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' from George Bataille, Barthes tries to shape the novelty of this narrative thanks to the linguistic developed by Saussure, the reflection of the Surrealist movement and the modern experience on sexuality statrted from De Sade. From its typology, related to the history of literature, to the figures of speech and techniques used to impress on the writing a particular experience, 'Story of the eye' rapresent a new kind of literature, that through the transgression of sexuality push language to its limit and express the askew power of literature itself.

Synopsis

In this critical essay of "Story of the eye" from George Bataille, Barthes tries to shape the novelty of this narrative starting from considering it as a piece of poetry due to the imagination behind it, an improbable one, opposite to the probable of the novel, precise exploration of individual elements against chance of combinations.

Its originality has to be seen in the way Bataille innovates the typology of narrative that focus on the story of an object, rather than a person, characterized during the romantic period by the passage of the object through different owners. Thanks to the complex game of metaphors and antinomies, Bataille introduces the migration of the main character through 'avatars', letting the object to acquire new forms and usages. Those migrations creates a double chain of significants based on two directive metaphors, the globular one, based on 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 reproduce the randomness of associative fields and moves everything on the surface with no secrets, no deep meaning, and impossibility of an interpretation, where remains a signification without a signified or where everything signified.

Using the new definitions of Saussure's linguistic, Barthes recognise this virtualisation of the metaphorical signs in the paradigm of the syntagmatic extension through contiguity, that allow to create a flow of matter in which 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 significants making a cross of the syntagmas. This approach reflect the law of the surrealist image formulated by Revendy and Breton, but constrained into a limited series giving an effect of banal and absurd.

Where contiguity is demolished and unlimited substitutions, in the freedom of an endless exchanging 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 principle of eroticism, is eroticism itself, transgression of sex opposite to its sublimation.

If Sade developed a pure combinatorics and encyclopaedic 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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