----
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
'His non-conformist mind was marked by what it was not yet customary to call black humor. Somewhat thin, with a style both romantic and of his time, he possessed (in a more youthful form of course, and less discreetly) the elegance he would never loose. His close-set, darkened eyes, brimming with all the blue of noon, went with his teeth that oddly suggested a forest animal, often uncovered by a laugh that (perhaps wrongly) I judged to be sarcastic'. Neither 'flamboyantly attired' nor 'extravagant', elegant but conservatively dressed ('I always knew Bataille dressed in a very Bourgeois way'; 'there was nothing Bohemian about him'). There was nothing Bohemian about him, but, as photographs of the time show, he displayed an elegance that was close to dandyism, a cynical dandyism.' -- Michel Leiris
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
'Corpses are the things of nightmares, figures that vibrate perpetually with the deafening echo of the last breath of presence. Georges Bataille's 1935 novel The Blue of Noon is inundated with literal and metaphorical descriptions of corpses, which are used to convey the narrator's self-ravaging tides of fear and desire. Simultaneously, the novel is interjected with strangely removed (despite the narrator's physical proximity) observations of the political events leading up to World War II. When viewed in the context of its author's biography and the period in which it was written, the disjointed poetic narrative that it unfurls is both personal and prolific.
'Like all of Bataille's narrative works, The Blue of Noon is in part a self-mediated biography, told through the thinly veiled voice of his male narrator Henri Troppmann. Although the implications will not be thoroughly explored here, the question of what requisites lend momentum to societies transgressions looms darkly in the background. Death exposes a very particular, and perhaps a penultimate, chaos; to surpass tears with momentary satiation does not escape comprehension. I would like to use specific passages from The Blue of Noon to discuss Bataille's personal and authorial transgression of the Impossible, and more precisely to study his use of corpses as signifiers for this exploration of threshold and how to implement language in describing this struggle. From his notions on expenditure, to the death of philosophy, Bataille waged a war on limits. Before aging into the figure we study here, Bataille was a young adult on the path to becoming a monk.
'Between the years 1920-1924, Georges Bataille's belief system underwent a dramatic shift. A series of encounters during this period helped set into motion a dizzying struggle with paradox Bataille attempted to both define and destroy for the duration of his life. Small cracks had begun to destabilize the foundation of a devout Catholicism he had presumably taken up as a means of insulating himself from the madness of his childhood; but it wasn't until his initial readings of Nietzsche that he felt deeply confounded by an intellectual choice in obsessive pursuits. His reaction to Nietzsche was in fact so provocative, that his first response was to reject the material. Reflecting years later on this moment, Bataille stated, "It is natural for a man encountering the destiny which belongs to him to experience an initial moment of recoil." The terror of his adolescence crashed over him for a second (and certainly not the last) time, but unlike his self-enclosing escape into religion, he chose to pursue this new and unnerving opening before him.
'By yielding to the Death of God and the laughing whilst peering into the void, transgression became his anti-idealistic ideal for living, signifying the end of an upright value system, in which all subjects are interchangeable and every structure is offered up for transmutable inversion. In his personal life, this allowed for his most debased desires to be structured accordingly; the brothel would become his church, and every person, from himself, to his mother, to his lovers (prostitutes, wives, and mistresses alike) was ultimately, a corpse. Bataille's association of human flesh to an ever-present mortality may be a holdover from his years of monistic study, but it also stems from childhood memories of his blind, syphilitic father, who deteriorated progressively into madness until his death. Bataille claims to have been in love with his father until the age of fourteen. At the onset of the new self-consciousness of puberty this adoration shifted to a deep hate.' -- DISCURSIVE BODIES: The Corpses of Georges Bataille's The Blue of Noon
Translation: Journalist: What is the Evil you're talking about? G. Bataille: There are, I believe, two sorts of Evil basically contrasting. On the one hand, one is linked to the necessity that everything goes right and succeed. On the other hand, the other one consists in positively breaking what is forbidden, like for instance, the ban on murder, or several sexual possibilities. J.: Does the title mean that Literature and Evil are inseparable? B.: I believe yes. Of course this isnt clear at first sight, but I think that if Literature goes away from Evil it becomes quickly boring. It is important to underline that Literature must deal with anguish, that this very anguish is based upon something that goes wrong, and eventually seriously bad. In leading the reader in some unpleasant perspective, I take the example of a novel, Literature avoids to get boring. J.: Thus a writer is always guilty of writing..? B.: Most of writers aren't fully aware of this, but I do believe in that profound guilt. Writing is basically the opposite of working. It might not appear so logical, although every amusing books are efforts submited to work. J.: Could you name 1 or 2 writers that might have felt guilty of writing? B.: Well, two of them, which I named in my book, are clearly distinct in that matter. Baudelaire and Kafka, both felt guilty being in the common "wrong" side. It is obvious for Baudelaire who chose the very name "les Fleurs du Mal" to describe his deepest thoughts. Kafka expressed himself even more clearly, he thought that by writing he was disobeying to his fellows and put himself in a situation of guilt. [...] J.: But being a writer and being guilty for Baudelaire or Kafka is because it's not a serious occupation, that's what their parents meant. They felt guilt being childish because they were writing. Do you think that Baudelaire and Kafka felt guilty by the very process of writing? B.: I think that expressly, even clearly pointed out by them a few times, they felt in the situation of a child towards his parents. The child disobeying to his parents and by then putting himself in a guitly conscience because he remember his affective parents who told him constantly what not to do, that it was bad ; in the strongest sense of the word. J.: If Literature is childish, you probably think that it is very puerile? B.: I Believe there is something essentially puerile within Literature. That may seem irreconcilable with one's admiration for it, which I share. But I think it is fundamental, that one cannot fully understand what Literature is all about if we do not put it on the childhood side. Which doesn't mean we put it on an inferior level. J.: You wrote a book about erotism, is erotism a childish behaviour in Literature? B.: I dont know if Literature distinguishes from erotism in general. But I think it is essential to underline the childish character of erotism as a whole. To be erotic is to be fascinated like a child with a game, a forbidden game. The man fascinated by erotism definitly is in the situation of a child towards his parents who is frightened of what might happen. He goes always far enough to be frightened. He doesn't content himself with what wealthy adults do, he must be frightened, he must put himself in the same situation than when he was a child always threatened of being told off harshly ; in an unbearable, intolerable way. J.: We may have understood that you are condemning this puerility and childish behaviour, but I think we should go back to the title of your book, Literature and Evil. This is not a condemnation of Literature and Evil. I'd like you to give us the bottom line of this book. B.: It is obvious that it's a warning, in this sense that we must warn against a danger, although it is possible that once we warned someone against a danger, we give him reasons to face it, and I think it is essential for us to face the danger which is Literature. I think it is a great and serious danger. But one is really a man only by facing this danger. Its within Literature that we aprehend human perspectives under their fullest shape, since Literature doesn't let us live without aprehending human things through their most violent perspectives. Wether it be tragedy, Shakespeare and so on. It is mainly Literature that allows us to see the worst. And to know how to face it, how to overcome it. on the whole the man who play finds in the game the strength to overcome what the game leads of horror.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.![]()
'Narrative pathways through Le Bleu du ciel are never straightforward. Moving through the text involves negotiating one unstable, disorientating space after another, passing through an elaborate network of symbolic spaces – basements, recesses, cells, and tombs – whose borders touch each other and whose limits are continuously lacerated and transgressed. The text itself becomes labyrinthine and circuitous, subject to what Bataille himself refers to in the novel’s foreword as ‘monstrueuses anomalies’ [‘freakish anomalies’]. Through a study of the treatment of space in the Le Bleu du ciel – spaces constantly shifting between light and dark, openness and enclosure, form and the formless, this essay has examined some of the novel’s ‘anomalies’ and obsessions, looking at their place in relation to ideas explored in the broader corpus of Bataille’s thought. Seen in this context, what has become apparent is that such anomalies are not anomalies at all, but rather nodal points in a system of thought itself devoted to an interrogation of notions of impossibility and contradiction. Reference to the work of Blanchot, itself linked to the territory inhabited by Bataille through numerous biographical and textual connections, expands the scope of this interrogation, helping to show how the spaces of Le Bleu du ciel might be seen to relate to experiences outside the limits of that book, and ultimately to a broader understanding of the unstable, vertiginous experience of reading itself.' -- Michael Eades
Autopsia - Blue of Noon
David Sylvian - Blue of Noon
Krieg - Blue of Noon
'Director André S. Labarthe, well-known as the co-founder and original developer of "Cinéma, de notre temps", here portrays the French writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962), whose work ventures, at the same time, into the fields of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art. Initially broadcasted on 30 April 1997, the film contains interviews with Pierre Klossowski and Jacques Pimpanneau. The French title could be translated as As-Far-as-The-Eye-Can-See (At the Limit of Vision).
'André Labarthe: "How to grasp with naked hands the most fiery thinking of the century? How to approach through film that which shies away whenever approached? How can the cinema - "the art of image" as we say - welcome and let live the intolerable images woven in stories such as Madame Edwarda and Blue of Noon? In short, how to talk about Georges Bataille in a film when we know that film to be impossible?"' -- Amip-France 3
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.![]()
Blue of Noon(Marion Boyars)
translated by Harry Mathews
'Blue of Noon is a novel that is as driven as a car whose driver has lost control. Troppmann the protagonist drinks to severe excess, womanises and is on the verge of despair. His wife Dirty who is introduced in the first chapter thoroughly drunk in the Savoy hotel in London is in an even more disgusting state than Troppmann and together they are driving each other to the brink. His wife separates from him and moves to Brighton leaving Troppmann to lead a dishevelled life of depravity and alcoholic excess in Paris. He visits Lazare a young communist whose ideology he finds as repugnant as her looks. Visiting friends in a nightclub he seduces Xenie by stabbing her in the thigh with a fork. He calls upon Xenie to visit him when he falls ill and scares her half to death whilst trying to seduce her. He visits Barcelona just as the General Strike is called and summons Xenie to him as well as his wife. Xenie gets caught up in the shooting and is terrified. Troppmann is reunited with his wife and together they make mad passionate love in the earth above a graveyard.' -- John Marcel, Resident Scholar
'There's at least one great missing film: the adaptation of Bataille's Blue of Noon that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was planning to direct at the time of his death. I will always regret that this film never got made, for doubtless it would have shed a new and harsh light on the interplay of politics and sexuality and on the historical links between the fascist terror that Bataille confronted in the 1930s and the more diffuse and disguised forms of oppression and deprivation we continue to face today.' -- Steven Shaviro, Artforum
Extract
1.
During the period of my life when I was most unhappy, I used to frequent - for reasons hard to justify, and without a trace of sexual attraction - a woman whom I only found appealing because of her ridiculous appearance: as though my lot required in these circumstances a bird of ill omen to keep me company. When, in May, I came back from London, I was in a state of over-excitement, helpless, almost ill; but this strange girl didn't notice a thing. In June, I left Paris to meet Dirty in Prum; then, out of exasperation, Dirty left me. On my return, I was incapable of keeping up a presentable attitude at any length. I spent as much time as I could with the 'bird of ill omen.' However, I sometimes succumbed to fits of annoyance in her company.
This disturbed her. One day she asked what was the matter with me. (She told me shortly afterwards that she had felt I might go insane at any moment.)
I was irritated. I answered, 'Absolutely nothing.'
She was insistent: 'I can understand it if you don't feel like talking. I'm sure it would be best if I left you now. You're not calm enough to give the project careful thought. But I want you to know that it's upsetting for me. What are you planning to do?'
I looked her in the eye, with no resolve whatsoever. I must have seemed at a loss, as if anxious to escape some obsession that would not be put off. She looked away.
I said to her, 'I suppose you think I've been drinking?'
'No, why? Is that something you do?'
'Frequently.'
'I didn't know that.'
She thought of me as someone serious - wholly serious, in fact - and for her, drunkenness was a thing that could not be reconciled with other obligations.
'It's only...You look worn out.'
'Let's talk some more about the project.'
'You're obviously too tired. You're sitting there as though you were about to keel over.'
'That's a possibility.'
'What's wrong?'
'I'm about to go insane.'
Why?'
'I hurt.'
'What can I do?'
'Nothing.'
'You can't tell me what's wrong?'
'I don't think so.'
'Cable your wife to come back. She doesn't have to stay in Brighton?'
'No. As a matter of fact, she's written me. It's best for her not to come.'
'Does she know the state you're in?'
'She also knows there's nothing she could do to change it.'
The woman sat there puzzled. She must have been thinking that, insufferable and spineless as I was, it was her duty to help me out of my predicament. She finally made up her mind and said to me curtly, 'I can't leave you like this. I'm taking you home, or to a friend's - whatever you like...'
I did not reply. Things at this point started going black inside my head. I'd had enough.
She took me home. I didn't utter another word.
2.
I usually saw her at a bar-and-grill behind the Bourse. I used to make her eat with me. It was hard for us getting to the end of a meal. We spent our time arguing.
She was a girl of twenty-five, ugly and conspicuously filthy. (The women I previously went out with had, on the contrary, been pretty and well-dressed.) Lazare - her surname - suited her macabre appearance better than her given name. She was strange; indeed, somewhat ridiculous. It was hard explaining the interest I took in her. It necessarily implied some kind of mental derangement. At least, that's how it appeared to the friends I used to meet at the Bourse.
At the time, she was the one human being who could rescue me from dejection. When se came into the bar, her frazzled, black silhouette in the doorway seemed, in this fief of luck and wealth, a pointless incarnation of disaster; but I would jump up and guide her to my table. Her clothes were black, badly cut, and spotted. She seemed not to see what was in front of her; she frequently bumped into tables as she walked by. her hair (short, stiff, unkempt, hatless) stuck out like a crow's wings on either side of her face. Between these wings, her nose - that of a skinny, sallow-fleshed Jewess - emerged beneath steel spectacles.
She inspired uneasiness. She spoke slowly, with a serenity of mind to which all things were alien. Disease, exhaustion, poverty, and death did not matter to her. What she assumed in others was an utterly tranquil indifference. She cast a spell as much by her lucidity as by her visionary powers of thought. I used to give her the money she needed to print a tiny monthly review to which she attached great importance. In it she defended Communist principles that were a far cry from the official Communism of Moscow. Most of the time I thought that she was genuinely mad and that it was ill-tempered mischievousness on my part to keep playing her game. I used to see her, I suppose, because her frenzy was as unbalanced and sterile as my own private life and, at the same time, no less anxious. What most fascinated me was the unhealthy eagerness that prompted her to give her life and blood for the cause of the downtrodden. It would, I reflected, be the thin blood of an unwashed virgin.
----
*
p.s. Hey. This post has been beefed up just a little bit since it first appeared here years ago, so it's kind of only two-thirds of a rerun in a way. See you soon.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
_____________________
'His non-conformist mind was marked by what it was not yet customary to call black humor. Somewhat thin, with a style both romantic and of his time, he possessed (in a more youthful form of course, and less discreetly) the elegance he would never loose. His close-set, darkened eyes, brimming with all the blue of noon, went with his teeth that oddly suggested a forest animal, often uncovered by a laugh that (perhaps wrongly) I judged to be sarcastic'. Neither 'flamboyantly attired' nor 'extravagant', elegant but conservatively dressed ('I always knew Bataille dressed in a very Bourgeois way'; 'there was nothing Bohemian about him'). There was nothing Bohemian about him, but, as photographs of the time show, he displayed an elegance that was close to dandyism, a cynical dandyism.' -- Michel Leiris
______________________
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
'Corpses are the things of nightmares, figures that vibrate perpetually with the deafening echo of the last breath of presence. Georges Bataille's 1935 novel The Blue of Noon is inundated with literal and metaphorical descriptions of corpses, which are used to convey the narrator's self-ravaging tides of fear and desire. Simultaneously, the novel is interjected with strangely removed (despite the narrator's physical proximity) observations of the political events leading up to World War II. When viewed in the context of its author's biography and the period in which it was written, the disjointed poetic narrative that it unfurls is both personal and prolific.
'Like all of Bataille's narrative works, The Blue of Noon is in part a self-mediated biography, told through the thinly veiled voice of his male narrator Henri Troppmann. Although the implications will not be thoroughly explored here, the question of what requisites lend momentum to societies transgressions looms darkly in the background. Death exposes a very particular, and perhaps a penultimate, chaos; to surpass tears with momentary satiation does not escape comprehension. I would like to use specific passages from The Blue of Noon to discuss Bataille's personal and authorial transgression of the Impossible, and more precisely to study his use of corpses as signifiers for this exploration of threshold and how to implement language in describing this struggle. From his notions on expenditure, to the death of philosophy, Bataille waged a war on limits. Before aging into the figure we study here, Bataille was a young adult on the path to becoming a monk.
'Between the years 1920-1924, Georges Bataille's belief system underwent a dramatic shift. A series of encounters during this period helped set into motion a dizzying struggle with paradox Bataille attempted to both define and destroy for the duration of his life. Small cracks had begun to destabilize the foundation of a devout Catholicism he had presumably taken up as a means of insulating himself from the madness of his childhood; but it wasn't until his initial readings of Nietzsche that he felt deeply confounded by an intellectual choice in obsessive pursuits. His reaction to Nietzsche was in fact so provocative, that his first response was to reject the material. Reflecting years later on this moment, Bataille stated, "It is natural for a man encountering the destiny which belongs to him to experience an initial moment of recoil." The terror of his adolescence crashed over him for a second (and certainly not the last) time, but unlike his self-enclosing escape into religion, he chose to pursue this new and unnerving opening before him.
'By yielding to the Death of God and the laughing whilst peering into the void, transgression became his anti-idealistic ideal for living, signifying the end of an upright value system, in which all subjects are interchangeable and every structure is offered up for transmutable inversion. In his personal life, this allowed for his most debased desires to be structured accordingly; the brothel would become his church, and every person, from himself, to his mother, to his lovers (prostitutes, wives, and mistresses alike) was ultimately, a corpse. Bataille's association of human flesh to an ever-present mortality may be a holdover from his years of monistic study, but it also stems from childhood memories of his blind, syphilitic father, who deteriorated progressively into madness until his death. Bataille claims to have been in love with his father until the age of fourteen. At the onset of the new self-consciousness of puberty this adoration shifted to a deep hate.' -- DISCURSIVE BODIES: The Corpses of Georges Bataille's The Blue of Noon
______________________
Translation: Journalist: What is the Evil you're talking about? G. Bataille: There are, I believe, two sorts of Evil basically contrasting. On the one hand, one is linked to the necessity that everything goes right and succeed. On the other hand, the other one consists in positively breaking what is forbidden, like for instance, the ban on murder, or several sexual possibilities. J.: Does the title mean that Literature and Evil are inseparable? B.: I believe yes. Of course this isnt clear at first sight, but I think that if Literature goes away from Evil it becomes quickly boring. It is important to underline that Literature must deal with anguish, that this very anguish is based upon something that goes wrong, and eventually seriously bad. In leading the reader in some unpleasant perspective, I take the example of a novel, Literature avoids to get boring. J.: Thus a writer is always guilty of writing..? B.: Most of writers aren't fully aware of this, but I do believe in that profound guilt. Writing is basically the opposite of working. It might not appear so logical, although every amusing books are efforts submited to work. J.: Could you name 1 or 2 writers that might have felt guilty of writing? B.: Well, two of them, which I named in my book, are clearly distinct in that matter. Baudelaire and Kafka, both felt guilty being in the common "wrong" side. It is obvious for Baudelaire who chose the very name "les Fleurs du Mal" to describe his deepest thoughts. Kafka expressed himself even more clearly, he thought that by writing he was disobeying to his fellows and put himself in a situation of guilt. [...] J.: But being a writer and being guilty for Baudelaire or Kafka is because it's not a serious occupation, that's what their parents meant. They felt guilt being childish because they were writing. Do you think that Baudelaire and Kafka felt guilty by the very process of writing? B.: I think that expressly, even clearly pointed out by them a few times, they felt in the situation of a child towards his parents. The child disobeying to his parents and by then putting himself in a guitly conscience because he remember his affective parents who told him constantly what not to do, that it was bad ; in the strongest sense of the word. J.: If Literature is childish, you probably think that it is very puerile? B.: I Believe there is something essentially puerile within Literature. That may seem irreconcilable with one's admiration for it, which I share. But I think it is fundamental, that one cannot fully understand what Literature is all about if we do not put it on the childhood side. Which doesn't mean we put it on an inferior level. J.: You wrote a book about erotism, is erotism a childish behaviour in Literature? B.: I dont know if Literature distinguishes from erotism in general. But I think it is essential to underline the childish character of erotism as a whole. To be erotic is to be fascinated like a child with a game, a forbidden game. The man fascinated by erotism definitly is in the situation of a child towards his parents who is frightened of what might happen. He goes always far enough to be frightened. He doesn't content himself with what wealthy adults do, he must be frightened, he must put himself in the same situation than when he was a child always threatened of being told off harshly ; in an unbearable, intolerable way. J.: We may have understood that you are condemning this puerility and childish behaviour, but I think we should go back to the title of your book, Literature and Evil. This is not a condemnation of Literature and Evil. I'd like you to give us the bottom line of this book. B.: It is obvious that it's a warning, in this sense that we must warn against a danger, although it is possible that once we warned someone against a danger, we give him reasons to face it, and I think it is essential for us to face the danger which is Literature. I think it is a great and serious danger. But one is really a man only by facing this danger. Its within Literature that we aprehend human perspectives under their fullest shape, since Literature doesn't let us live without aprehending human things through their most violent perspectives. Wether it be tragedy, Shakespeare and so on. It is mainly Literature that allows us to see the worst. And to know how to face it, how to overcome it. on the whole the man who play finds in the game the strength to overcome what the game leads of horror.
____________________________
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
'Narrative pathways through Le Bleu du ciel are never straightforward. Moving through the text involves negotiating one unstable, disorientating space after another, passing through an elaborate network of symbolic spaces – basements, recesses, cells, and tombs – whose borders touch each other and whose limits are continuously lacerated and transgressed. The text itself becomes labyrinthine and circuitous, subject to what Bataille himself refers to in the novel’s foreword as ‘monstrueuses anomalies’ [‘freakish anomalies’]. Through a study of the treatment of space in the Le Bleu du ciel – spaces constantly shifting between light and dark, openness and enclosure, form and the formless, this essay has examined some of the novel’s ‘anomalies’ and obsessions, looking at their place in relation to ideas explored in the broader corpus of Bataille’s thought. Seen in this context, what has become apparent is that such anomalies are not anomalies at all, but rather nodal points in a system of thought itself devoted to an interrogation of notions of impossibility and contradiction. Reference to the work of Blanchot, itself linked to the territory inhabited by Bataille through numerous biographical and textual connections, expands the scope of this interrogation, helping to show how the spaces of Le Bleu du ciel might be seen to relate to experiences outside the limits of that book, and ultimately to a broader understanding of the unstable, vertiginous experience of reading itself.' -- Michael Eades
_____________________
Autopsia - Blue of Noon
David Sylvian - Blue of Noon
Krieg - Blue of Noon
_____________________
'Director André S. Labarthe, well-known as the co-founder and original developer of "Cinéma, de notre temps", here portrays the French writer Georges Bataille (1897-1962), whose work ventures, at the same time, into the fields of literature, anthropology, philosophy, economy, sociology and history of art. Initially broadcasted on 30 April 1997, the film contains interviews with Pierre Klossowski and Jacques Pimpanneau. The French title could be translated as As-Far-as-The-Eye-Can-See (At the Limit of Vision).
'André Labarthe: "How to grasp with naked hands the most fiery thinking of the century? How to approach through film that which shies away whenever approached? How can the cinema - "the art of image" as we say - welcome and let live the intolerable images woven in stories such as Madame Edwarda and Blue of Noon? In short, how to talk about Georges Bataille in a film when we know that film to be impossible?"' -- Amip-France 3
____________________
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Blue of Noon(Marion Boyars)translated by Harry Mathews
'Blue of Noon is a novel that is as driven as a car whose driver has lost control. Troppmann the protagonist drinks to severe excess, womanises and is on the verge of despair. His wife Dirty who is introduced in the first chapter thoroughly drunk in the Savoy hotel in London is in an even more disgusting state than Troppmann and together they are driving each other to the brink. His wife separates from him and moves to Brighton leaving Troppmann to lead a dishevelled life of depravity and alcoholic excess in Paris. He visits Lazare a young communist whose ideology he finds as repugnant as her looks. Visiting friends in a nightclub he seduces Xenie by stabbing her in the thigh with a fork. He calls upon Xenie to visit him when he falls ill and scares her half to death whilst trying to seduce her. He visits Barcelona just as the General Strike is called and summons Xenie to him as well as his wife. Xenie gets caught up in the shooting and is terrified. Troppmann is reunited with his wife and together they make mad passionate love in the earth above a graveyard.' -- John Marcel, Resident Scholar
'There's at least one great missing film: the adaptation of Bataille's Blue of Noon that Rainer Werner Fassbinder was planning to direct at the time of his death. I will always regret that this film never got made, for doubtless it would have shed a new and harsh light on the interplay of politics and sexuality and on the historical links between the fascist terror that Bataille confronted in the 1930s and the more diffuse and disguised forms of oppression and deprivation we continue to face today.' -- Steven Shaviro, Artforum
Extract
1.
During the period of my life when I was most unhappy, I used to frequent - for reasons hard to justify, and without a trace of sexual attraction - a woman whom I only found appealing because of her ridiculous appearance: as though my lot required in these circumstances a bird of ill omen to keep me company. When, in May, I came back from London, I was in a state of over-excitement, helpless, almost ill; but this strange girl didn't notice a thing. In June, I left Paris to meet Dirty in Prum; then, out of exasperation, Dirty left me. On my return, I was incapable of keeping up a presentable attitude at any length. I spent as much time as I could with the 'bird of ill omen.' However, I sometimes succumbed to fits of annoyance in her company.
This disturbed her. One day she asked what was the matter with me. (She told me shortly afterwards that she had felt I might go insane at any moment.)
I was irritated. I answered, 'Absolutely nothing.'
She was insistent: 'I can understand it if you don't feel like talking. I'm sure it would be best if I left you now. You're not calm enough to give the project careful thought. But I want you to know that it's upsetting for me. What are you planning to do?'
I looked her in the eye, with no resolve whatsoever. I must have seemed at a loss, as if anxious to escape some obsession that would not be put off. She looked away.
I said to her, 'I suppose you think I've been drinking?'
'No, why? Is that something you do?'
'Frequently.'
'I didn't know that.'
She thought of me as someone serious - wholly serious, in fact - and for her, drunkenness was a thing that could not be reconciled with other obligations.
'It's only...You look worn out.'
'Let's talk some more about the project.'
'You're obviously too tired. You're sitting there as though you were about to keel over.'
'That's a possibility.'
'What's wrong?'
'I'm about to go insane.'
Why?'
'I hurt.'
'What can I do?'
'Nothing.'
'You can't tell me what's wrong?'
'I don't think so.'
'Cable your wife to come back. She doesn't have to stay in Brighton?'
'No. As a matter of fact, she's written me. It's best for her not to come.'
'Does she know the state you're in?'
'She also knows there's nothing she could do to change it.'
The woman sat there puzzled. She must have been thinking that, insufferable and spineless as I was, it was her duty to help me out of my predicament. She finally made up her mind and said to me curtly, 'I can't leave you like this. I'm taking you home, or to a friend's - whatever you like...'
I did not reply. Things at this point started going black inside my head. I'd had enough.
She took me home. I didn't utter another word.
2.
I usually saw her at a bar-and-grill behind the Bourse. I used to make her eat with me. It was hard for us getting to the end of a meal. We spent our time arguing.
She was a girl of twenty-five, ugly and conspicuously filthy. (The women I previously went out with had, on the contrary, been pretty and well-dressed.) Lazare - her surname - suited her macabre appearance better than her given name. She was strange; indeed, somewhat ridiculous. It was hard explaining the interest I took in her. It necessarily implied some kind of mental derangement. At least, that's how it appeared to the friends I used to meet at the Bourse.
At the time, she was the one human being who could rescue me from dejection. When se came into the bar, her frazzled, black silhouette in the doorway seemed, in this fief of luck and wealth, a pointless incarnation of disaster; but I would jump up and guide her to my table. Her clothes were black, badly cut, and spotted. She seemed not to see what was in front of her; she frequently bumped into tables as she walked by. her hair (short, stiff, unkempt, hatless) stuck out like a crow's wings on either side of her face. Between these wings, her nose - that of a skinny, sallow-fleshed Jewess - emerged beneath steel spectacles.
She inspired uneasiness. She spoke slowly, with a serenity of mind to which all things were alien. Disease, exhaustion, poverty, and death did not matter to her. What she assumed in others was an utterly tranquil indifference. She cast a spell as much by her lucidity as by her visionary powers of thought. I used to give her the money she needed to print a tiny monthly review to which she attached great importance. In it she defended Communist principles that were a far cry from the official Communism of Moscow. Most of the time I thought that she was genuinely mad and that it was ill-tempered mischievousness on my part to keep playing her game. I used to see her, I suppose, because her frenzy was as unbalanced and sterile as my own private life and, at the same time, no less anxious. What most fascinated me was the unhealthy eagerness that prompted her to give her life and blood for the cause of the downtrodden. It would, I reflected, be the thin blood of an unwashed virgin.
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p.s. Hey. This post has been beefed up just a little bit since it first appeared here years ago, so it's kind of only two-thirds of a rerun in a way. See you soon.