Miscellanea

story of the eye — georges bataille

“to others, the universe seems decent because decent people have gelded eyes. that is why they fear lewdness. they are never frightened by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. in general, people savor the ‘pleasures of the flesh’ only on condition that they be insipid.

but as of then, no doubt existed for me: i did not care for what is known as ‘pleasures of the flesh’ because they really are insipid; i cared only for what is classified as ‘dirty.’ on the other hand, i was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, while, in some way or other, anything sublime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. my kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything i may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.”

he’s so right. everyone is so obnoxious about sex (and vices in general). i have always been relatively indifferent to these moral panics around sex, not because sex is necessarily meaningless, but because i don’t think its meaning is fixed in advance. sex can definitely have meaning and serve as an act of love in the way that it’s intimate and you give pleasure while you get it. in the same way, i think it can mean nothing, or it can be beautiful and degrading at once.

what i especially like here is his idea that ordinary debauchery is still strangely well-behaved. it is allowed to be “dirty,” but only inside the little category we have already designated as dirty. everything outside of it — scholarship, professionalism, seriousness, purity, the sublime — is supposed to remain untouched. even vice has conditions placed around it so that it does not contaminate the rest of the world.

i think that is part of why it’s so strange that there is a general insistence that sexuality contaminates every part of a person’s identity, while at the same time everyone quietly accepts sex as an ordinary thing that everyone does. i think a lot about girls who have received academic punishment for having onlyfans accounts. it’s really weird that sexual behavior can “soil” how someone is seen professionally, as though scholarship and sexuality have to belong to completely separate moral worlds. if something sexual can make someone suddenly seem unprofessional, then clearly we have assigned sex this enormous symbolic power while pretending that distinction is natural.

we construct this distinction between what is respectable and what is “dirty,” and then forget that we constructed it in the first place. i like the idea that people can be dirty without submitting to all the insipid conditions we’ve placed around what dirtiness is allowed to mean. bataille’s version is more extreme than simply accepting vice: the point seems to be that dirtiness becomes interesting precisely when it refuses to stay confined to the thing that society has already agreed may be dirty. it reaches the things that were supposed to remain pure.

another observation, somewhat related but also a different point: i think people label things as “unforgivable” or “taboo” because they recognize general patterns for the type of person who typically does a certain act. saying “if this person does x they are automatically bad” is kind of an easy way for people to make decisions without actually thinking critically about it. people tend to ignore nuances and just want the easy option. people have often called me naïve for being forgiving of certain things, but i would argue that maybe the more naïve thing is to set limits without actually thinking about them.

i’m realizing i kind of went on my own side tangent instead of further adding to his point. i just mean that i think it’s funny how people set standards for acceptable forms of pleasure (and other private vices in general), and even what we call transgression is usually expected to stay inside those standards. the “insipid” standard is a funny observation because apparently even being dirty has to be done correctly.

discussion that followed

orion: i think too, a lot of “deviancy” arises from a certain ideology and their continued outlook + moral grandstanding. specifically what you said about how people generally use “pattern recognition,” i think it boils down to not wanting/caring to understand others or no empathy.

helena: i think people prioritize speed. thinking critically about something is time consuming, so it’s simpler to say “x is always bad” and plainly reject it even though there might be nuances. however, i think it’s more fruitful in the long term to think critically in these moments.