The Pineal Eye
Georges Bataille
Georges Bataille
It betrays, at the same time. through morbid reflexes. a bloody erection and a demanding thirst for indecency and cri- minal debauchery.
For that reason I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scarulal and that my passions are only expressed by the Jesuve.
The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes, which serve as its anus. Although this globe eats nothing, it often violently ejects the contents of its entrails.
These contents shoot out with a racket, and fall back, stream- ing down.
-The Solar Anus
I. Scientific Anthropology and Mythical Anthropology
To the extent that a description of human life that goes back to the origins tries to represent what the fonnless universe has accomplished in producing man rather than something else, how it has been led to this useless production and by what means it made this creature something different from all the rest-to: this extent it is necessary to abandon scientific anthropology, which is reduced to a babbling even more senile than puerile, reduced to giving answers that tend to make the questions put to it seem ludicrous, whereas these answers alone are miserably so when confronted with the inevitable and demanding brutality of an interrogation taking upon itself the very meaning of the life that this anthro- pology supposedly aims to describe.
But in the first phase, at least, philosophical speculation is rejected with no less impatience than the impotent theories of prehistory when this speculation, . obeying the dictates of a guilty conscience, almost always kills itself or timidly . prostrates itself before science. For even if this inhuman prostration can still be denounced, even if it is still possible for man to contrast his own cruelty and· madness with a necessity that is crushing him, nothing of what is known of the means proper to philosophical investigation can inspire in him any confidence; philosophy has been, up to this point, as much as science, an expression of hu- man subordination, and when man seeks to represent himself, no longer as a moment of a homogeneous process-of a necessary and pitiful process-but as a new laceration within a lacerated nature, it is no longer the leveling phrase- ology coming to him from the understanding that can help him: he can no longer recognize himself in the degrading chains of logic, but he recognizes himself, instead-not only with rage but in an ecstatic torment-in the virulence of his own phantasms.
Nevertheless, the introduction of a lawless intellectual series into the world of legitimate thought defines itself at the outset as the most arduous and auda- cious operation. And it is evident that if it were not practiced without equivoca- tion, with a resolution and a rigor rarely attained in other cases, it would be the most vain operation. Outside of a certain inaccessibility to fear-it is a question here essentially of undergoing, without being overwhelmed, the attraction of the most repulsive objects-two conditions thrust themselves on anyone whose object is to invest understanding with a content that will remain foreign to it, and they do so not only in a clear and distinct way, but as imperative prescriptions.
