This is our audiobook of Georges Bataille’s The Story Of The Eye. We have made it available in full, as narrated by Griffin S.
The audiobook was mastered by Keenan Ketzner. To both Griffin S. and Keenan Ketzner, I give my strongest and most sincere thank-you. I will forever be grateful to them for honoring this piece of literary history, and being the first to preserve it as an audiobook. We offer this to you, the listener, for free.
Also, a great thank-you to Ansgar Allen for allowing our usage of a portion of his essay regarding the reading of Georges Bataille, to bolster this audiobook’s existence. To all who read, listen, and cherish the fiction of the writer, we offer nothing but praise and a truly humbled honor, to you.
We recommend listening to this with headphones, quietly with the volume turned down low.
Ansgar Allen
The death of thought: Reading Bataille in the ruins of the university”, 2023
For Bataille, language is also a system of concealment that works to soothe over unbearable truths, such as the persistence of violence in all domains, including the territory of the ‘civilised’. Civilised speech rests upon the assumption that violence has been excluded from its operations. This creates a pact of sorts, but it is one that perpetuates a lie (Bolin, 2020). The same arguably applies to academic writing, viewed as a form of extended discourse governed by expectations of civility. The apparent calm of civilized speech in general, and the virtue of academic exchange in particular (viewed as necessary to the pursuit of truth, but which, as many academics will know, is only a cover for substantial disagreement, if not mutual enmity), is another self-regarding idea that the civilized seem bound to perpetuate.
Language as the medium of academic exchange is suspect to Bataille in another respect too; it prevents problems from taking form in their true abysmal proportion, by chopping them up. In his conclusion to Eroticism, Bataille (2002) writes: “The time comes when we have to take hold of conceptual data as a whole, the ideas upon which our existence hinges in this world” (274). This statement comes toward the end of a fairly long book which has operated by subdividing its object of enquiry and so has functioned by failing to take hold of its problem ‘as a whole’. Bataille is not immune to the irony. This language to which he refers was an avoidable necessity, it facilitated his analysis, even if it also persistently haltered it. “This body of thought would clearly not be available to us if language had not made it explicit” (274), he goes on. And then comes a passage worth quoting at length, since it describes Bataille’s predicament well, but even more tellingly describes that of academia more generally.
But if language is to formulate it, this can take place only in successive phases worked out in the dimension of time. We can never hope to attain a global view in one single supreme instant; language chops it into its component parts and connects them up into a coherent explanation. The analytic presentation makes it impossible for the successive stages to coalesce… language scatters the totality of all that touches us most closely even while it arranges it in order. Through language we can never grasp what matters to us, for it eludes us in the form of interdependent propositions, and no central whole to which each of these can be referred ever appears… (274)
Share this post