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A review by marginaliant
The Tears of Eros by Georges Bataille
1.0
Philosophers don't get to write about history anymore because they don't write anything that makes sense. It's the new law, established by me.
My problems with this book are... many. First is that it is way too vague and homogenizing. The book covers the entire history of civilization (mostly Western, except when he takes Chinese torture victims and Voodoo practitioners out of context for no reason) in 200ish pages, the majority of which are taken up with illustrations. So of course he can't actually say anything, he can only scrape up some vague examples of situations which were both erotic and violent. He entirely eschews any *context* for *why* a civilization would mingle ideas of sex and violence, or what the long-term implications are of that phenomenon. Does it perpetuate violence? Does it normalize sex? Who knows--certainly not Bataille!
Obviously I'm a scholar of the twenty-first century but I really felt like something was left to be desired from his interpretation. I wanted to hear about gendered dimensions of violence. I wanted to hear about drugs and alcohol. I wanted to hear about class differences. I wanted to hear about race and culture. I wanted ANYTHING that was an actual dimension of this phenomenon.
If this were a freshman philosophy paper I'd fail it.
He also does this irritating thing of saying that something is erotic and horrifying but doesn't explain why it is erotic. At the end, he has g r a p h i c images of a Chinese man having his flesh hacked off while he is still alive. In this picture the man's ribs can be seen but he is wearing a kind of glassy-eyed expression, presumably caused by the opium which was given to these victims so that they did not pass out from the pain. I clearly understand the tragic part of this example. HOWEVER, he does not explain what is supposed to be erotic about this. He hints that the smile is indicative of a kind of ecstasy on the behalf of the tortured man? Yikes!
If he just wanted to write about his gore-related sexual fetishes he could have kept those to himself.
My problems with this book are... many. First is that it is way too vague and homogenizing. The book covers the entire history of civilization (mostly Western, except when he takes Chinese torture victims and Voodoo practitioners out of context for no reason) in 200ish pages, the majority of which are taken up with illustrations. So of course he can't actually say anything, he can only scrape up some vague examples of situations which were both erotic and violent. He entirely eschews any *context* for *why* a civilization would mingle ideas of sex and violence, or what the long-term implications are of that phenomenon. Does it perpetuate violence? Does it normalize sex? Who knows--certainly not Bataille!
Obviously I'm a scholar of the twenty-first century but I really felt like something was left to be desired from his interpretation. I wanted to hear about gendered dimensions of violence. I wanted to hear about drugs and alcohol. I wanted to hear about class differences. I wanted to hear about race and culture. I wanted ANYTHING that was an actual dimension of this phenomenon.
If this were a freshman philosophy paper I'd fail it.
He also does this irritating thing of saying that something is erotic and horrifying but doesn't explain why it is erotic. At the end, he has g r a p h i c images of a Chinese man having his flesh hacked off while he is still alive. In this picture the man's ribs can be seen but he is wearing a kind of glassy-eyed expression, presumably caused by the opium which was given to these victims so that they did not pass out from the pain. I clearly understand the tragic part of this example. HOWEVER, he does not explain what is supposed to be erotic about this. He hints that the smile is indicative of a kind of ecstasy on the behalf of the tortured man? Yikes!
If he just wanted to write about his gore-related sexual fetishes he could have kept those to himself.