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A review by sethlewisrice
Story of the Eye by Georges Bataille
5.0
2024 favourites in no particular order
#14 George Bataille - ‘Story of the Eye’ (1928)
Two lovers find a terrifying brand of ecstasy on a journey of erotic excess.
Reading it cover-to-cover really felt like a reset; apparently Bataille believed that literature was the direct descendent of sacrificial religion.
‘Story of the Eye’ has a total disregard for taste that is, in its own way, earnest. Some of the sentences are astoundingly beautiful, blissful, ecstatic, but the story lives so far away from those sentiments that poetic expression likes to attract. Like here: “My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.” Is that not beautiful while rejecting everything but dirt?
Everything that this book is, it is the most base example of; reading it felt like going right to the end of the line.
#14 George Bataille - ‘Story of the Eye’ (1928)
Two lovers find a terrifying brand of ecstasy on a journey of erotic excess.
Reading it cover-to-cover really felt like a reset; apparently Bataille believed that literature was the direct descendent of sacrificial religion.
‘Story of the Eye’ has a total disregard for taste that is, in its own way, earnest. Some of the sentences are astoundingly beautiful, blissful, ecstatic, but the story lives so far away from those sentiments that poetic expression likes to attract. Like here: “My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.” Is that not beautiful while rejecting everything but dirt?
Everything that this book is, it is the most base example of; reading it felt like going right to the end of the line.