User:Tancre/RW&RM/The Metaphor of the Eye

The Metaphor of the Eye

• Author: Roland Barthes
• Publisher and date: "En hommage a Georges Bataille", in Critique, nos. 195-6, August-September 1963.

Abstract

In this critical essay of 'Story of the eye' by George Bataille, Barthes tries to shape the novelty of this narrative to reveal the secrets behind the ambiguous experience of this text. Starting from defining the typology of this piece of literature and analysing the basic structure in accordance with a post-structuralist approach, Barthes moves to a reflection on crossing metaphors, originally developed by the Surrealist movement, to a comparison with modern experience of sexuality posited by De Sade and taken to its extreme by Bataille as to reveal the secret of literature itself.

Synopsis

Barthes starts his crytical essay pointing out how this narrative differs from the novel, where the imagination that creates it is based on the probability of the events, all things considered. On the other hand 'Story of the eye' can be seen as a poem because the imagination that triggers the whole narrative is improbable, never happen under certain circumstances, precise exploration of individual elements against a chance of combinations. from considering the 'Story of the eye' as a poem due to the immagination behind it, an improbable one, opposite to the probable of the novel, precise exploration of individual elements against chance of combinaitons.
Its originality has to be also seen in how Bataille innovates the typology of a narrative focusing on the story of an object, rather than a subject, characterized in romantic literature by the hand by hand passage of the object through different owners. Thanks to the complex game of metaphors and antynomies, Bataille introduces the migration of the main character, through different 'avatars' letting the object acquires new forms and usages. Those migarations creates a double chain of significations based on two directive metaphores, the globular one, settled in the eye-egg relation, and the liquid one as complementary to the first. Despite the sexual thematic of the story, there isn't a proper generative term, even if Bataille deciphered the poem itself by giving in the end the bibliographical source of his metaphor (eye/father - ocular/genital). The indeterminacy of metaphorical order reproduces the randomness of associative fields and moves everything on the surface revealing the absence of a deep meaning and therefore the impossibility of interpretation. What remains is a signification without a signified, or where everything signified, and a text where only formal criticism is possible.
Using the new formulation of Saussure's linguistics, Barthes recognises this virtualisation of the metaphorical signs in the paradigm of the syntagmatic extension through contiguity, allowing to create a flow of matter where the substances of the virtual signs can be enshrined. In parallel, the freshness of the technique is based on a continuous interchange of those two chains of significations making a cross of the syntagmas. This approach reflects the law of the surrealist image formulated by Revendy and Breton, but constrained into a limited series giving an effect of banality and absurdity.
Where contiguity is demolished and unlimited substitutions, in the freedom of an endless exchange of meaning, usage and association, are allowed, everything becomes equal and different at the same time, a blurred space in constant vibration. This technical transgression of the forms of language, violation of their limits, matched on the transgression of values, avowed prinicple of eroticism, is eroticism itself, transgression of sex opposite to its sublimation. If Sade developed a pure combinatory and encycopaedic eroticism, non metaphorical, in which a finite number of erotic loci can be combined in infinite figures, and Bataille explores the interchange of obscenity and substance from one object to another, in a continuous transgression of the sexual, they both transformed experiences into an askew(devoyè) language, that is literature itself.

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