Monthly Archives: November 2006

Some books on Bataille

Some books translated into English by Bataille. This post inspired by a 2003 post by Spurious on Bataille’s (who hid Walter Benjamin’s manuscript of Paris Arcades in the Parisian Bibliothèque Nationale when Benjamin fled from the Germans to Spain) time during WWII:

The Collected Poems of Georges Bataille (1999) – Georges Bataille, Mark Spitzer [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The Wall
A hatchet
give me a hatchet
so I can frighten myself
with my shadow on the wall
ennui
feeling of emptiness
fatigue.

Inner Experience (1988) – Georges Bataille, Leslie A. Boldt [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

The book, “Inner Experience”, was compiled post-humously from notes Bataille kept with the intention of putting into book form. Nonetheless, “Inner Experience” is very comprehensive and essential to understanding Bataille’s philosophies of base materialism, expenditure, the sacred and the need to transgress the limits of experience.

Chronology of Inner Experience via Spurious:

1941: Begins ‘Le Supplice’, the great central section of Inner Experience.
1942: Bataille completes Inner Experience during the summer. It is published by Raymond Queneau.
1943: Inner Experience is published. Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus and Sartre’s Being and Nothingness are published in the same year.
1943: ‘Nom de Dieu’, a text written by the Surrealists, argues Inner Experience evidences a simple minded idealism.
1943: Blanchot reviews Inner Experience in Journal des débats in May.
1943: Sartre publishes a long, unfavourable review of Inner Experience in Cahiers du Sud. Bataille’s reply is found what will be published in 1945 as On Nietzsche.
1944: Marcel [Moré] reviews Inner Experience more or less favourably. But he accuses Bataille of complacency and self-satisfaction. —Spurious

The Unfinished System Of Nonknowledge (2004) – Georges Bataille, Stuart and Michelle Kendall [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Following Bataille’s lead, as laid out in his notebooks, editor Stuart Kendall assembles the fragments that Bataille anticipated collecting for his summa. Kendall’s introduction offers a clear picture of the author’s overall project, its historical and biographical context, and the place of these works within it. The “system” that emerges from these articles, notes, and lectures is “atheology,” understood as a study of the effects of nonknowledge. –from the publisher

The Impossible (1991) – Georges Bataille [Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

When I discovered Bataille in the early 2000s, I remember reading a quote which goes something to the effect of: “sex starts where words end” which illustrates the transgressiveness of sexuality and the inadequateness of language to describe experience. Can somebody pinpoint this quote? [Nov 2006]

L’abécédaire de Deleuze

L’abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze laced with the back matter of Jahsonic.com:

A as in Animal, B as in ‘Boire’ <Drink>, C as in Culture, D as in Desire, E as in ‘Enfance’ <Childhood>, F as in Fidelity, G as in ‘Gauche’ <Left>, H as in History of Philosophy, I as in Idea, J as in Joy, K as in Kant, L as in Literature, M as in ‘Maladie’ <Illness>, (N as in Neurology, O as in Opera, P as in Professor, Q as in Question, R as in Resistance, S as in Style, T as in Tennis, U as in ‘Un’/One, V as in ‘Voyage’/Trip, W as in Wittgenstein, X,Y as unknown, Z as in Zigzag. —http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/~wrankin/deleuzeABC.html

And from the abécédaire itself, some comments by Deleuze on literature, especially his love for Villiers de l’Isle-Adam and Restif de la Bretonne:

Parnet refers to Deleuze’s love for secondary literary authors, like Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Restif de la Bretonne, asking if he has always cultivated this affection. Here, Deleuze covers his face with one hand as he responds that he finds it truly bizarre to hear Villiers referred to as a secondary author [Deleuze laughs]. If you consider that question… [he pauses, shrugging his shoulders] He says that there is something really shameful, entirely shameful… He recalls that when he was quite young, he liked the idea of reading an author’s work in his entirety, the complete works. As a result, he had great affection not for secondary authors, although his affection sometimes coincided with them, but for authors who had written little. Some works were too enormous, overwhelming for him, like Hugo‘s, such that Deleuze was ready to say the Hugo wasn’t a very good writer. On the other hand, Deleuze knew the works of Paul-Louis Courrier nearly by heart, quite deeply. So Deleuze admits to having this penchant for so-called secondary authors, although Villiers is not a secondary author. Joubert was also an author he knew deeply, and one reason why he knew these authors was for a rather shameful reason, he admits: it had for him a certain prestige to be familiar with authors that were hardly known… But that was a kind of mania, Deleuze concludes, and it took him quite a while to learn just how great Hugo is, and that the size of work was no measure.

And some more comments on Leskov:

Deleuze continues in this vein, agreeing that in so-called secondary literatures… He insists that in Russian literature, for example, it’s not limited to Dostoyevski and Tolstoy, but one cannot call [Nikolai] Leskov secondary as there is so much that is astonishing in Leskov. So these are great geniuses. Deleuze then says that he feels he has little to say on this point, on secondary authors, but what he is happy about is to have tried to find in any unknown author something that might show him a concept or an extraordinary character. But yes, Deleuze says, he has not engaged in any systematic research [in this domain].

But in fact, this whole section on literature is very interesting, we find Deleuze commenting that “ he knows that every great philosopher is a great writer”. This is something I have first heard by W. F. Hermans.

Notes on my blogroll entries

Below are answers to the question: why I read the blogs I read:

dadanoias
- Since about six months I’ve been reading Dadanoias, a young woman from Barcelona whose interests are sex and music. She has very good tastes in both, but her forte is the first.
Giornale Nuovo
- Been following the work of Misteraitch for about two years now. Misteraitch buys antique art books and then scans plates of them for us to share. Unique content, excellent tastes. Misteraitch is British but resides in Finland. Works in IT (I think).
Girish
- I discovered Girish only two months ago via the Reading Experience literary blog . He is at the center of a group cinema critics who rival the best of offline critics. His blog is immensely popular. Outside of film, he is into music, especially eighties dance but also reggae.
gmtPlus9 (-15)
- One of the earliest blogs I started to follow, maybe four years ago. The author lives in Taiwan. His main interests are the visual arts and old weird americana (bluegrass, rockabilly, etcetera…).
greencine
- Cinema blog, incredibly prolific, I suspect that David Hudson research and posts all day. Greencine is an American video-on-demand service provider. Very knowledgable, and not only about film.
groovy age of horror
- Been reading Curt since two years now. He feeds my interest in ‘low culture’: paperbacks, fumetti, movies and comics of the 1970s horror boom.
K Punk
- A perennial favourite since about 1 year. The author Mark Fisher has a degree in philosophy and literature and resides in the UK. He keeps me abreast of the intellectual core of the blogosphere and all things Otherian, Zizekian, Lacanian and postmodern. What fascinates me in his work is that I don’t understand half of it. Someday I will.
notes from somewhere bizarre
- At the center of the fashionable blogosphere, with an emphasis on eroticism and technology.
PCL linkdump
- Got acquainted with this European outfit through Groovy Age of Horror. Emphasis: fun pop culture. An interesting sideproject is Mr Dante Fontana’s visual guidance who posts the best of Youtube music videos so you don’t have to find them yourself.
phinnweb
- I’ve known Phinn since practically my first steps on the internet around 1996. We share an interest in just about everything. His specialities are electronic music and Finland, where he was born. Last year he ran a very personal blog, recently he just posts about ‘cultural things’, much like I do.
Radio Nova
- Not a blog but the best radio station in the world, met them twice: first when stuck with my brother on the Paris ring, then when Matthieu sent the entire corpus of nova CDs to me in 2002.
rare erotica
- From the people who run disinfo. Erotica is the interest we share.
sauer-thompson
- I have known this Australian duo since the early 2000s. Philosophy is their thing.
spurious
- I found this anonymous writer through the Reading Experience. He is a specialist on French literature (Blanchot, Bataille, …) and writes beautiful prose poetry.
The Pinocchio Theory
- I became familiar with the work (e. g. Doom Patrols) of Steven Shaviro somewhere in the late nineties. He is a specialist on postmodernism based in the United States or Canada and at the center of the – mainly continental philosophy – blogosphere. Friends with K-Punk, writes about music and film and literature too.
The Reading Experience
- I found this blog somewhere in May of this year when I was researching the concept of realism in literature. He keeps me abreast of the online literary criticism world. His blog introduced me to a whole list of other blogs. Much like Girish he is at the center of the literatisphere.
woebot
- I’ve known Woebot’s work since May 2004. He buys a lot of records, some really obscure ones too. Works in the graphic sector. Resides in the UK. At the center of the musiblogosphere. Check his Top 100.

That’s all. Thank you.

Mediazation, experience and aura

Prompted by this post by The Reading Experience blog on John Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934) I started thinking about the concept of mediazation, a word to which one only finds 344 references on the web. A much more common word that denotes the same quality is mediated, of which there are 77 references on Jahsonic alone, most prominent of which are the references to mediated sex and mediated violence. Mediatedness and mediazation are key concepts in modernism and postmodernism. One might even argue that if modernity started after the Middle Ages and the arrival of print culture for the happy few, postmodernity started with the advent of the mediazation of mass society, with the replacement of aura and direct experience by the media (which coincides with the arrival of print culture for the masses). If one follows this through it would appear that the shift from modernity to postmodernity is only one of degree.

From the web:

For Shaviro, Cronenberg is not simply an illustration of postmodern media theory. Rather, “the brutally hilarious strategy of Videodrome is to take media theorists such as Marshall McLuhan and Jean Baudrillard completely at their word, to overliteralize their claims for the ubiquitous mediazation of the world.” Footnote But the difference between Cronenberg and (for example) Baudrillard is Cronenberg’s insistence on the palpability of mediated experience: –William Beard via http://iceberg.arts.ualberta.ca/filmstudies/Videodrome.htm [Nov 2006]

Experience, quipped Oscar Wilde, is the name one gives to one’s mistakes. Does aesthetic experience then name the central blunder of modern aesthetics? Though long considered the most essential of aesthetic concepts, as including but also surpassing the realm of art, aesthetic experience has in the last half-century come under increasing critique. Not only its value but its very existence has been questioned. How has this once vital concept lost its appeal? Does it still offer anything of value? The ambiguous title, “the end of aesthetic experience,” suggests my two goals: a reasoned account of its demise, and an argument for reconceiving and thus redeeming its purpose.

[…] Modernization and technology, Benjamin likewise argued, have eroded aesthetic experience’s identification with the distinctive, transcendent autonomy of art. Such experience once had what Benjamin called aura, a cultic quality resulting from the artwork’s uniqueness and distance from the ordinary world. But with the advent of mechanical modes of reproduction like photography, art’s distinctive aura has been lost, and aesthetic experience comes to pervade the everyday world of popular culture and even politics. Aesthetic experience can no longer be used to define and delimit the realm of high art. Unlike Adorno, Benjamin saw this loss of aura and differentiation as potentially emancipatory (although he condemned its deadly results in the aesthetics of fascist politics). In any case, Benjamin’s critique does not deny the continuing importance of aesthetic experience, only its romantic conceptualization as pure immediacy of meaning and isolation from the rest of life. –Richard Shusterman via http://www.artsandletters.fau.edu/humanitieschair/end-aesth-exp.html [Nov 2006]

Scott Walker

The Drift (2006) – Scott Walker
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

[i]f you are a fan of Diamanda Galas (who is about the only person who can compare in terms of anguish and horror and pain [apart from maybe Arthur Russell]), Lydia Lunch, later Marc Almond, or dark, slow goth music full of tortured anguish, then you stand a good chance of liking this. –[euchrid] (UK) for Amazon.co.uk

There is a 10 minute Scott Walker documentary at Youtube. Phinn on Scott.

Scott Walker is the stage name of American born singer-songwriter Noel Scott Engel. Born in January 1943 in Hamilton, Ohio, he was named after his father. Walker has long resided in England.

Walker’s own original songs of this period (emerging solo work) are a late, last flowering of a dark Romanticism tinged with Surrealism and Existential angst. They are influenced by Jacques Brel and in some inchoate way, the writing of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus and early twentieth century European thought, poetry, art and music (despite the fact that by then Existentialism was waning as a philosophical and literary fashion). Walker explored European musical roots while paradoxically expressing his own American experience and alienation. He was also inching to a new maturity as a recording artist. This would bear incredible fruit with his marvellous country recordings in the early seventies.–http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Walker_%28singer%29

Digression: “Starsailor” by Tim Buckley on Youtube. My fave Tim Buckley song (and the only one I own) is “Sweet Surrender” (taken from the album Greetings From L.A. (1972)). I have it on the best compilation of the 2000s: Underground Moderne.

Genre fiction vs literary fiction

Stephen Mitchelmore in an new post at This Space (who I’ve mentioned before here) writes about the distinction between genre fiction and literary fiction.

If there’s one reason why this blog exists, it is to challenge the assumptions of British culture about what it means for work to be ‘literary’. Over two years and longer, I’ve posted blogs defining literary fiction, and observed that it tends to be only genre writers and their fans who are perplexed about their exclusion from the literary prizes (which, I must say, aren’t terribly literary anyway). I’ve even asked an apparently taboo question: why aren’t literary writers given genre awards? But it seems I’m having no impact and the dummies are winning the day. At least in that respect I’m following in the finest literary tradition.

Although he says that he’s defined literary fiction here, he starts his definition by saying that he’s only offering another evasion but then goes on to say that:

I seek an engagement at the deepest level. It’s not always the most comfortable of experiences, and if I had any intelligence maybe I’d avoid it by getting lost in some genre fiction.

In this analysis two words stand out: engagement and intelligence. Engagement points to seriousness (which we need from time to time, but not always); the way Stephen uses the term intelligence indicates that somehow genre fiction is stupid. A pity.

Let me round up this quote (introduction mine) by a certain George Walden who represents my view on this matter best:

The perceived contradiction between high and low culture is a recurring theme on Jahsonic.com. I believe that both high culture and low culture are minority tastes and as such can be described as subcultures, both influencing mainstream culture. I also believe that both high and low culture have produced masterpieces and works of mediocrity. As George Walden puts it:

Three points appear self-evident.

First, there is no conflict whatever between popular and more demanding culture, and no need to choose.

Second, that the majority of popular culture is commercially produced ephemera of mostly lamentable quality which needs absolutely no help or encouragement from government, still less nauseous ingratiation.

Third, that there is such a thing as high art, and that some things will always remain for the privileged few – privileged not in the tired old class-conscious meaning of the word, but in the sense that by hard work and/or natural ability they are able to appreciate, eg highly refined musical forms or classical literature that it is not given to everyone to understand, even if we are given every opportunity to do so.

— George Walden, source unidentified (website offline)

Jeremy Reed

Interviewed by Dee at Fringecore:

Jeremy: My interest in French literature comes from the depth of imagination and the fact that French writers use the image as the predominant constant in their work. Also the decadence that they use so uniquely, the sensuality of the work and the imagination of it, which I don’t find a corresponding equivalent in British literature. I would call myself an aesthete – love of beauty is central to all I do, therefore opulence and the decadence of the 18th/19th century period, appeals to me, and I fuse it with a modern sensibility, so that the cyber world is fused with the decadent world of De Sade’s La Coste – reaching across the centuries. —http://www.fringecore.com/magazine/m6-3.html [Nov 2006]

Excerpts from a review by Cercles of Heartbreak Hotel: A Tribute to the King in Verse by Jeremy Reed, 2002.

I first stumbled across Jeremy Reed in one of the English / American bookshops of the left bank in Paris. The novel was hidden away on the bottom shelf of a dusty bookcase and its title caught my eye; it was called Diamond Nebula (1994). I quickly found this was an author after my own heart: postmodern without being hermetic, with obvious enthusiasm for David Bowie, Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol, and mostly J.G. Ballard. I don’t mean the regrettably mainstreamed Ballard of recent years, the Ballard of the somewhat banal Empire of the Sun (1984) or the boring Super-Cannes (2000), no, I mean the good old Ballard of such subversive jewels as The Atrocity Exhibition (1970) or Crash (1973). […] […] After I’d read Diamond Nebula, I bought some of Reed’s previous books. He is an extraordinarily prolific author; does this man ever get any sleep?

[…] His Sadean erotic novels, such as Sister Midnight (1997) don’t impress me so much, admittedly, but they are not without merits, as such things go.

[…][Marc] Almond and Reed share many passions: David Bowie, the Marquis de Sade, Jean Genet, Oscar Wilde, Georges Bataille, J.G. Ballard, Derek Jarman, Scott Walker, Jacques Brel, Charles Baudelaire, Arthur Rimbaud, Federico Garcia Lorca, Jean Cocteau, and especially J.K. Huysmans. “What is it like to be a torch singer?”, asks Reed, “Is it so very different from being a poet?” At any rate, this particular poet and this particular torch singer often plunge their readers / listeners into the same sleazy delectable Camp. And incidentally, Almond has also published very acceptable poetry, in addition to a gripping autobiography, Tainted Life (1999). —http://www.cercles.com/review/r5/reed.html [Nov 2006]

Excerpts from Jeremy Reed: The Prizes and the Disappointments by Geoff Stevens

There appear to be some areas of confusion, fans would say mystery, about Jeremy Reed. For instance we are told that he was born in 1952 from one source, and 1954 from another, whereas Andrew Duncan asserts that the true date was 6th March 1951. He was brought up in Jersey, in the Channel Islands, where his childhood was “solitary and dark-sided”. He was to go on to Essex University and obtain a BA hons 2 or, if other sources are to be believed, a PhD in Literature.

Icelandic singer Bjork said she found his work “the most beautiful gorgeous outrageously brilliant poetry in the universe”. —http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Stevens%20essay.htm [Nov 2006]

Toshio Saeki: The Early Works (1997) – Toshio Saeki

Toshio Saeki: The Early Works (1997) – Toshio Saeki
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Book Description
Before Toshio Saeki worked in his current palette of bright colors, he expressed the darker and more chaotic aspects of unbridled eroticism in black and white, with the occasional and dramatic splash of a single primary color. In this lavishly illustrated book, Saeki’s disturbing iconography reveals links to the past and simultaneously indicates the even more bizarre twists his work would take in the future. Early Works also includes the panel-by-panel replication of a Saeki manga story. Japanese Text Only

Please note that Catherine Robbe-Grillet has contributed to this book.

More here and here and more Japanese erotica here.

Story of I (1997) – Jo Anne Kaplan

Story of the Eye is easily one of the most enduring texts of the 20th century, I just discovered this version which was new to me:

GB, 1997, 23 Min.
Jo Anne Kaplan, London

A woman sits alone in a bare, white-tiled bath, reading George Bataille’s “Story of the Eye”. The bizarre events described by the text provoke a series of fantasies in which the room and its accoutrements become the stage and the woman the main player. As her dreams unfold, she becomes the “eye” of the story and her own body the object of its gaze. With a feminine hand, “Story of I” plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside-out. The eye in the vagina, seen through blood, urine and tears, looks at itself in the mirror. —http://www.transmediale.de/97/english/25.htm [Nov 2006]

In a major Hayward Night for the Gallery’s Undercover Surrealism exhibition, animate! joins forces with Halloween to present The New Flesh, a visceral evening of musical and cinematic interventions exploring Georges Bataille’s trademark themes of sex and death, and the legacy of his dissident surrealism in popular culture.

The New Flesh provides a rare chance to see the highly explicit and provocative mistress-piece Story of I (1997, UK, 21 mins), Jo Ann Kaplan’s improvisation on Georges Bataille’s infamous Histoire de l’Oeil. The film is a gender-twisting meditation on the erotic extremities of human desire, a highly explicit journey through the sexual foundations of Western visual culture and the intimate terrains of male and female bodies. With a feminine hand, Story of I plucks Bataille’s central metaphor from its original context and re-invents its erotic vision from the inside out. The eye is the vagina and, seen through the blood, urine and tears, it looks at itself in a mirror. —animateonline.org [Nov 2006]

Raymond Pettibon (born 1957)

Raymond Pettibon: The Books 1978-1998 (2000) – Raymond Pettibon
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]

Raymond Pettibon (born 1957) is an American artist who is:

“known for his comic-like drawings with disturbing, ironic or ambiguous captions. His subject matter is sometimes violent and anti-authoritarian. He works primarily in ink on paper and many of his drawings are monochromatic, although he sometimes introduces color through the use of crayon, pencil, or watercolor. In addition to his paper works, Pettibon has experimented with video art and has recently produced large art installations by arranging his paper works within a room in the context of larger drawings made on the walls of the gallery. ”

He also designed Sonic Youth’s album cover art for Goo

He is featured here thanks to my rereading of an early issue of Fringecore magazine. (who I just tried sending a mail, but it bounced, does anyone know how to contact them, especiall Dee?)

Pettibon’s work somehow reminds me of Antwerp artist Dennis Tyfus, especially works like this one.

The Raymond Pettibon Google gallery.