The Other Sun: - IA de Investigación especializada en el MIT

The Other Sun:
Non-Sacrificial Mutilation and the
Severed Ear of Georges Bataille

FREDRIK RÖNNBÄCK

En 1914, the nationalist right-wing author and politician Maurice Barrès pub-
lished The Great Pity of the Churches of France, a collection of texts in which he
inveighs against the law separating church and state that had been adopted on
December 9, 1905. The book was the culmination of a campaign that Barrès had
waged since 1910, and included an open letter and a petition as well as three
speeches to the Chamber of Deputies. If the state no longer takes care of churches
and cathedrals, he argues, the buildings will fall into decay and their treasures will
be sold to the highest bidder. He even claims to have already witnessed auctions
where sacred icons and Madonna statuettes were wholesaled under the most pro-
fane circumstances. Barrès also refuses to participate in efforts to survey the reli-
gious art of these churches, noting that whatever is deemed worthy of preserva-
ción, and is thereby rescued from sale or destruction, will only end up in a muse-
um, a fate equally dire.1

His clarion call to resist secularization is coupled with a strongly felt distrust
of the progressive optimism and rationalism of the time. Without rejecting reason
outright, Barrès emphasizes the limitations of its reach: Those who hasten the sec-
ular future ignore that there are parts of our being that can never be fully
explained, regions “where, as Goethe writes, reason cannot reach but where we
nevertheless do not wish for unreason to reign.”2 At the heart of Barrès’s argu-
ment is the existence of a triton genos that falls neither under the positivism of rea-
son nor under the superstition of unreason, and the key word in his exposition
that reveals something about its role is orientation. Some might object that the
church’s physical building serves no purpose in a village where the Catholic faith
has all but died out, he suggests, but then retorts that “the simple fact that these
sensitively charged walls orient, quite indistinctly and insufficiently, yet still orient
pensamiento, plays an invaluable part in the philosophy of the village.”3 Just as a magnet
causes iron filings to line up according to its magnetic field, so does the church
create a sacred field of orientation that envelops the entire village and acts upon
all its inhabitants, believers and nonbelievers alike.

1.
2.
3.

Maurice Barrès, La grande pitié des églises de France (París: Émile-Paul Frères, 1914), páginas. 2–3.
Ibídem., pag. 92. Unless otherwise indicated, translations are my own throughout.
Ibídem., pag. 92. My emphasis.

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112

OCTUBRE

Barrès was not alone in his opposition to the new law. On August 16, 1904,
an article with the ominous title “The Death of Cathedrals” appeared in the pages
of Le Figaro. Its author, Marcel Proust, invites the reader to imagine for a moment
that Catholicism died out centuries ago and that all its traditions were lost, leaving
only a few magnificent but empty cathedrals standing as silent witnesses of a
bygone era. Would the French government then not support efforts to recreate
the mysterious drama of High Mass, just like ancient Greek tragedies were once
brought back to life in amphitheaters? Proust does not concern himself with the
decline of Christianity, but with the aesthetic existence of its houses of worship,
brought to life by the Gesamtkunstwerk of the religious rites. Like Barrès, sin embargo,
he warns against the museification of the cathedral or, worse, against the possibili-
ty that the government might decide at its discretion to turn disused churches into
anything from conference halls to casinos. In the end, Proust as much as Barrès
discredits his own argument, as legitimate fears seamlessly transition into hyper-
bole. But even his exaggerations are essentially secular in nature. They rely not on
the notion of a sacred function that is annihilated by the mercantile economy of
the museum, but rather on a corporeal relationship between the church and the
bodies of the congregation.

The theme of orientation is present in “The Death of Cathedrals” as well. Como
one travels through the French countryside, steeples rising above every new village
outline the visual topography of the landscape. De hecho, the importance of the
country church as a reference point and its reliability for the purpose of orienta-
tion are so fundamental that, in an article published in Le Figaro three years later,
Proust calls upon them to illustrate the disorienting effect of speed when traveling
by automobile. He describes how the steeples of Saint-Étienne, instead of slowly
growing larger in his field of vision, seem to stay suspended at an indefinite dis-
tance, alternately disappearing behind each other and reappearing, as if they were
moving sideways on a two-dimensional plane. The directionality of movement is
distorted, substituting lateral displacement for diminishing distance, and the slow,
organic progression toward the church is replaced by an apparent immobility fol-
lowed by a violent jump when the automobile comes to a halt before the church:
They have already arrived. As if the steeples had been waiting in ambush, “they
jumped out in front of us so suddenly that we barely had time to stop before crash-
ing into the porch.”4

Despite his emphasis on a purely geographical form of orientation, Proust
also argues that the material reality of the church can exert an influence that,
regardless of the observer’s own faith, seeps into the intellectual and spiritual
realm. And far more influential than religious paintings and sculptures are the
architectural lines of the building itself, obscurely hinting at unspoken thoughts
“and capable both of lifting our imagination in their soaring elevation and of

4.
Marcel Proust, “Impressions de route en automobile,” Le Figaro, Noviembre 19, 1907. El
article was republished in Pastiches and Mixtures with the title “Days in an Automobile.” The impressions
were also reused in Swann’s Way.

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The Other Sun

113

imprisoning it altogether in the curve of their fall.”5 After World War I, "El
Death of Cathedrals” was included, in an abbreviated form, in Pastiches and
Mixtures together with an addendum from its author describing it as “quite
mediocre” and guilelessly noting how much words can sometimes change over
tiempo. A far greater threat to the cathedrals of France had emerged in the mean-
tiempo: The physical destruction wreaked by an external enemy had trumped the
fear of creeping internal decay.

Around the time of this republication, Georges Bataille published a text that
echoes the sentiment of Proust’s note, if not his overarching argument. “Notre-
Dame de Rheims” laments the near-death of one cathedral in particular during
the war. Por supuesto, having been the coronation church of French kings for eight
hundred years, Notre-Dame de Reims is not just any cathedral, and in the article it
is scarcely more than a symbol of the religious spirit of the nation, a vessel for the
musings of a remarkably pious Bataille, who describes it as “the highest and most
magnificent consolation that God left among us.”6 While addressing a very differ-
ent situation, the tone is reminiscent of the various expostulations about the law of
1905. Juxtaposing the prewar splendor of the cathedral with the devastation
brought about by repeated German bombings, the second half of the article
describes the return of its author to Reims. Against his earlier conviction that “as
long as [the cathedral] lasted, even if in ruins, we would still have a mother to die
para,”7 the actual ruins now strike him not as a living and caring mother but as a
ghastly rictus of death.

“Notre-Dame de Rheims” is an anomaly in Bataille’s oeuvre. One might even
argue that it is not quite part of it at all, and for many years it was not: Never men-
tioned by the author himself, it was virtually unknown until after his death.8 It
stands apart both stylistically and thematically. Denis Hollier notes that, separated
from Bataille’s main work by ten years of silence, this early text is not only incon-
gruous but in many ways in direct conflict with his other writings.9 Beyond its obvi-
ous religiosity, it also represents a more general faith in authority and order that is
absent from his later works. Sin embargo, traces remain of this moment of youth-
ful adoration. The article portrays Notre-Dame de Reims as the physical body of
the Virgin Mother: The stones of the cathedral are her flesh and blood, the desola-
tion of its ruins are the terrifying smile of her skeletal remains. The one-sentence

Proust, “La mort des cathédrales: Une conséquence du projet Briand sur la Séparation,” Le

Georges Bataille, “Notre-Dame de Rheims,” in Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 1 (París: Gallimard,

5.
Figaro, Agosto 16, 1904.
6.
1970), pag. 612.
Bataille, “Notre-Dame de Rheims," pag. 612.
7.
8.
Even after the discovery of “Notre-Dame de Rheims,” the first volume of Bataille’s complete
works published by Gallimard does not begin with this text, which is instead added to the end in a sec-
tion labeled “Addendum 1973,” assigning it a status below that of a literary work but above that of an
annotation or a discarded draft.
9.
1993), pag. 32.

Denis Hollier, “La métaphore architecturale,” in La prise de la concorde (París: Gallimard,

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114

OCTUBRE

paragraph that signals the passage of four years of war reflects this anthropomor-
phic view: “Today, sin embargo, she rises in desolation, mutilated.”10 Two decades
más tarde, in one of Bataille’s first talks at the College of Sociology, on February 5,
1938, this mutilated body returns in a very similar context. “One might even har-
bor aggressively anti-Christian sentiments,” he writes; “this does not take away from
the feeling that the church and the houses surrounding it together establish a vital
equilibrium, such that a radical destruction of the church would be a form of muti-
lation.”11 This defense of the church comes from a Bataille who doubtless identi-
fies more with these aggressively anti-Christian sentiments than with the author of
“Notre-Dame de Rheims,” and yet the argument is again almost identical to those
presented in opposition to the separation of church and state: The country church
orients life in the village that surrounds it, and its destruction would have implica-
tions beyond the immediate effects felt only by the diminishing group of people
who regularly attend Mass. Both the sentiment and the choice of words call to
mind “Notre-Dame de Rheims,” the silent ghost of a text that both is and is not the
beginning of Bataille’s work.

Story of the Ear

Mutilations abound in Bataille’s work. In two articles written in the 1930s, él
addresses the famous episode that took place on December 23, 1888, in Arles,
when Vincent van Gogh took to his left ear with a razor. In “Sacrificial Mutilation
and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” published in 1930 in Documents, él
examines the event in conjunction with two other cases of self-mutilation. The first
concerns a less illustrious artist, Gaston F., OMS, as he was walking along Boulevard
de Ménilmontant in the vicinity of Père-Lachaise, “suddenly started staring at the sun
and receiving from its rays the imperative order to rip off a finger, without hesitation, con-
out feeling any pain, bit down on his left index finger, . . . and ripped it off com-
pletely.”12 The young artist himself claimed that, in addition to the Sun’s orders,
the deed was inspired by a biography of Van Gogh, but this literary explanation is
rejected entirely by Bataille, who sees no other possible connection between the
two painters than their shared dependence on the Sun, making the mutilation the
equivalent of a ritual sacrifice.13

The second case of self-mutilation referenced by Bataille is perhaps even
gorier. A woman, having been committed to an asylum after a delirium of reli-
gious hallucinations, is found in her room one morning trying to gouge out her
eyes with her bare hands. When asked about her motives, she “claimed to have
heard the voice of God and to have seen a few moments later a man of fire: ‘Give

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Bataille, “Notre-Dame de Rheims," pag. 612.
Georges Bataille, “[5 février 1938],” in Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 2 (París: Gallimard, 1970), pag. 324.

Georges Bataille, “La mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh,” in

10.
11.
My emphasis.
12.
Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 1, pag. 258. Bataille’s emphasis.
13.

Ibídem., pag. 259.

The Other Sun

115

me your ears, crack open your head,’ said the ghost.”14 Having failed to deliver her
ears, she decides to appease the solar deity’s emissary with her eyes instead.
Bataille finds this example crucial in that it illustrates the possibility of passing
from a less essential form of ablation—the ear—to “the most horrifying form of
sacrifice”—Oedipal enucleation.15 His inclination to emphasize this substitution is
easy to understand. The symbolic importance of the eye as an object of self-mutila-
tion is incontestable, and its prominent role in Bataille’s own writings needs no
further elucidation. But what if one were to challenge his quick affirmation that a
mutilated ear would have been any less essential? After all, in two of the three
cases mentioned in the article, the ear is the intended object of sacrificial dismem-
berment. It appears strange, entonces, to conclude that it would be of lesser impor-
tance than the eye.

In “Sacrificial Mutilation and the Severed Ear of Vincent Van Gogh,” Bataille
cites Salomon Reinach’s interpretation of the Prometheus myth, a self-referential
system where the titan, the eagle feeding on his liver, and the Sun all form one
creature who mutilates himself, first by ripping the Sun from its heavenly position
and then again by swallowing his own liver only to spew it out through his open
bowels, once again forcing himself to eat it. “There is, En realidad,” Bataille writes, “no
reason to separate the ear of Arles or the index finger of Père-Lachaise from
Prometheus’s famous liver.”16 When he returns to the case of Van Gogh’s self-
mutilation in 1937, in the article “Van Gogh as Prometheus,” published in Verve,
the point of reference is, once again, as the title suggests, the Prometheus myth,
but his comparative reading has shifted in a significant way. While his earlier inter-
pretation focused on the corporeal reflexivity of self-mutilation, he now develops a
theme that was only present in potentia in the earlier essay. Despite being at the
heart of the argument of the previous essay, the importance of the Sun to the
Prometheus myth was hardly explored at all. By the time he pens “Van Gogh as
Prometheus,” however, Bataille seems to have discovered the full potential of this
myth as it relates to Van Gogh’s self-mutilation: “For it was not only a bloody ear
that Van Gogh removed from his own head . . . much more than an ear, Van Gogh
OMS, desde 1882, had thought it better to be Prometheus than to be Jupiter, tore
from himself nothing less than a SUN.”17 The severed ear no longer represents the
autophagy of the Aetos Prometheus but rather the theft of the heavenly fire that
precedes it, transposing it from the obscure margins of ritual punishment to the
central position of the transgression itself.

Contrary to Bataille’s claims, the severed ear is central to the aesthetics of his
interwar articles. The immediate implications of the metaphor equating the ear
and the Sun are artistic. The Sun transforms Van Gogh’s art; there is a before and
an after to the incident in Arles. The Sun becomes a mystical force, dictating the

14.
15.
16.
17.

Ibídem., pag. 263.
Ibídem., páginas. 263–64.
Ibídem., pag. 268.
Georges Bataille, “Van Gogh Prométhée,” in Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 1, pag. 498.

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116

OCTUBRE

rhythm and orientation of his art, a “sorcerer whose dance slowly stirs the crowd and
carries it away in his movements.”18 A seemingly banal question might serve as a next
step: What is the function of the ear? The outer ear, the cartilage appendage also
known as the pinna, which is to say the feather, collects sounds and channels them
into the ear canal. But symbolically, as the ear’s only immediately visible part, también
represents the ear as a whole. Van Gogh’s assault on the outer ear then ripples
inward and becomes an aggression directed at the unassailable inner ear as well.
These are the regions that house the vestibular system that is the center of our sense
of spatial positioning. The ear is the locus of balance and orientation, and Van
Gogh’s solar-induced self-mutilation, as well as the failed attempt by the woman in
the asylum, can be read in light of this fact. The destabilization of Van Gogh’s art,
when the entire visual field is drawn into the wild disorienting dance of the Sun, es
symbolically prefigured by his attack on the center of balance. From that moment
en, Van Gogh’s painting is “radiance, explosion, flames.”19

This mutilation is in fact not, and could never be replaced by, an Oedipal
enucleation, and the eye is conspicuously absent from “Van Gogh as Prometheus.”
The chain of associations that is established instead runs between “the ear, the asy-
lum, el sol, the most spectacular of feasts and death.”20 Whereas the eye repre-
sents the Sun as a symbol of vision and knowledge—reason as opposed to unrea-
son—what makes it possible for the ear to take its place is that, like the Sun, it is a
means of orientation. Slicing the ear results in a complete upheaval of the stability
and permanence of this world. It is a fragile balance that Van Gogh’s symbolic self-
mutilation disrupts, a stability that is guaranteed only by the great distance that
separates Earth from the perpetual cataclysms of the Sun, and by the thin layer of
the Earth’s crust, “for the incandescence of lava is found in the depths of the
earth.”21 When Bataille writes about Van Gogh’s mutilated art that “the earth
undulated like a rapid sea,” the image he summons is not that of land turning into
agua, but of a flood of molten rock surging up from beneath.22

Because of its mazelike structure, the vestibular system of the inner ear is also
frequently referred to as the labyrinth. It is therefore, as Hollier remarks, the cen-
ter not only of orientation but also of disorientation. The ambiguity is reflected in
Bataille’s reversal of the labyrinth’s metaphorical value, denouncing the Icarian
aspirations of philosophy to escape on the wings of rational thought.23 Indeed, es
after the incident in Arles that the Sun assumes its dominant position in Van
Gogh’s paintings, orienting the visual field through its rays, dictating every move

Ibídem., pag. 499.
18.
Ibídem.
19.
Ibídem.
20.
Ibídem., pag. 498. The same preoccupation with an underground layer of lava, upon which the
21.
solid ground rests, can be found in an article by Michel Leiris entitled “Civilization,” published in
Documents almost a decade earlier. See Michel Leiris, “Civilisation,” in Brisées (París: Gallimard, 1966,
1992), páginas. 31–32.
22.
23.

Bataille, “Van Gogh Prométhée," pag. 499.
Denis Hollier, “Le labyrinthe et la pyramide,” in La prise de la concorde, pag. 114.

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The Other Sun

117

in the wild dance it incites. Rosalind Krauss speaks of two mythic cycles that domi-
nate Bataille’s aesthetics: on the one hand the “chthonic obscurity of the cave,"
the labyrinth where terror and blindness reign, and on the other the Sun, “that
embodiment of the zenith and of light,” which symbolizes the ideal of elevation
but also the madness that ensues if one stares at it fixedly.24 The labyrinth and the
Sun embody opposite aspects of the sacred: the repulsive horrors of the sacred left
and the elevated attraction of the sacred right. Yet the cycles of the Sun and the
labyrinth are one and the same, Krauss writes, and artistic creation occurs “at the
limit: where light turns to darkness, where life surrenders an image of death,
where sight is extinguished in a revelatory moment which is the same as blind-
ness.”25

The limit where sight equals blindness—this is the goal of Icarus’s flight. Pero
the impossibility of an Icarian flight contained in the story of Van Gogh’s severed
ear differs from the myth. The assault on the labyrinth of the ear is not simply an
attempt to escape its prison by laying it in ruins, nor is it a rejection of the orienta-
tional system of the Sun-labyrinth in favor of limitless chaos. One is not possible
without the other, since the immediate target of the sacrificial gesture is never the
labyrinth itself, which remains out of reach, but the pinna, the feather that lifts
Icarus toward the sky. The labyrinth and the feather come together to form the
ear, creating an inextricable unit of errance and escape, and any violence is by
necessity directed at both. The severed ear is Bataille’s answer to the call of the
labyrinthine underworld, but the double bind of the ear’s labyrinth-feather struc-
ture turns the descent into an ascent and vice versa.26 Not only is Icarus’s flight fol-
lowed by the inevitable fall, but “the height of elevation in fact coincides with a
sudden fall of unheard violence.”27 This is what constitutes the artistic condition.
The flight is also the fall that splits the Sun in two—the one that lures Icarus to fly
ever closer and the one that throws him back down to the ground.

The Sun of the ear is the Sun of balance and imbalance, the Sun that must
not be seen, lest the observer be struck to the ground, for “staring at the sun
relates to mental ejaculation, foaming at the mouth and epileptic fits.”28 It is the
Sun of sudden and brutal falls. There is one other mention of epilepsy, the falling
sickness, in Bataille’s early work. It occurs in Story of the Eye, when Simone abruptly
se derrumba, “her clothes all messed up, her ass in the air, as if she suffered from
epilepsy.”29 Simone, por supuesto, is situated squarely within the main thematic order

Rosalind Krauss, “Antivision," Octubre 36 (Primavera 1986), páginas. 149–50.
24.
Ibídem., pag. 150.
25.
26.
An inadvertent illustration of this reversal is provided when Denis Hollier cites the title of
Gaëtan Picon’s The Fall of Icarus by Picasso as The Flight of Icarus by Picasso. (Hollier, “Le labyrinthe et la
pyramide,” p. 108.) It belongs in that rare category of misquotes that enhance our understanding
rather than diminish it, by drawing attention to the true nature of Bataille’s Icarus, a saber, that his
flight and his fall are one and the same.
27.
28.
29.

Georges Bataille, “Soleil pourri,” in Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 1, pag. 232.
Ibídem., pag. 231.
Georges Bataille, “Histoire de l’oeil,” in Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 1, pag. 20.

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118

OCTUBRE

of this story, which is that of the eye, so it is hardly surprising that her fall should
appear to be nothing more than an act. She falls to the ground in spasms in order
to create a moment of disruption. Her fall reads like a parody of another fall that
occurs earlier in the story, when the pious and naive Marcelle makes her appear-
ance and surprises Simone and the narrator in a compromising situation.
Marcelle’s fall, unlike Simone’s imitation, is authentic and unprovoked. It is a gen-
uine loss of balance, a failure of the ear.

Metaphorical Taxonomy

Roland Barthes speaks of two metaphorical chains that make up Bataille’s
Story of the Eye. Por un lado, there are the globular objects: the eye, the testi-
cle, and the Sun; en el otro, intertwined with these, there are the liquids: tears,
urine, and sunlight.30 If these individual metaphors are grouped together in what
could be classified as the globular and the liquid families, the taxonomy can also
be extended to two different metaphorical orders, both of which include their
own versions of the Sun. There is the order of the eye, to which both of Barthes’s
metaphorical chains belong, and there is the order of the ear. Each order is
defined by a different set of characteristics: The order of the eye relates to knowl-
edge and reason, and the order of the ear to balance and orientation.

The metaphorical order that unites the Sun and the ear is most explicit in
the essays on Van Gogh, but the Sun as a metaphor for a general principle of ori-
entation can also be found elsewhere. En el 1938 article “The Obelisk,” published
in Mesures, Bataille reproduces almost verbatim Nietzsche’s parable from The Gay
Science about the madman in the town square. He abruptly cuts the parable short,
sin embargo, erasing what is arguably the most compelling part of Nietzsche’s argu-
mento. For what is truly noteworthy is not the madman’s announcement that God is
muerto, but his sudden realization that he has spoken too soon and that the towns-
people surrounding him cannot yet perceive the absence of the Sun, but instead
continue to go about their business in its warm morning glow.

All of this is left out. De hecho, Bataille makes a claim that amounts to the oppo-
site. The disorientation that the madman speaks of already appears to be estab-
lished truth. Human beings, he writes, exist in a state of individuality that reduces
them to specks of dust, and what they fail to see is not the absence of a sacred cen-
ter but, on the contrary, its invisible presence, the gravitational pull of an ordering
principle that has not yet disappeared and that controls the orbital movements of
each individual particle. It is as if the townspeople in Nietzsche’s parable already
believed that they were hurtling through space, away from all Suns, plunging con-
tinuously in every direction. They are all in a sense madmen. Instead it is the town
square, where the announcement is made, that inherently contradicts their beliefs.
“The Place de la Concorde is where the death of God must be announced and

30.

Roland Barthes, “La métaphore de l’oeil,” Critique 195–196 (1963), pag. 772.

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The Other Sun

119

shouted out, precisely because the obelisk is its calmest negation. A turbulent and
empty human dust gravitates around it as far as the eye can see.”31 Just like
Proust’s steeples, the vertical directionality of the obelisk pulls the human imagi-
nation upwards “in [es] soaring elevation.” The false sense of order becomes a
false sense of disorder.

The madman’s announcement is negated by the sacred topography of the
town square, and Van Gogh’s self-mutilation does not eliminate the pull of the
sacred Sun. If anything, the Sun asserts its attraction with even more force, cadena-
ing out the artist’s works along its rays. But the severed ear is also the incident that
reveals the inaccessibility of the Sun. The intensified attraction is matched by an
equally strong repulsion. The result of the assault on the labyrinth-feather of the
ear is an interruption of the artist’s ascendant trajectory, preventing him from ever
reaching the gravitational core, including its outer limits, where the light of the
Sun meets the darkness of the labyrinth. The artist still desires the sacred, but is
forced to abandon the path that leads to it. It is reminiscent of Giorgio Agamben’s
description of acedia, an “anguished sadness and desperation” that results from
the sense of awe that the intense contemplation of God inspires.32 This in turn
brings about a withdrawal from the divine; “it is the perversion of a will that wants
the object, but not the way that leads to it, and which simultaneously desires and
bars the path to his or her own desire.”33 Not only is there no weakening or extinc-
tion of desire, pero, just like van Gogh’s sacred Sun, its intensity appears only to
increase. The attitude of the melancholic is a way to seize an unobtainable object
of desire by feigning a loss when in fact nothing has been lost at all, either because
the object was never in the possession of the melancholic to begin with or simply
because the object never existed.

Van Gogh’s self-mutilation symbolically and corporeally illustrates the with-
drawal from the object of desire that is the cause of melancholia. Through the vio-
lent destruction of the ear that is the locus of both disorientation and orientation,
of errance and escape, all forms of movement toward the sacred are rendered
impossible. If the mutilation of the eye is a rejection of the primacy of sight,
belonging to a paradigm of vision and blindness, where the true space of artistic
creation is the limit where one turns into the other, the mutilation of the ear abol-
ishes this limit altogether. The story of the ear thus reveals a different aspect of
Bataille’s thought, a metaphorical order based on refusal rather than experience.
It is an attempt to grasp the ungraspable by embracing it in its absence, akin to the
belief found in apophatic theology that the ineffable can only be approached
through silence.

Georges Bataille, “L’obélisque,” in Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 1, pag. 503.
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L. Martinez

31.
32.
(Mineápolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), pag. 5.
33.
Ibídem., pag. 6. Similarmente, Barthes points to the difference between loss of faith and disinvestment
in a note on acedia. See Roland Barthes, Comment vivre ensemble: Simulations romanesques de quelques
espaces quotidiens: Notes de cours et de séminaires au Collège de France, 1976–1977, ed. Claude Coste (París:
Seuil, 2002), pag. 53.

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Agamben juxtaposes his elaborations on melancholia with a reading of
Freud’s 1927 article on fetishism, observing that what unites the fetishist and the
melancholic is that they both succeed in surreptitiously appropriating the absent
or unobtainable object by blocking the path that would force them to accept the
impossibility of their desire, which is instead transferred to another object. El
threat of castration that weighs heavily on the fetishist is also, according to C. F. B.
Molinero, at the heart of Bataille’s account of van Gogh’s self-mutilation. It represents
a double bind, a desire to perfectly resemble the solar father who both demands
this resemblance and forbids it.34 But this is where the order of the ear comes into
play. It becomes, as it were, an Alexandrian cut that promptly does away with the
Gordian double bind of castration. Subordination is no longer the only alterna-
tivo. Instead the desire can be projected onto a different object, creating a new tra-
jectory that is no longer aimed at the Sun. The same function can be discerned in
religious fetishes. William Pietz distinguishes a number of “basic themes that recur
throughout the history of fetish discourse,” one of which is “a fixed power to
repeat an original event.”35 Part of the attractive power specific to the fetish object
is that it provides a material manifestation of an event that is unrepeatable and no
longer present. The fetish becomes a space of infinite repeatability, a space of
presence through absence.

What emerges, entonces, is an undercurrent in Bataille’s work, a silent mourning
whose symbolic manifestation is the ear as opposed to the eye. The current has its
origin in “Notre-Dame de Rheims,” a text that was conceived under the sign of the
madre, as Hollier notes, contrasting it against a later recollection of the same
events of August 1914—when Bataille left Reims together with his mother, leaving
his father and brother behind—this time recounted under the sign of the father
in The Little One, de 1943.36 The intimate connection between the enucleated
eye and the memory of the blind father is addressed by the author himself in
“Coincidences” at the end of Story of the Eye.37 Analogously, it could be said that the
silence of the severed ear recalls the silence enveloping “Notre-Dame de Rheims,"
the motherly cathedral for whom soldiers marched toward their deaths. El
labyrinthine cathedral, with its nave and its aisles, with its ambulatory and its apse,
towers over the city of Reims like the deaf ear of a giant.

34.
“To cross the limit is to undergo castration; not to do so is to remain subordinate.” (C. F. B.
Molinero, “Rotten Sun,” Art History 34, No. 2 [2011], pag. 408.) As it happens, one of the texts that Bataille
planned to write, but never did, would also have dealt with the castration complex. See Denis Hollier,
“About Some Books Which Bataille Did Not Write,” trans. Boris Belay, Parallax 3, No. 1 (1997), pag. 75. Él
is also worth noting that the sacred and the unconscious are brought together by Bataille as different
forms of the heterogenous. See Georges Bataille, “La structure psychologique du fascisme,” in Oeuvres
complètes, volumen. 1, páginas. 345–47. Needless to say, as the symbol of useless expenditure par excellence in
Bataille’s writings, the Sun—the object of the disavowed sacred desire—is also a manifestation of the
heterogenous.
35.
36.
37.

William Pietz, “The Problem of the Fetish, I,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 9 (1985), pag. 10.
Hollier, “La métaphore architecturale,” páginas. 48–52.
Bataille, “Histoire de l’oeil,” páginas. 73–78.

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The Other Sun

121

“You have heard [ouï-dire] of Reims, which was a great city on the plains of
Champagne.”38 We now know that the author’s first words were not about the eye
of the father in Story of the Eye, but about the ear of the mother, and we know that
with this ouï-dire, hearing was the first of the five senses to appear in his work. As if
to signal the inevitability of the shift of focus toward vision, the same text ends in
the domain of sight when the author declares that he “will never see a more splen-
did youth.”39 Yet hearing continues to be associated with the mother. It dominates
the first pages of My Mother, which take place in a world entirely made of sound,
rolling back and forth between silence and unintelligible speech, be it the father’s
muddled ramblings at the dinner table or the muffled voices of his parents’ fight-
ing that penetrate the bedroom wall. When sight is eventually restored, it is not
the mother who appears but the father.40

The ear is the focal point of a series of attributes of the mother: the fetishism
that Freud ascribes to the fear of castration, the melancholia that afflicted
Bataille’s own mother,41 the loss of balance and the fall of Marcelle, whose piety is
a rare glimpse of the mother in a story so overwhelmingly charged with the sym-
bolism of the father. The ear is also the receptacle of the mother tongue, como
Jacques Derrida notes when he sets up Nietzsche’s German, the living mother
tongue, against Latin, the dead language of the father. Whereas the father tongue
is no longer spoken or heard and can only be acquired by means of the eyes, el
mother tongue almost unnoticeably enters the mind through the ear.42

Hubris/Melancholia

“He walked onward,” Georg Büchner writes about Lenz in his eponymous
novella, “caring little one way or another, to him the path mattered not, now up,
now down. He felt no fatigue, except sometimes it annoyed him that he could not
walk on his head.”43 This is also the desire that drives Bataille: to wander aimlessly,
not caring about the direction of his path. Disorientation equals orientation. On
the horizontal plane, there is no escaping the labyrinth, and as it becomes the
prison of its creator and his son Icarus, their only possibility of escape is along the
eje vertical. As for Bataille, he shows no desire to leave the labyrinth at all. Él es
no Theseus; he does not seek to retrace his steps back to the exit. Nor is he inter-
ested in taking flight. When the Icarus myth appears in Bataille’s writings on art
and literature, its moral lesson has been subverted. It is an indictment of timidity
and restraint, pero, more importantly, it is a call to seek not the triumphant flight

Bataille, “Notre-Dame de Rheims," pag. 611.
38.
Ibídem., pag. 616.
39.
Georges Bataille, “Ma mère,” in Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 4 (París: Gallimard, 1971), pag. 180.
40.
See Michel Surya, Georges Bataille, la mort à l’œuvre (París: Gallimard, 1992), pag. 21.
41.
42.
This distinction can be found in Otobiographies, which fittingly revolves around the two main
symbols of the ear and the Sun, focusing mainly on Nietzsche’s Ecce Homo, which the philosopher, en
Derrida’s words, wrote in “the noontime of life,” when the Sun is at its highest point. Like Bataille,
Nietzsche also emphasizes the cohabitation in his own persona of the solar rise and fall.
43.

Georg Büchner, Lenz, trans. Richard Sieburth (Nueva York: Archipelago Books, 2004), pag. 3.

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122

OCTUBRE

but the fall that inevitably follows. Against a naive belief in the existence of purity
and truth, he presents the ambiguity and duality of the Cretan Sun.

When Bataille denounces André Breton’s Icarian disposition in the polemi-
cal essay “The ‘Old Mole’ and the Prefix Sur in the Words Surhomme and Surrealist,"
Icarus lends himself to this insult only insofar as he incarnates an escapist sense of
superiority more in line with the traditional reading of the myth. Yet it is clear that
this tragic figure is not Bataille’s Icarus. Later in the essay, he returns to an Icarus
OMS, like Picasso in “Rotten Sun,” secretly desires the punishment more than the
deed, a mirror image of the mythological character.44 Icarus’s flight only makes
sense to Bataille if the vectors of desire are reversed, and Breton’s surrealism is
objectionable precisely because this is not the case. Against the moral interpreta-
tion of the myth, Bataille paints a portrait of Icarus as a melancholic fetishist.45
Contrary to his mythological namesake, this melancholy Icarus knows that the Sun
is unobtainable and no longer aspires to reach it. His solar fetish is a desire to be
violently struck down.

The emphasis on errance is then not the only reason to turn to Büchner’s
Lenz. Paul Celan remarks in his speech upon receiving the Georg Büchner Prize
that “whoever walks on his head has heaven as an abyss beneath him.”46 And what
is Bataille’s reading of the myth if not a representation of Icarus on his head?
What was above him is now below him. Instead of soaring into the heavens, sup-
ported by feathers and wax, this Icarus falls into the sky, precipitating toward an
unobtainable Sun that is now at the bottom of an abyss, struggling to make his way
back up to the ground.47

As the desire of the event is reversed and the morality of the Icarus myth is
subvertido, the flight is also detached from the notion of hubris. Walter Benjamin
notes the incompatibility of melancholia and hubris in The Origin of German Tragic
Drama, as he explores a turn toward melancholia and mourning that is concurrent
with a transition between two philosophical paradigms, embodied by two different
dramatic forms: the ancient Greek tragedy and the German Trauerspiel. The for-
mer is governed by a necessity of defiance that reveals itself in the agonistic struc-
ture of the play. Faced with the imminence of his death, the hero pleads his case,

Georges Bataille, “La ‘vieille taupe’ et le préfixe sur dans les mots surhomme et surréaliste,” in

44.
Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 2, pag. 100.
45.
The kinship between Icarus and the melancholic can also be sensed in the following words
by Jean Starobinski: “A melancholic is one who, with more ease than others, rises to the highest
thoughts; but if the black bile, despite its intensity, is consumed and cools down, it becomes glacial and
is converted, in the words of Baudelaire, into ‘black poison.’” (Jean Starobinski, La mélancolie au miroir:
Trois lectures de Baudelaire [París: Julliard, 1989], pag. 47.)
46.
Selected Poems and Prose of Paul Celan, trans. John Felstiner (Nueva York: W.. W.. norton, 2001), pag. 407.
47.
The reversal of the Icarus myth in Bataille’s work is also noted by Jonathan Strauss. A pesar de
not addressed directly, his argument supports the analogy between Bataille’s Icarus and the concept of
acedia as examined by Agamben. Just like the medieval monks, whose affliction arises out of their con-
templation of the divine, Bataille’s sense of abjection is, according to Strauss, directly related to the
overwhelming splendor of the sky. (Jonathan Strauss, “The Inverted Icarus,” Yale French Studies 78
[1990], pag. 121.)

Paul Celan, “The Meridian: Speech on the Occasion of the Award of the Georg Büchner Prize,"

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The Other Sun

123

all while recognizing that death is already inherent in his person. This is the con-
text in which Benjamin places hubris. “Only antiquity could know tragic hubris,” he
writes, “which pays for the right to be silent with the hero’s life.”48 More specifical-
ly, the person who pays this price is Socrates, who announces the departure from
the tragic in the moment of his death by renouncing the power of logos—funda-
mental to the tragic drama—and accepting his death sentence with silent equa-
nimity. In tragic terms Socrates’s resignation can only be understood as an
instance of hubris, a scornful refusal to justify himself before the gods. But in this
very same act Benjamin sees the inauguration of a post-tragic paradigm of mourn-
ing where terms like hubris have lost all meaning. The same silence that would be
framed as tragic hubris is reinterpreted as an expression of melancholia.

The tragic hero resists death because he knows that his life “unfolds from
death, which is not its end but its form.”49 Socrates, por otro lado, perceives
death as something that he must endure but that remains alien to him. His resig-
nation is therefore not absolute, but limited to the temporal world, and it implies
a belief in a continued immortal existence. The new ideal that he represents
cleaves more closely to the self-sacrificial forbearance that would later become a
cornerstone of Christian virtue than to the belligerence of the tragic hero. A diferencia de
the Christian martyr, sin embargo, the immortality that awaits Socrates is not in a heav-
enly afterlife but in the dissemination of his work, and for his work to survive it has
to be written down. The promise of immortality that allows the regime of melan-
cholia to supersede the tragic is thus already predicated on the impossibility of
real survival, announcing the necessity to abandon speech in favor of writing.
Survival can only take place in the substitute, the pharmakon; it relies on the infi-
nite repeatability of the text as fetish. And whereas the Greek drama is presented
as a singular “decisive cosmic achievement,” the German Trauerspiel relies precisely
on the fetishistic idea of infinite reiteration.50

Circumventing the tragic agon also means skirting the crucial moment of rit-
ualized passing from the realm of the living to that of the dead, placing the martyr
both in life and in the afterlife but never at the limit between them. It is the same
silence that Plotinus advocates as the only means to approach what resists lan-
guage, the same resignation that Agamben places at the origin of acedia. They all
denounce the failure of logos, the inability of speech and reason to grasp the inef-
fable and the futility of engaging in the back-and-forth of dialogue. Silence and
resignation form the melancholy unit of disengagement and immobility that shuns
the moment of traversing the limit. It might seem strange to place Bataille in this
tradition of disregard for transgression, but as Michel Foucault reminds us, el
transgression that is of interest to Bataille does not rely on an opposition of
terms.51 It is not a violent triumph over the limitations of our being; it is not even a

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48.
1998), pag. 115. Emphasis in translation.
49.
50.
51.

Ibídem., pag. 114.
Ibídem., pag. 119.
Michel Foucault, “Préface à la transgression,” Critique 195–196 (1963), pag. 756.

124

challenge to these limits. En efecto, Bataille develops his concept of transgression
against the idea of dialectical negation and goes out of his way to point to the
interdependence of the limit and its transgression. “Transgression is not a nega-
tion of the taboo,” he affirms, “but rather exceeds it and completes it.”52 The dis-
missal of logos that is the foundation of Bataille’s search for non-knowledge is at
the heart of the only form of transgression he acknowledges, which should be
understood in the context of “a negative theology, founded on mystical experi-
ence,” or in other words an adherence to the via negativa that ultimately reveals
the absence of the object of desire.53

Oscillations

It is fitting that this melancholy transgression should be represented by the
ear. Pascal Quignard writes in The Hatred of Music that “ears have no eyelids,” and
the immediacy and inevitability of sound remain unequaled in the visual
domain.54 We can close our eyes or avert our gaze, but we are exposed to sound
like no other sensory stimulus. Perhaps this is also why, as Jean-Luc Nancy points
afuera, the auditory is traditionally associated with esoteric and mystic knowledge,
while vision symbolizes clarity and rational thought.55 It represents the inescapabil-
ity of our primordial fears. Sound passes through obstacles in a way that light does
no. This is why, in My Mother, Pierre, who is hiding in his room after dinner, poder
hear his parents’ fighting, although they are hidden from sight. The sound inex-
orably penetrates, first the walls of the room, then the tympanum of his ears. But it
is a penetration without penetration. The immediacy of sound is illusory. Cuando
our eyes are open they are like wide-open vessels into which light is constantly
poured. The ears, por otro lado, receive sound only through the mediation
of the eardrum. “Listening means being at the same time both outside and inside.”56
Hearing is therefore the sense of melancholia par excellence. Vision ruptures
the limit between our being and the world as light punctures the eye and penetrates
our body through the pupil. Hearing, sin embargo, is a transgression of the limit without
rupture. The tympanum, “this strange limit, which is not a limit,”57 remains whole

Georges Bataille, “L’érotisme,” in Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 10 (París: Gallimard, 1987), pag. 66.
52.
Ibídem., pag. 28.
53.
54.
Pascal Quignard, La haine de la musique (París: Calmann-Lévy, 1996), pag. 118. Esta observación
is also made by Adorno in Introduction to the Sociology of Music, contrasting the passivity of hearing
against the necessary volition of sight. The notion of an entirely passive ear is rejected by Roland
Barthes in “Écoute” and by Peter Szendy, who writes that “just because the ear has no eyelids, it is not
reduced to simple exposure, to a mere panic opening before everything that happens to it.” (Peter
Szendy, Sur écoute: Esthétique de l’espionnage [París: Minuit, 2007], pag. 48.) The fact that listening can also
take the form of an activity does not, sin embargo, change the reversal of mediacy and immediacy that
remains a fundamental difference between the eye and the ear.
Jean-Luc Nancy, “Être à l’écoute,” in L’écoute, ed. Peter Szendy (París: Harmattan, 2000), pag. 276.
55.
56.
Ibídem., pag. 287. Despite arguing against Adorno’s passivity of hearing, Szendy comes close to
this ambiguity of being outside and inside at once when he affirms with Barthes that in our day, it is no
longer possible to clearly distinguish, in the act of hearing, between the one who speaks and the one
who listens. (Szendy, Sur écoute, pag. 51.)
57.

Jacques Derrida, “Tympan,” in Marges de la philosophie (París: Minuit, 1972), pag. IX.

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The Other Sun

125

and merely vibrates at the frequency of the transgression, allowing the sound to exist
both outside and inside. A perforated eardrum does not transmit sound, just like a
taboo that is abolished does not bring us closer to the sacred sphere that it was set up
to protect. Asimismo, the metaphorical order of the ear does not seek to pierce
through the limit, to perforate the ear, but rather to be simultaneously within and
sin, to reach the Sun by giving up the moment of transgression, to transcend the
limits of being by affirming the impossibility of doing so.

Bataille’s use of the Icarus myth hinges on a reversal of perspectives similar
to Benjamin’s reading of the death of Socrates. In addition to the reversal he sig-
nals in “Rotten Sun,” there is a departure from the Romantic interpretation of the
myth, which cultivated a narcissism of persecution and suffering by portraying the
artist as a genius rising above the crowd and being struck down, “the man chosen
and the man fated to suffer.”58 Romantic literature became a battleground for two
archetypal representations of the artist—the languorous and passive hero of the
eighteenth century, incapacitated by mal du siècle, and his opposite, the passionate
hero who sought to impose his personality on the world—as illustrated by
Rastignac’s having to “choose between the satanic revolt of Vautrin and the
Christlike resignation of old Goriot.”59 Bataille’s Icarus—like Benjamin’s
Socrates—embodies both types in one single event that can interchangeably be
described as one or the other, depending on the vantage point of the observer.
Satanic revolt equals Christlike resignation. The saturnine shades of melancholia
are home to the exuberance of saturnalian revelries. Like Baudelaire’s “Saturnine
libro,” Bataille’s work is at once both “orgiastic and melancholic.”60 Icarus’s flight
becomes his fall, but when he surges back toward the Earth, the solar desire pro-
jected onto the ground provokes a sudden eruption of lava, causing it to undulate
“like a rapid sea.”61 The Earth is now the unreachable Sun; the fetish is the origi-
nal object of desire. Suspended between two Suns, Icarus neither flies nor falls.

The fetish takes the place of the sacred object of desire, not in the incom-
plete sense scorned by Kant, but by becoming its origin.62 It was always more origi-
nal than the sacred yearning itself. As Sarah Kofman notes, Freud’s fetish serves as
a substitute for nothing more than an earlier substitute, hiding nothing more than
an absence. Fetishism is not so much about substitution as it is about oscillation
“between a gesture mastering the oscillation and a gesture that rattles and solicits
all oppositions, carrying with it in its drift, entre otros, the opposition of
fetish/non-fetish, substitute/thing itself, masculine/feminine.”63

The ear is always about oscillation. Before mutilation, the tympanum vibrates

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Maurice Z. Shroder, Icarus: The Image of the Artist in French Romanticism (Cambridge, Masa.:

Ibídem., pag. 39.
Charles Baudelaire, “Épigraphe pour un livre condamné,” in Oeuvres complètes, volumen. 1 (París:

58.
Prensa de la Universidad de Harvard, 1961), pag. 31.
59.
60.
Gallimard, 1975), pag. 137.
61.
62.
Goldthwait (berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), pag. 111.
63.
de Cerisy, 23 juillet–2 août 1980 (París: Galilée, 1981), pag. 100.

Bataille, “Van Gogh Prométhée," pag. 499.
See Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T.

Sarah Kofman, “Ça cloche,” in Les fins de l’homme: À partir du travail de Jacques Derrida: Colloque

126

OCTUBRE

and the acoustic oscillation allows the inside to become the outside, the labyrinth
to become the feather. As an object of self-mutilation, the ear stands for the
destruction of both the labyrinth and the feather, suspending Icarus in an endless
oscillation between the Sun and the ground, which becomes another Sun. In a
sense, the act of mutilation therefore accomplishes nothing. There is no transfor-
mation and no transgression. Like the eardrum itself, the act merely reproduces
and amplifies an oscillation that was already present. It only refers back to itself.
This is why Bataille writes that there is no reason to separate the severed ear from
Prometheus’s liver. Both events are eminently self-referential and self-enclosed. Él
is not a case of “casting out of oneself a part of the self.”64 And this is probably why
Bataille, for whom sacrifice at the time holds a fascination beyond measure, seems
reluctant to accept the importance of a severed ear unless it can be brought back
to the notion of ocular enucleation. What Bataille senses, but is unable to articu-
late, is that the severed ear is not a sacrificial gesture, because there is no rupture
of the self. In this sense the ear does not only evoke the inescapability of the gravi-
tational force of the sacred but also paradoxically prefigures the impossibility of
sacrifice that Nancy ascribes to the absence of a sacred outside to our finite being.
Bataille needs to be corrected, Nancy writes, “withdrawn from the slightest tenden-
cy towards sacrifice.”65 It should be clear by now that this correction begins with
the melancholia that surrounds the sacred. It begins with the fetishistic oscillation
that stems from the implicit admission that the sacred is both all too present and
always already absent. The correction begins with an attunement as the tympanum
harmonizes with the vibrations of the outside, a penetration without penetration
that reflects what Nancy elsewhere calls “the sacred stripped of the sacred.”66

Nancy also writes that Bataille never advocates the return of the sacred. Pero
this is because the sacred never disappeared, and because it was never there, justo
like Bataille’s first stumbling steps as an author, the forever absent panegyric to
Notre-Dame de Reims, whose presence nevertheless persists in the strain of melan-
cholia that runs through his work. This is also why Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche’s
parable can state the opposite as if it were the same. The sacred is absent to the
townspeople who believe that it is present and it is present to those who believe
that it is absent. The same is true for the notion of the sacred in Bataille’s work. Its
presence is constantly reaffirmed by the author himself but always in another
form—as violence, eroticism, arte, comunidad. It is never more than a word that no
longer denotes the sacred itself, a word that, as Maurice Blanchot writes, “only
serves to hide the fact that it cannot say anything.”67 This is the gravitational force
of the sacred, its orienting principle. This is the profound melancholia that attach-
es to the idea of the sacred: not that it should or should not be mourned, not that
we are soaring into the Sun or plunging continuously through space, but that we
are capable of neither, only of suspended oscillation.

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64.
65.
(1991), pag. 36.
66.
67.

Bataille, “La mutilation sacrificielle et l’oreille coupée de Vincent Van Gogh," pag. 266.
Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Unsacrificeable,” trans. Richard Livingston, Yale French Studies 79

Jean-Luc Nancy, La communauté désœuvrée (París: Christian Bourgois, 1986), pag. 86.
Maurice Blanchot, “Le grand refus,” in L’entretien infini (París: Gallimard, 1969), pag. 51.
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