ABATTOIR. – L’abattoir relève de la religion en ce sens que des temples des époques reculées, (sans parler de nos jours de ceux des hindous) étaient à double usage, servant en même temps aux implorations et aux tueries. Il en résultait sans aucun doute (on peut en juger d’après l’aspect de chaos des abattoirs actuels) une coïncidence bouleversante entre les mystères mythologiques et la grandeur lugubre caractéristique des lieux où le sang coule. Il est curieux de voir s’exprimer en Amérique un regret lancinant : W. B. Seabrook 1 constatant que la vie orgiaque a subsisté, mais que le sang de sacrifices n’est pas mêlé aux cocktails, trouve insipide les mœurs actuelles. Cependant de nos jours l’abattoir est maudit et mis en quarantaine comme un bateau portant le choléra. or les victimes de cette malédiction ne sont pas les bouchers ou les animaux, mais les braves gens eux-mêmes qui en sont arrivés à ne pouvoir supporter que leur propre laideur répondant en effet à un besoin maladif de propreté, de petitesse bilieuse et d’ennui : la malédiction (qui ne terrifie que ceux qui la profèrent) les amène à végéter aussi loin que possible des abattoirs, à s’exiler par correction dans un monde amorphe, où il n’y a plus rien d’horrible et où, subissant l’obsession indélébile de l’ignominie, ils sont réduits à manger du fromage. – G. BATAILLE
Each of the three chapters focuses on the significance of humor and laughter in the good life as advocated by Bataille, Deleuze, and Rosset. These chapters also explore the complex relationship between the comic and the tragic, and of humor and laughter to irony, satire, and ridicule. The Legacy of Nietzsche’s Philosophy of Laughter makes an invaluable contribution to recent interpretive work done on Bataille and Deleuze, and offers further introduction to the relatively understudied Rosset. It illuminates the philosophies of these three thinkers, their connection to Nietzsche, and, overall, the significant role that humor plays in philosophy.
Her perspective is that self-referential humor that encourages one to see themselves as incongruous (serious/foolish, important/unimportant, grounded/unmoored) primes humans to see their own ridiculousness; seeing oneself as ridiculous allows one to move past the tragic condition and fulfill their desires in life.
Lydia Amir is Visiting Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, USA. She is the author of Humor and the Good Life: Shaftesbury, Hamann, Kierkegaard (2014), and Rethinking Philosophers’ Responsibility (2017). She is the Founding-President of the International Association for the Philosophy of Humor
A naked body, shown off, can be seen without interest. Similarly, it’s easy to look at the sky and see only emptiness. Still, a displayed body keeps, I think, the same power it has in sex play. And in a serene or brooding sky, I can open a wound that I’ll cling to as to a woman’s nudity.
Insofar as we need a cultural explanation, and not an MK-Ult(u)ra(l) one, this is probably it, not that those two possibilities are strictly inconsistent. For my take on how we can have Fukuyama-without-violence, see here (essay) and here(podcast):
The only way liberal democracy can fall short of humanity’s final political synthesis is if it too harbors an inherent contradiction necessitating further conflict. Now Fukuyama brings another alarming Teuton onstage to consider this possibility—for didn’t Nietzsche say that liberal society produces the bathetic creature he labelled “the last man,” a cow-eyed consumer so lost in complacent satisfactions that he lacks any thymos at all? (Nietzsche’s contemporary heirs—ultra-right-wing online shitposters—have their own pungent labels for this archetype: the soyboy, for instance, or the bugman.) And doesn’t this last man at the end of history eventually become so disgusted with himself that he begins to long for an apocalypse of the sort that ended Europe’s long peace in 1914 when the citizens of the nations clamored for a cleansing war?
Fukuyama says yes to this dire possibility. As a solution he proposes that liberal society must allow illiberal pockets in private life—religion, sports, art, etc.—to drain humanity’s incorrigible thymos away from the political realm while still satisfying our urge to rise up and be recognized as not merely equal to but better than our neighbors in at least some arenas. To put it more coarsely than he does, we may need a little fascism in our poetry or our football games or our church services to keep fascism out of the government.
For my response to Bataille, whom Shullenberger cites elsewhere in the piece, see here—limited to my reading of his most famous novel, all I’ve read of him, but enough to get the point. I took the excess violence or violence-as-excess in the pornographic novel more as prescription than diagnosis, but perhaps in that essay, significantly written and posted on the 7th of November 2016, I was being too moralistic:
Mothers and sisters—that is, female blood relations—are presumably sickening for Bataille because, like eggs, they stand for generation and their menstrual blood for the processes that generate life. The eye, on the other hand, stands for visionary perception, but it too must be debased because the eye’s idealism has in the western tradition also upheld life by associating it with a higher ideal, God or the Platonic forms or, simply, the truth. Bataille and his heroes are inverted Platonists, no less in love with an ideal, but a dark and negative ideal, an upside-down sublime, a mountain standing on its head, a photo-negative of the good, an anti-truth of the rapture of torture.
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All in all, Story of the Eye is a typical piece of “French extremity,” to cite the film genre, a narrative tradition almost unchanged since the days of Sade, whose books I have never succeeded in finishing, and which continues onscreen today. Mechanically reversing the traditional pieties of the west like flipping a series of switches, the devotees of extremity have created a pious tradition of their own, carried on to a stultifying extent in the institutions of culture, particularly the art world and some wings of academe.
Born in 1925 in Montmartre, Philippe Hiquily studied at the Parisian Ecole nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in the same class as Gimond-Janniau and César. One of his works, La Bicyclette, was acquired in 1956 by the Musée d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. In 1959, he exhibited in the New York gallery The Contemporaries. He then met the surrealist artists, Max Ernst and Georges Bataille at Ninette Lyon’s. He is celebrated for his work on metal, and began to design pieces of furniture in the 1960s. In the 1980s, he created mobile sculptures propelled by electric motors.
