would be physically impossible. The images have been taken from across time,
from prehistoric cave paintings of half-men, half-beasts, to Hans Bellmer's
biomorphic drawings. There are criticisms that could be made of this selection
of art. The art is Eurocentric. The images are from Europe or
The emphasis on art in The Tears of Eros indicates that Bataille believed that art could
be conceived as a gateway to an impossible thought of this loss. By the
standards of this loss, the loss of what constitutes the human, this art must
be a failure to some degree, collapsing before the transgression that
constitutes its subject. The inability to think about the work of art on the
terms of its own loss is the condition by which it brings itself into being. It
was Maurice Blanchot who identified the worklessness in Bataille’s writing, and
who proposed that work was itself in a relation with worklessness, the refusal
of work enabling a consideration of that which refuses to be considered as
work. [33] Thus it is that the exigency of the outside becomes
the logic by which art constitutes itself, the differentiation of work holding
the trace of a continuity by which this work evaporates. Works of art partake
of eroticism merely by affirming their own status as works, implicitly
dissolving into their own contrary worklessness, in a suspension that has its
origins in the relation of being to death. The discontinuity of a structure
such as a work is attendant upon our own status as discontinuous people, yet
art is itself a reaction to this inescapable state, and an affirmation of the
continuity of life beyond oneself. To think about art, then, is to think about
this transgressive movement between the two, in order to stage a
"permanent revolution", a movement without arrest in either the
stratified structures of civilisation or the senselessness of orgiastic
experience.[34]
To think the lingchi
photographs may be impossible, yet this impossibility cannot be compared to any
other. For a correspondence between these images must convert them into forms
that speak of the loss of what it means to be human, forms such as torture,
cruelty and sadism. Can one compare a man being sawn in half from the groin to
that of a woman holding the decapitated head of her lover? Can one compare war
and sacrifice? Each event depicted in The
Tears of Eros involves a loss that is unrecoverable, a dissolution of the
form by which the comparison central to Elkins’ argument, that between lingchi
and other images is made possible. This is the precise difference between
Bataille's inclusion of the lingchi
images in a continuum and that of Elkins, who preserves them as an
inassimilable remainder. Elkins places the images outside an economy of art in
order that this economy may operate, in a reduction of the other images in The Tears of Eros to representation.
Endowing the lingchi with the
authority of the real, Elkins preserves the other within his theory, while for
Bataille eroticism is a blurring or immersion.
An art informed by Bataille’s concept of eroticism
would then be constituted by those destructions that exceed art. This is hardly
the operation of informe as described
by Bois and Krauss. An operation produces or, in a medical sense, restores its
subject, while the movement of eroticism describes loss. This is a loss that
vastly exceeds the art that documents transgression, in its continuity
exceeding the discontinuity by which art differentiates itself as art.
an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 5, March-April 2008, ISSN
1552-5112
Notes