Posted by Daniel Brittain
A summary, getting us back to last time, including pictures.
The beginning immanence (a negative thought based around our historical perspective of a desired returned to immanence, the inability to transcend the world):
I am able to say that the animal world is that of immanence and immediacy, for that world, which is closed to us, is so to the extent that we cannot discern in it an ability to transcend itself…Unavoidably, in our eyes, the animal is in the world like water in water. (Theory of Religion, 23-24)
The sun (founding the immanence), the giver that never receives, that continually gives, creating an excessive burden that is spent or wasted:
The Mithraic cult of the sun led to a very widespread religious practice: people stripped in a kind of pit that was covered with a wooden scaffold, on which a priest slashed the throat of a bull; thus they were suddenly doused with hot blood, to the accompaniment of the bull’s boisterous struggle and bellowing- a simple way of reaping the moral benefits of the blinding sun. (Rotten Sun, Visions of Excess, 57)
A “mechanic” “world’, a collection of expenditures that spill out, life forms that press out, like the shit out of the anus, from a point of privilege, where that which is gives away. Entry and exit points based around the three general principles of Limit, Pressure, and Extension.
When the great anthropoid carcass found itself standing on the ground, no longer swinging from one tree to another, itself now perfectly straight and parallel to a tree, all the impulses that had up to that time found their point of free expulsion in the anal region ran up against a new barrier. Because of the erect posture, the anal region ceased to form a protuberance, and it lost the “privileged power of points”: the erection could only be maintained on condition that a barrier of contracted muscles be regularly substituted for this “power of points.” Thus the obscure vital thrusts were suddenly thrown back in the direction of the face and the cervical region: they were discharged in the human voice and in more and more fragile intellectual constructions. (Pineal Eye, Visions of Excess, 89)
Conceived in a tremendous historical perspective returning to a time when the sea liquefied like female sex under the caresses of the sun and ejaculated life onto the land like the male:
The two primary motions are rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheel and pistons. These two motions are reciprocally transformed, the one into the other. Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus. (The Solar Anus, Visions of Excess, 6)
Two realms of movement, horizontal and vertical planes, the vertical following the horizontal, in which once the horizontal possibilities have been filed, the vertical finding locations suitable for erection:
I imagined on the one hand plants, which are uniformly animated by a vertical movement analogous to that of tides, which regularly elevate water, and on the other hand animals, which are animated by a horizontal movement analogous to that of the turning earth. Thus I arrived at reductions that were extremely simple and geometric but at the same time monstrously comic (for example, I saw that the alternating movement of all the coituses on the surface of the earth is similar to that of locomotive pistons, so that the continual movement of coituses on the surface of the earth is as closely tied to the earth’s rotation as the movement of pistons is to that that of wheels). (The Jesuve, Visions of Excess 75)
The Erection, raising toward the sun, that gives birth to “homo sapiens”. The Big Toe “founding” the step towards Reason. Changing an ontological perspective of mouth driven consumption (ruled by sharp teeth) to creation via hand manipulation.
The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals; in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighboring animals. (Mouth, Visions of Excess, 59)
The function of the human foot consists in giving a firm foundation to the erection of which man is so proud (the big toe, ceasing to grasp branches, is applied to the ground on the same plane as the other toes. (The Big Toe, Visions of Excess, 20)
In this new standing perspective (man is shat upon the earth, as heterogeneous, outside the immanence. This otherness seen in early forms of expression: the hidden body, the poetry based upon the animal.
In effect, prehistoric man depicted animals in fascinating and naturalistic images, but when he wanted to represent himself, he awkwardly concealed his unique, distinguishing features beneath those of the animal that he was not. He only partially divulged his human body, and he gave himself an animal head (Cradle of Humanity, 60).
Man’s first movement amid the animals and trees had been to concede of the existence of the animals and trees and to negate his own. The human body appears as a Cartesian diver, like a toy of the wind and the grass, like a cluster of dust charged with an activity that decompress it. The blatant heterogeneity of our being in relation to the world that gave birth to it, which we have become so incapable of proving through tangible experience, seems to have been for those among us who have lived in nature, the basis for all representation (Cradle of Humanity, 46)
The feeling of inferiority based around a world of small technical possibility (though rich(er) in possibilities of expression), though, slowly disappearing as things fill the world and constitute history, changing form of expression, defining the sacred, mastery being Mastered. Mastered as identified, conceptualized, i.e. Myths, Totems, Legend…Becoming HIM-the singular concept, an all encompassing word in a sentence in a book, the Book, the transition to that which is always being written, dogmatism, universality:
It is the book that always serves as the temptation of a certain literalism: the idea that not only is there a transcendent God who serves as a human ideal (he is just, permanent, transcendent, vengeful, peaceful, etc), but that God’s Word is definitive, not subject to the vicissitudes of interpretation. The religion of the Book presupposes not only a fixed doctrine, absolute and unchanging, but a corps of specialists (clerics) who teach it as Law and impose it on all believers. (Bataille’s Peak, 64)
In this follow up lecture we are going to be exploring what it means to be a writer (writing the Book) and how this writing affects Possibility. In exploring the writer we are going to use the most monstrous writer Sade and hopefully come to terms with our morality, our religion (a shift to atheism in relation to HIM), and our personal perversions in the process.
For Saturday:
Read the final dialogue, the 7th, in Philosophy of the Bedroom
(Though if you can, try to read the complete story. For those who have just got done reading Kan’ts Critique of Judgement, your in a prime position after reading Sade’s novel to move to Lacan’s Kant with Sade).
Read the Statutes in the Introduction (starts on Page 40) of the 120 Days of Sodomy. Or, at least glance through the introduction. The work is heavy so its very easy to find a place in the text to sink down and be amazed without having any background.
Extra: Bataille: The Use Value of D.A.F De Sade