Skin-Nihilism Now: Flaying the Face and Refiguring the Skin

Abstract

A profound cutting or wounding of the body disrupts the self-control of the mind in its contemplation of a death always on the brink of finality but never quite arriving at it. Thinking articulates each instant of the postponement of such a torturous death, life is the torment and anguish of its forestalling. If Bataille’s obsession with this photo, in its focus on the ‘most anguishing of worlds accessible to us through images captured on film’, can be seen as an identification with the instant of ecstatic pain, Artaud might be said to have spoken directly from within such a moment; the moment of his own ‘mental’ dismemberment and painful struggle against disintegration, experienced in the form of thinking through the ‘flesh’:

This photograph had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at once ecstatic and intolerable. (Bataille 1989, 206)

In the course of the ecstatic vision, at the limit of death on the cross and of the blindly lived lama sabatchtani, the object is finally unveiled as catastrophe in a chaos of light and shadow, neither as God nor as nothingness, but as the object that love, incapable of liberating itself except as outside itself, demands in order to let out the scream of lacerated existence.

[Bataille (1936) 1985, 185]

To be silent, to die slowly, in the conditions of a complete déchirure. From there slipping into the depths of silence and with an infinite perspective, you will know from what infamy the world is made.

[Bataille (1947) cited in Wilson 1995, 186]

Dedication: to the gruesomely murdered, and all others NOW being hacked, lacerated, chopped, flayed, raped and dismembered; to all those subjected to annihilations of the skin. (The photographer of the illustration on p. 199 is unknown.)