NOTES
- A preliminary version of this paper was given at a conference on “The Ethics and Aesthetics of Torture: Contextualizing China”, held at the University of Toronto in March 2001. I thank Jérôme Bourgon, R. Bin Wong, Timothy Brook, Nancy Park, Marc Gotlieb, Cheh Chieh-jen, and Joyce Liu for their many ideas, and Claire Margat for sharing her knowledge of Bataille's sources. Christine Barthe of the Musée de l'Homme, Paris, was helpful in acquiring photographs; and I thank Georges Didi-Huberman for help finding sources. I ambushed audiences at the Royal College of Art and the University of Wisconsin, Madison, with this material, and I thank them for their very interesting responses. Special thanks to Kathryn Stockton for comments I am still pondering.
- This argument is made in my book The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing (New York: Harcourt and Brace, 1996).
- One book will be co-edited by Timothy Brook and Jérôme Bourgon; a second will be the product of a conference to be held at the University College Cork, Ireland, 22–24 April, 2005; an exhibition will follow, also in Cork, in 2006. For information about the conference see http://www.imagehistory.org. For information on the research group, which includes the author, see http://turandot.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/.
- Robert Heindl, Meine Reise nach den Straflwlonien (Berlin: Ullstein, 1913). Heindl republished the photographs in an essay, “Strafrechtstheorie und Praxis”, Jahrbuch der Charaktemlogie (1) 1924: 89–152, and again in his book, Der Berufsverbrecher (Berlin: Pan-Verlag R. Heise, 1926). I will be quoting from the third edition (1927). Heindl did not take the pictures, and apparently falsified his experiences of lingchi (as opposed to his accounts of witnessing decapitations); but that genealogy does not pertain to the present argument. My own book The Object Stares Back, 111–4, reproduces the photographs from Heindl's 1924 essay.
- Louis Carpeaux, Pékin qui s'en va (Paris: Maloine, 1913) 188–9; Georges Dumas, Nouveau traité de psychologie 2 (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1932) 283–6. Further references will be abbreviated LC, GD respectively. Jérôme Bourgon points out to me that Bataille makes this claim in Les Larmes d'Éros, and it is uncorroborated. For the purposes of the present argument, what matters is that Bataille knew of the photographs for a long time; at least since he saw Dumas's Nouveau traité de psychologie in the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1936.
- Bataille mis-cites the edition: he cites the 1923 edition of the Traité de psychologie, but that edition does not have the photographs in question. Georges Bataille, Les Larmes; d'Éros (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 2000 [1961]) 120; Georges Bataille, The Tears of Ems, trans. Peter Connor (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989) 204–5. Henceforth abbreviated LE, TE respectively.
- Like Carpeaux's pictures, Dumas's are heavily retouched; I reproduce the sequence from photographs in the collection of the Musée de l'Homme (reproduced here), which are apparently unretouched and also show more peripheral details than Dumas's or Bataille's. Bataille number 3 (as reproduced here from the Musée de l'Homme) is from the same negative as the photograph given to Bataille by Borel.
- See http://www.museeniepce.com/execution_chinoise/.
- In particular there are arguments to be made about the detailed look of the pictures, and the quality of attention required to take them in. I am preparing that material for a book in response to Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucida. Other studies on Bataille's sources, on the politics and ethics of the images (especially in light of Giorgio Agamben's claims), and on the art-historical impact of surrealist theories in Mesoamerican studies will be forthcoming (see n. 3).
- Pierre Alféri and Olivier Cadiot, “Bataille en relief”, 408, cited, in Connor, Georges Bataille, and the Mysticism of Sin, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, c. 2000) 161.
- Claire Margat, personal communication, 2001. Margat's Esthétique de l'horreur is forthcoming (Paris: Éditions Desjonquères, 2001). See further her “La rencontre du dieu Polemos”, review of Bataille, L'Apprenti Sorvier, in Critique 636 (May 2000) 426–39.
- Ford lists voluptuary punishments (including Sade's), satiric and polemical punishments (including Mirbeau's), and the denial of torture itself (Roussel's bloodless, uncathected punishments). Mark Ford, Raymond Roussel and the Republic of Dreams (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000) 111–12.
- Connor, Georges Bataille, 162.
- David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (London: Enitharmon, 2001 [1935]); Herbert Read (ed.), Surrealism (New York: Praeger, 1971 [1936]).
- In this context a reasonable way of formulating the opposition is to set surrealism's emphasis on transgression against Greenberg's definition of modernism as the “intensification… of [a] self-critical tendency that began with the philosopher Kant”. Modernism, in that formula, is a practice whose “essence” is its capacity to “criticise itself. The transgressive moment, however it is conceived, is fundamentally opposed to the self-interrogation of the pseudo-Kantian critique. See Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting” (1960), in John O'Brian (ed.), Clement Greenberg: The Collected Essays and Criticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995) 4, 85.
- Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss, Formless: A User's Guide (New York: Zone Books, 1997), originally published as l'Informe: mode d'emploi (Paris: Éditions du Centre Pompidou, 1996). A pertinent interview with the authors is posted on the Internet at www.phreebyrd.com/~sisyphus/bataille/ssedofsky.html.
- Bois and Krauss, Formless, 15.
- ibid., 5.
- ibid., 79.
- Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993) 190. This use of Lyotard is discussed in my On Pictures, And the Words that Fail Them (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) 103–10, 255–56.
- Edited by Paul Hegarty, University College Cork, Ireland.
- Georges Didi-Huberman, “L'Immagine Aperta”, Jacqueline Risset (ed.), Georges Bataille: Il Politico e il Sacro (Naples: Liguori, 1987) 167–88, especially p. 169 citing Hollier. I thank Didi-Huberman for bringing this to my attention.
- ibid., 167.
- ibid., 180–81.
- ibid., 182.
- ibid.; Le Ressemblance informe ou le gai savoir visuel selon Georges bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995). Didi-Huberman is discussed in Bois and Krauss, Formless, 69–72 and 79–81. The title of Didi-Huberman's book is given in two incorrect versions, p. 79 and p. 287 n. 38.
- ibid., 80. The context of the first quotation is as follows (Yve-Alain Bois, the named author of the section “Figure”, quoting Didi-Huberman): “‘The informe would thus specify a certain power that forms have to deform themselves constantly, to pass quickly from the like to the unlike’, Didi-Huberman writes; and in so doing the informe is thus neatly mapped onto the idea of deformation. Accordingly, the slightest alteration to the human anatomy, in a painting for example, would be said to participate in the formless—which comes down to saying that modern figurative art, in its quasi-totality, would be swept up into such a definition. This also implies that the term informe would cover so enlarged a realm as to no longer have any bite.”
- Bataille, Les Larmes d'Éros (Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1971) 122.
- Personal communication, February 2001. Roth pointed out that many of the visitors had never been in an art gallery or a museum. The Warhol Museum made a decision—misguided, I think—not to provide any textual guidance for viewers who came to see the lynching show and then found themselves, unexpectedly, in a setting where a certain disaffection about media and politics, and a certain pictorial sophistication, were taken for granted. When I visited (October 2001) that gap was filled in some measure by a group in the lobby that was asking visitors to fill out a survey describing their experience.
- The book, James Allen (ed.), Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America (Santa Fe NM: Twin Palms, 2000), is not a good guide to the appearance of the originals. The original photographs vary from wallet-sized pictures to mantel-sized prints with elaborate frames. Some are stained, some torn, many written on. The book adjusts their many unexpected formats to fit its uniform design. It is far more absorbing to look at the original images than to flip through the book or, in my experience, to peruse Warhol's uniformly large silk-screens.
- T. J. Clark, Farewell lo an idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (New Haven CT: Yale University Press, 1999) 307.
- Heindl describes the bargaining he witnessed at a beheading, where the condemned man offered to pay the executioner the equivalent of a dollar to make sure his head didn't come completely off. Then, when the executioner agreed, he tried to get a better deal. “Seventy-five cents? Fifty cents?” (“Spricht er ihnen Trost zu? Nein, er feilscht. Für I Dollar Mex. erklärt er sich bereit, den Kopf nicht ganz vom Hals zu trennen, was für den Totenkult von groβer Beteutung ist. Für 75 Cent.—Für 50 Cent—.”) Heindl, “Strafrechtstheorie”, 137.
- Bois and Krauss, Formless, 15.
- On Crewdson, see Jasmine Benyamin, “‘Stuff’: Gregory Crewdson's Gaze Upon the Domestic Sublime”, Thresholds 23 (2001): 64–67; On Gober, see Robert Haywood, “Robert Gober's Virgin and Drain”, Ibid., 36–43. Both taken, for purposes of illustrating the theme's ubiquity, from the same journal.
- Denis Hollier, Against Architecture and the Writings of Georges Bataille trans. Betsy Wing (MIT Press: Cambridge MA., London, England, 1989) 84.