User:Tancre/readings/The Metaphor Of The Eye

Notes on "The metaphor of the eye" by Roland Barthes

Not a story of characters (as Sade) but of an object through its migration (from hand to hand in romantic immagination) from image to image, in a cycle of imaginary avatars far from the original being. Migration of the substance not of the product. This composition should be called a poem because the novel is 'probable, all things considered', The poetry is 'improbable, never happen under any circumstances - except'. Novel chance combinations, poem precise and complete exploration of individual elements. Story of the eye as a metaphorical composition (+ metonymy in the end), where the eye stands for a n number of objects, that are similar and dissimilar to it, and declined, like flexional forms of the same word/identity. Metaphorical journey where the eye moves into the nomenclature of the physical space, acquiring new forms and usage. Eye as the matrix of a run object, different stations of the ocular metaphor. first metaphor eye-egg > form (oeil-oeuf) and content (globular, white). --> The content can be metaphorically extended (milk, testicles). second complementary metaphor liquid (tears, urine, sperm) --> In general moisture and 'making wet' (bowels of the gored horse spilling, urinary liquefation of the sky/sun)

2 chain of significants but is there a hierarchy of the metaphors? If there is a generative term, is not a sexual one or a sexual fantasy (not directly phallic theme but 'round phallicism'). Bataille himself doomed the deciphracion of his poem giving the sources (biographical) of his metaphor > eye/father - ocular/genital. Indeteterminacy of metaphorical order (overlooked in the psychology of archetypes) reproduces the randomness of associative fields (Saussure), no pre-eminence to any of the terms declension. No deep meaning, everything on the surface with no secrets, signification without a signified (or everything signified). Open literature out of the reach of all interpretation, only formal criticism.

Metaphor of the eye and tears as virtual signs, paradigm of the syntagmatic extension through contiguity. Narrative as a flow of matter enshrining the metaphorical substance from its essential virtuality. Exceeding of narrative in the fresh techniques of interchanges of two chain of significants, possibility of syntagma (eye weeps/broken egg runs out/ light(sun) pours down - breaking an egg/putting out an eye) and then crossing of the syntagma (breaking an eye/putting out an egg). Law of the surrealist image formulated by Reverdy and Breton “the more remote and right the relations between the two realities, the more powerful will be the image”, but Bataille's image is concerted and constrained in a limited series of two finite, giving an effect of banal and absurd. Eroticism as artistic meaning, through the metonymy. Demolish contiguity and further illimited substitution, consequence a contagion of qualities and actions, freedom of an endless exchanging meaning and usage, and associations that are equal and different in the same time. The world becomes blurred, no separeted properties, wavy meaning, constant vibration. Transgression of values, avowed principle of eroticism, matched on a technical transgression of the forms of language, violation of a limit to the signifying space, and make possible a counter-division of objects/usages/meanings/spaces/properties that is eroticism itself. Metaphor and metonimy makes possible the transgression of sex (oppostie to the sublimation).