I don't get the pissplay. I've read Bataille's explanation that his blind paralytic father would stare with serene deranged bliss into the sky when pissing, and his idea that consciousness floats on a sea of obscenity whose ingress demands immediate recoil or expulsion once contemplated, and his oeuvre is to press into that oceanic potency.
Is piss the "waters of life" of his concept of dark superabundance, the excess abyssal waste energy of the universe that is his secular interpretation of divine superabundance post the death-of-god? It's not mere taboo indulgence or Rabelais bodily excretions, he maintains the taboo against shit despite De Sade and Rabelais already giving that literary treatment and it being an obvious next taboo to break or bodily function to be eroticised. The taboo against homosexuality is also maintained in the main, again against De Sade and despite orgies and lesbianism being engaged in.
Can someone French or with a French mindset help here?
>He (Bataille) refused to accept that sacrifice was in any sense teleological or that it resonated with the peace of God rooted in the goodness of Creation and the redemptive economy. His account of the fall was limited to a change in the mode of knowing and as a result he could only described salvation as unintelligible inoperativity. Bataille imported (consciously or otherwise) severe Jansenist understandings of an inscrutable capricious divine sovereign. In refusing any form of transcendence or participation, Bataille simply brought the dark god of Jansensim into the realm of inner experience. Such an understanding does not lend itself to communities of worship and his religious atheism was plagued with incommunicability though he clearly desired to form a larger movement. The only temples that remained for him were individuated bodies attempting to break the shackles of self-consciousness through spastic violence to themselves or others.
https://churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/georges-bataille-the-dark-soul-of-the-night/
Quite interesting but I have the feeling I still don't get it
I haven’t read the story of the eye but in his essays Bataille reduces drives into a dialectic between appropriation/accumulation vs excretion/expenditure. He’s probably just playing around with that idea in the novel.
Worth reading if you're into Bataille, it's very short. I found his own exegesis, which is included in the version in the OP pic, more interesting that the work itself (easy to get bogged down by the luridness), but you need the strange fantasy as ground for the exegesis. Most of it based on his relationships with his crazy mother and crazy father. His father reminds me of the crazy begger in Madame Bovary and how Emma dies in horror with the thought of the beggers digusting visage, Baitaille's father having gone insane and being left abandoned in the village behind German lines in WW1 to die alone. Baitaille leans into the horror of experiencing that madness and abandonment. The piss symbology being inspired by the look of serene bliss in his mad father's face when pissing into his invalid bedpan.
Why draw the line at shit though when you're going all in with piss if it's an expediture thing? He is writing in a De Sadian tradition that was fecal focused too. Must be something special about piss.
Lol I feel the frustration. Like I said I haven’t read the story so you’d have to explain to me what you mean by “draw the line at shit”. He uses shit and anal metaphors as analogies to his broader philosophical project quite a bit in his early essays.
The book is a succession of piss orgies. The structure of the work is a series of sex scenes each of which feature piss and pissing. Now in the spirit of De Sade you may expect such sexual transgressions, and indeed they soon extend to murder, suicide, mutilation, a little blood, sodomy, near necrophilia. But unlike De Sade there are still taboos not crossed. There is no shit. There is very little that veers on homosexuality, the maximum extent is a male third wheel jerk offs in the corner at times, and another male victim gets pissed on and forced to drink male piss from a cup in the process of an orgy, but even when the orgy involves three men and one woman there is no real sexual interaction between the men. Unlike De Sade taboos remain and the transgressions have other symbolic meanings: eggs, eyes, and bulls testicles used as implements of masturbation have approachable symbolic meanings and inferences. The piss and the focus on pissing, to me at least, is more difficult to understand but its centrality to the work demands some explication beyond mere taboo-breaking or obscenity for sake of the obscene.
Not Bataille's purpose, in the work the dirtiness of piss is relished. In this it is De Sadian, the purileness of the obscenity of rancid piss is exalted in. The closest we have to shit entering the sensory staging is an orgy in a pigsty where the smell of the shit is briefly mentioned as enhancing the sensuality of the obscenity. The rancidness and chemical comparisons to offensive odours of the piss is always mentioned.
Scat play is only nice to watch from afar, irl its a hassle, the smells dampen the arousal for majority of the people and the taste is nothing special either, very bland, unless there is a blood in it. Unlike the pissplay its not something to just do spontaneously in the heat of the moment. Cleaning up afterwards is tedious and ruins the romance for most people. And not only concerning your body, but think about upholstery and nooks and all the crannies in your furniture. Whereas with watersports you can just turn on the vacuum cleaner and be done with it. Its only for the most dedicated degenerates, usually autistic boomers.
Not sure the practicality argument is a good one in Batailles case, they're smashing raw eggs all over the room which would be harder to clean. And they're murdering people and leaving bodies around the place. Peccadillo preference argument is probably stronger but begs the question as to why one obscenity becomes erotic while the other obscenity stays unerotic and remains doubly taboo.
> Whereas with watersports you can just turn on the vacuum cleaner and be done with it.
Putting pee in a vacuum cleaner seems like a pretty bad idea. Wouldn’t that mix with all the dust and clog everything up with mush and clay?
Depends on the cleaner anon. Serious watersport afficionados usually have the good sense to invest in nice karcher or a reasonable clone with built in liquid removal option.
>I don't get the pissplay
So what you do is first relieve yourself, then drink a lots of clear water immediately before sex session. This way your piss will be clear with have just a faint taste, making it palatable, especially for aroused partner. Also before making them drink it, just piss all over their body, which will make for a very pleasant experience of warm shower on their skin and psychologically prepare them for whats coming next. Very important, especially with younger ones. Noobs often make a mistake of holding urine for a long time in their bladder, which causes it to get stale and acquire yellow color and unpleasant taste from condensed salts, ruining what could be the otherwise a great fun. Your welcome.
Was he against homosexuality
Why did I open this thread?
Filthy degenerates burn in hell
Apparently, that's peak academia.
Bataille was a post-theological mystic, his thought is deeply religious. See the link here for a Catholic response to his work
. Your reaction to obscenity was why he found it important, its potency to break the self so that we must recoil and cast it away (you condemning it to the fires of hell) otherwise it dissolves us, yet retains an deep compelling power, hence why you clicked the thread against your better instincts like a teenage girl clicking onto a true crime podcast. Bataille asks what is the nature of that power and the experience of that which so powerful both against the self and on the self as an affect.
>can't handle urophilia in a book
ngmi with girls
You piss on my floor you get put outside with the other dogs you dirty b***h.
Everyone only have eyes for that one, what about other Bataille fiction?