Bataille & Carnival Smut

For those unfamiliar with Georges Bataille I have chosen two selections from his work.

A lot of reading follows but more can be found at Supervert or at your local bookstore. I highly recommend Literature and Evil for philosophy/criticism and My Mother, Madame Edwarda and the Dead Man for literary smut.

Excerpted from The Cruel Practice of Art:

The Painter is condemned to please. By no means can he transform a painting into an object of aversion. The purpose of a scarecrow is to frighten birds from the field where it is planted, but the most terrifying painting is there to attract visitors. Actual torture can also be interesting, but in general that can't be considered it's purpose. Torture takes place for a variety of reasons. In principle it's purpose differs little from that of the scarecrow: unlike art, it is offered to sight in order to repel us from the horror it put's on display. The painted torture, conversely, does not attempt to reform us. Art never takes on itself the work of the judge. It does not interest us in some horror for it's own sake: that is not even imaginable. (It is true that in the Middle Ages religious imagery did this for Hell, but that is precisely because art was hardly separable from education.) When Horror is subject to the transfiguration of an authentic art, it becomes a pleasure, an intense pleasure, but a pleasure all the same.

To see in this paradox the mere effect of a sexual vice would be vain.

It is with a sort of mute, inevitable, inexplicable determination, like that in dreams, that the fascinating specters of misery and pain have always lurked among the background figures in this carnival of a world. No doubt art does not have the same essential meaning as the carnival and yet, in each, a part has always been reserved for that which seems the very opposite of pleasure and amusement. Art may have finally liberated itself from the service of religion, but it maintains it's servitude with regard to horror. It remains open to the representation of that which repulses.

Next, a warning, this is not work/library/child safe. Don't show your mom unless she's very, very cool and more than a little crazy. It is explicit, violent, and absurd. You have been warned. From The Story of the Eye:

She had no qualms, and instantly amused herself by fondling the depth of her thighs and inserting this apparently fluid object. The caress of the eye over the skin is so utterly, so extraordinarily gentle, and the sensation so bizarre that it has something of a rooster's horrible crowing.

Simone meanwhile amused herself by slipping the eye into the profound crevice of her ass...she tried to keep the eye there simply by squeezing her buttocks together. But all at once, it zoomed out like a pit squooshed from a cherry, and dropped on the thin belly of the corpse, an inch or so from the cock.

In the meantime, I had let Sir Edmond undress me, so that I could pounce stark naked on the crunching body of the girl; my entire cock vanished at one lunge into the hairy crevice, and I fucked her hard while Sir Edmond played with the eye, rolling it, in between the contortions of our bodies, on the skin of our bellies and breasts. For an instant, the eye was trapped between our navels.

Well. That about says it all.