#ecce monstrum

[majestativa]

Pain shaped my character.

GEORGES BATAILLE — cited in Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form [Ed. Jeremy Biles], (2007)

[majestativa]

Your passion decomposes you scrupulously.

HANS BELLMER — cited in Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form [Ed. Jeremy Biles], (2007)

[majestativa]

For Bataille, the uncanny aspect of the labyrinth is even more pronounced, and in some regards it directly contradicts Eliade’s understanding of the sacred, even while insisting on that concept’s profoundly ambivalent nature. For Eliade, sacred rites and sacred space lift the religious person out of the world of time and change and into a realm of eternity structured by timeless paradigms and populated by unchanging archetypes. For Bataille, on the contrary, the sacred releases excessive forces that open one to a dangerous temporal flow in a terrified and exhilarated experience of ‘‘horror-spreading time.’’

It is thus the sinister, or left-hand, aspect of the labyrinth that interests Bataille—the aspect of the labyrinth that presents danger, and emphasizes its close alliance with death.

JEREMY BILES — Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, (2007)

[majestativa]

For Bataille and for Bellmer, Eros, like the acéphale, is neither a man nor a god, but a monster. And this sacred monstrosity provokes a desire to see, even to the point of death. The object of such a blinding vision is beheld and thereby experienced, simultaneously or successively, as horror and ecstasy. And whether they come in sobs or in laughter, the tears uttered from the wounds we willingly suffer are also the tears of Eros.

JEREMY BILES — Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, (2007)

[majestativa]

It should be recalled that for Bataille, a specter or ghost is not the equivalent of the fully decomposed corpse, but is conceived in the register of decay. In other words, the specter is the uncanny embodiment of fleshly corruption, [...] an irrepressible memento mori. And if Weil is Bataille’s spectral friend, it is only as she returns, like a daimonic intercessor, as the reality of bodily decay and death, and thus the nullification of illusion.

Decay and death are indeed central to Weil’s concept of incarnation, a concept that paradoxically is no less spectral in nature than Bataille’s fantasy of Lazare. Weil promotes what might be called a practice of incarnation, a practice that has as its goal the eradication of illusion. Illusion, according to Weil, is a kind of error in perception; it is the mistaking of what is merely imagined for reality itself. The ‘‘test of what is real,’’ on the other hand, is that ‘‘it is hard and rough’’—that it is painful, in body and soul. ‘‘What is pleasant,’’ says Weil, ‘‘belongs to dreams.’’ To overcome the evasions of dream and illusion, Weil says that ‘‘we must become incarnate. . . . Man has to perform an act of incarnation, for he is disembodied by his imagination.’’

JEREMY BILES — Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, (2007)

[majestativa]

The uncanny, or Unheimlich, is, according to Freud’s famous formulation, ‘‘that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar. What is ‘‘long familiar,’’ or heimlich, through a process of repression, ‘‘develops in the direction of ambivalence, until it finally coincides with its opposite, unheimlich. Like the word sacer, which contains the antithetical meanings ‘‘high’’ and ‘‘low’’ or ‘‘holy’’ and ‘‘damned,’’ the uncanny means both itself and its opposite; it is simultaneously itself and its other. The contradiction encapsulated by the concept of the uncanny thus partakes of the ambivalence of the sacred that Eliade revisits throughout his scholarly oeuvre. The sacred, says Eliade, both ‘‘attracts and repels, it is useful and dangerous, brings death as well as immortality.’’ This uncanniness of the sacred extends to the structure of the labyrinth, the ‘‘negative qualities (inaccessible, dangerous, guarded by monsters and so on)’’ that ‘‘can certainly be explained by the ‘terrible’ aspect of the sacred . . . and vice versa.’’ This ambivalence thus underwrites the ‘‘complex and contradictory morphology’’ of the labyrinth, the domain of death through which heroic initiates and those on mystical quests must pass.

JEREMY BILES — Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, (2007)

[majestativa]

Rage is a desire to experience the laceration, the sacrificial wounding indicative of a move from the profane to the sacred.

JEREMY BILES — Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, (2007)

[majestativa]

... writing and wounding, ink and blood.

JEREMY BILES — Ecce Monstrum: Georges Bataille and the Sacrifice of Form, (2007)