Unknowing Susan Sontag's Regarding

Recutting with Georges Bataille

Louis Kaplan (bio)
University of Toronto
louis.kaplan@utoronto.ca
Abstract
This essay reviews and challenges Susan Sontag's use and abuse of Georges Bataille in her last
book, Regarding the Pain of Others. Sontag takes up Bataille's understanding of and fascination with a
group of Chinese torture (or lingchi) photographs from the beginning of the twentieth century. Her somber
reading glosses over Bataille's "anguished gaiety" in the face of these images and his post-Nietzschean
tendency to laugh in the face of the impossible. Sontag overlooks Bataille's atheological and iconoclastic
approach to these images steeped in transgression and non-knowledge in an attempt to frame his thinking
as somehow full of religious meaning and allied to the Christian transmutation of suffering into sacrifice.
Bound to a restricted (or Hegeilian) economy that remains servile to knowledge, Sontag's encounter with
these images misses the opportunity to acknowledge the sovereign (and comic) operation as "absolute
rending" inscribed in an excessive economy without reserve. Unlike Sontag in Regarding, Bataille looks to
these deathly images in terms of an ethics of the impossible and risks bringing together non-knowledge,
laughter, and tears. The essay concludes with a look at the limits of Sontag's analysis of Jeff Wall's Dead
Troops Talk to underscore the profound practical joke that non-knowledge plays on those who would seek
to turn death into a pedagogical exercise. The essay also suggests the relevance of Jean-Luc Nancy's
thinking about such images (and photography in general) beyond the logic of representation and in terms of
exposure (or of being posed in exteriority).
Real reading goes forward unknowing, it always opens a book like an unjustifiable cut in the
supposed continuum of meaning. It must go astray at this break.
--Jean-Luc Nancy, "Exscription"
In confronting the visual representation of pain and suffering as its object of study and the role that
the medium of photography plays in this global enterprise, Susan Sontag's final book Regarding the
Pain of Others (2003) has served as a touchstone for post-9/11 political and ethical debates, especially
in connection with the amorphous "war on terror" that has been waged during the Bush administration,
when the state of emergency became standard in American foreign policy.1 The book took on an even
greater resonance in the spring of 2004 with the release of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs in Iraq
and against the backdrop of revelations of the harsh treatment of prisoners (or so-called "enemy
combatants") in Guantanamo Bay.2 Regarding the Pain of Others contains Sontag's conscientious
reflections and objections to the images of death and destruction that constitute the genres of war and
torture photography (see cover art). Her account traces the venerable history of war photography from
Roger Fenton's propagandistic images in the Crimean War that served the nationalist agenda of the
British sovereign in 1855 through the Golden Age of photojournalism featuring the auteurship of such
celebrated figures as Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith in the Spanish Civil War and World War II to
more recent examples of the horrors and disasters of war in places like Rwanda, Somalia, and
Sarajevo. Completely lacking in photographic illustrations, Sontag's survey carefully avoids visual
spectacle. Instead, the book features an onslaught of horrific photographs that flash up and pass away
in the minds' eyes of her readers. Eduardo Cadava theorizes the reading and regarding of photographic
images as a way we learn about deathas a way of "learning to die."3 As Cadava and others argue,
this lesson relies in large part on the relationship of the photographic image to timeas it exposes
finitude and mortality as markers of our being-in-common.4 While one is tempted to generalize this as
the property of every photograph, it is the unfortunate characteristic of war photography that it puts the
corpse (of the dead soldier or civilian) and the ruin (of the destroyed building) at the center of its action.
As Sontag writes quite early in her book and in a manner that articulates her view that the photograph is
an indexical trace of the referent and therefore cannot but tell the truth: "Look, the photographs
say, this is what it's like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War

rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins" (Regarding 8). Sontag's description
of what war photography does foregrounds a litany of destructionof violent actions that rip open and
break apart the body politic and the soldiers who serve its commands (tearing, rending, dismembering,
ruining, etc.). But rather than envisioning these images as indexical traces to be comprehended in
terms of a transparent logic of appearance ("this is what it's like"), it would be more to the point in the
face of the destruction and the havoc wreaked by and in these images to view these photographs
asdeadly exposures that occur at the limits of meaning and understanding. Here I am recalling the
etymological root of exposure as "being posed in exteriority."5Such deadly exposures and scorched
illuminations put both photography and the reading of photographs on a perpetual war footing.
It is interesting to note that the violent imagery that is conjured hereof tearing and rending, of
ripping open and evisceratingreturns later in the book with Sontag's close reading of a photograph
that depicts the infamous Chinese torture of a hundred cuts (lingchi). This leads Sontag to the ideas
and desires of Georges Bataille and to a group of lingchi photographs derived from the beginning of the
twentieth century, from before this practice was outlawed in China in 1905. The images were taken by
French troops stationed in cities like Beijing and Tianjin and were first published by Louis Carpeaux just
a few years later in France. These photographs were to become a crucial site for philosophical
reflection (as well as Buddhist meditation) throughout Bataille's life, especially after he was given one of
these images as a present by his psychoanalyst, Dr. Adrien Borel, in 1925. While Sontag seeks to enlist
Bataille's support for her own arguments, the question remains whether this post-Nietzschean
philosopher of laughter and unknowing can be made to serve the somber rhetoric of
Sontag'sRegarding. For when Bataille introduces us to something like absolute dismemberment or
rending in one of his subversive readings of Hegel and the master/slave dialectic, it is framed in terms
of the complicated (or even tortuous) concept of anguished gaiety. In contrast to Sontag, Bataille writes
in "Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice" with the blackest of humors: "On the contrary, gaiety, connected with
the work of death, causes me anguish, is accentuated by anguish, and in return exacerbates that
anguish: ultimately, gay anguish, anguished gaiety cause me, in a feverish chill, 'absolute
dismemberment,' where it is my joy that finally tears me apart, but where dejection would follow joy
were I not torn all the way to the end, immeasurably" (25). What happens to the anguished gaiety of
Bataille's gaze upon the work of death and dismemberment and/as the (immeasurable) loss of
meaning, which he associates with a practice of sovereignty, that could only take place at the limits or
the interruption of discoursewhat happens to that gaiety when it becomes appropriated by
Sontag'sRegarding, enmeshed as it is in a discourse that seeks to give a sense and a meaning to the
pain of others and that thereby practices a form of Hegelian mastery that would claim to avoid the loss
of meaning? In this regard, Sontag's confident and transparent assertions about the photography of war
and its horrors (with statements like "this is what it's like") mirror Hegel's The Phenomenology of
Spirit and a practice of lordship and mastery (Herrschaft) wherein, as Bataille states, "[d]ismemberment
is, on the contrary, full of meaning" (27).6
It is important to stress that Sontag's discussion of the lingchi photographs never invokes Bataille's
practice of sovereignty and its impossible (or even laughable) relationship with death. According to
Arkady Plotnitsky, the sovereign operation marks for Bataille the "irreducible loss of meaning which is
also always excessive, in particular with respect to any possibility of containing it by presence,
consciousness, or meaning."7 The sovereign operation would disenable Sontag from making sense of
the pain of others through the medium of photography and to enlist these images as a type of moral
knowledge that is therefore full of meaning. In addition to ignoring the sovereign operation, Sontag
overlooks Bataille's engagement with general economy as the science or the theory of such sovereign
practice that manifests at the level of political economy. Finally, rather than acknowledging Bataille's
(non)concept of nonknowledge (nonsavoir) in relationship to the lingchi photograph, Sontag insists that
the contemplation of this image offers "a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge" (Regarding 98). In
these ways, Sontag's writing on Bataille remains embroiled in a practice of mastery and in a restricted
economy that excludes the practice of sovereignty. However, this is not to overlook that Bataille's
sovereign operation also involves mastery within certain reconfigured limits.8 This recalls one of the

crucial points that Jacques Derrida makes in his groundbreaking essay on Bataille, "From Restricted to
General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve." Derrida insists that the sovereign operation
reconfigures meaning by marking its limits within an excessive field of chance, nonsense, play, and
non-knowledge. This is exactly how Bataille practices a "Hegelianism without reserve" and why Derrida
writes that unreserved play or chance includes the work of meaning not in terms of any regime of
knowledge but in terms of the force of inscription. In the sovereign operation, meaning becomes a
function of play and non-knowledge through a process of reinscription or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls
"exscription." Derrida's review of Hegel's blindspots would also apply to Sontag's Regarding the Pain of
Others in terms of its "conscientious suspension of play" in the face of the disasters of war. Derrida
writes that
Hegel has bet against play, against chance. He has blinded himself to the possibility of his
own bet, to the fact that the conscientious suspension of play (for example, the passage
through the certitude of oneself and through lordship as the independence of selfconsciousness) was itself a phase of play; and to the fact that play includes the work of
meaning or the meaning of work, and includes them not in terms of knowledge, but in terms
of inscription: meaning is a function of play, is inscribed in a certain place in the configuration
of a meaningless play.
(260)
We also need to ask what happens to Sontag's Regarding and the insistence that "the moral capacity
of the photograph is repeatedly defined by its relative ability to confer knowledge and understanding on
the viewer" (Beckman 119) if and when one applies Bataille's radical and unconditional unknowing to it.
What is to be done in the face of Bataille's sovereign insistence upon the "exscription" of meaning?
How does one regard that which seeks to expose what Jean-Luc Nancy has called the "infinite
discharge of meaning" or that which "withdraws from all signification" ("Exscription" 64)?9 This essay
addresses such questions by comparing the ways Sontag and Bataille analyze and interpretas well
as fail to analyze and interpretthese infamous and painful lingchi photographs poised at the limits of
the sayable and the knowable. In contrast to Sontag's mastery, Bataille's (non)concepts (e.g.,
sovereignty, unknowledge) and the specialized ways in which he deploys them seek to make meaning
slideor even to go beyond meaningas they laugh in the face of death and the impossible. Following
Nancy, the goal of unknowing Sontag's regarding would be "to read in every line the work or the play of
writing against meaning" (62). For a long time, scholars believed that the images that were in Bataille's
possession illustrated the torture of the political prisoner Fu-Zhu-Li, who had been found guilty of the
murder of Prince Ao-Han-Oun and who was executed by lingchi on April 10, 1905. However, recent
research by Jrme Bourgon at the East Asian Institute at the University of Lyon has clarified that the
victim in Bataille's photographs was not actually Fu-Zhu-Li but another, unknown criminal from the
same period.10 There are eight extant images from this execution, and four of them were published by
Bataille in the final section of The Tears of Eros, his magisterial survey that examines the history of art
at the intersection of eroticism and death.11 The confusion stems from the addition of a caption in the
book that accompanies one of the photographs and that recites Carpeaux's summary of the execution
of Fu-Zhu-Li. Offering readers a date for one of these images that turns out to be five years later than
the abolition of lingchi in the Chinese penal code, Sontag introduces the image in the following way:
One of the great theorists of the erotic, Georges Bataille, kept a photograph taken in China
in 1910 of a prisoner undergoing 'the death of a hundred cuts' on his desk, where he could
look at it every day. (Since become legendary, it is reproduced in the last of Bataille's books
published during his lifetime, in 1961, The Tears of Eros.) 'This photograph,' Bataille wrote,
'had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at
the same time ecstatic and intolerable.'"
(Regarding 98)
Before delving further into this passage, one notes that an extra cut has taken place in Sontag's
transcription of the citation from The Tears of Eros. While the original quotation has a question mark

after the word "ecstatic""ecstatic(?)"this has been cut out of Sontag's version, making for a world of
difference. While Sontag calls Bataille the philosopher of Eros, she does not mention here that he is the
philosopher for whom Eros is always bound to Thanatos, the promiscuous coupling of sexuality and
death that is not that far from Bataille's Surrealist nemesis Andre Breton's concept of "convulsive
beauty" to which Sontag also refers elsewhere in the book (Regarding 23). This contrasts with an
earlier essay, "The Pornographic Imagination," in which Sontag writes that what "Bataille exposes in
extreme erotic experience is its subterranean connection with death" (61). In this context, one also
recalls the title of one of Bataille's books that binds Eros and Thanatos via the violent acts of the
sensual bodyErotism: Death and Sensuality. In the "Introduction," Bataille states the following
formula: "Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death" (11). The paradoxical
formula structures erotism as an exuberance of life that strives for death as its limit experience. Bataille
sees death as the continuity of being that discontinuous beings strive for in the passionate embrace of
erotic activity. In light of Bataille's formulation, it is not surprising that the orgasmic climax of sexual
release is called the petit mort. The domain of eroticism is marked by violation and the transgression of
discontinuous bodies. Bataille writes about this in a way that again invokes the limit. "What does
physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners?a violation bordering
on death, bordering on murder?" (17). While ignoring the consequences of nonknowledge, this
background about erotic violation unto death helps to flesh out and elucidate Sontag's assertion
in Regarding the Pain of Others that the contemplation of this harrowing and tortuous image and its
violent depiction of death involves the "liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge" (Regarding 98).

Click for larger view

Fig. 1.
Anonymous, The Chinese Torture of One Hundred Cuts, ca. 1905.
For Sontag, Bataille clearly had an obsessive and intimate relationship with these photographs, and his
regard for them (and upon them) took on the aspect of a daily ritual. In turning and returning to these
images, from which others would want to turn away, it seems clear that Bataille wanted to remind
himself of something. Sontag comes up with three reasons Bataille would have wanted to gaze upon
these gruesome images. These involve taking courage, numbing down, and attesting to injustices. She
writes, "As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To
steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the
incorrigible" (Regarding 98). But Sontag does not consider another reason why images of the atrocious
can become objects of contemplation, one that was very close to Bataille's heart: to laugh in the face of
death and the impossible. Steeped in solemnity, Sontag's Regarding does not tap into the resources of
the Nietzschean gay science (frhliche Wissenschaft) that were pivotal to Bataille's thinking and his
laughter.12 Time and again in his writings, Bataille turns to "Nietzsche's Laughter." He quotes the
following as a laudable model: "To see tragic characters founder and to be able to laugh, despite the
profound understanding, emotion and sympathy that we feel: this is divine" (The Unfinished System 22).
Bataille's compulsive return to these images stages an encounter with the impossible that goes far
beyond an acknowledgment of the existence of the incorrigible and that remains open to the effects of
nonknowledge. But this divine laughter derived from excess and full of anguish cannot be read simply
as sadistic pleasure or mere maliciousness, for it acknowledges its own foundering and ruin in the
same mortal breath. In meditating on his fascination with this Chinese torture victim in The Inner
Experience, Bataille considers laughter in the face of ruin without any hope of salvation: "The young
and seductive Chinese man of whom I have spoken, left to the work of the executionerI loved him
with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the
excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in
it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin" (120). This inclusive view of the photographic
exposure of suffering as both shared communication and as anguished gaiety is very different from

Sontag's perspective in an earlier essay, "The Image World" in On Photography, which argues that the
"feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at
them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt" (168). Sontag's disregard for this vital
strand of anguished gaiety that marks the Bataillian corpus seems peculiar because she began her
intellectual career in close connection with the renegades of French Surrealism and their
transgressions. First of all, one thinks of her edition of Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (1976), which
includes a considered and affirmative introduction to his work. Even more relevant to this discussion,
one recalls her rigorous analysis of the transgressive eroticism of Bataille's The Story of the Eye in "The
Pornographic Imagination," published in Styles of Radical Will (1969). Sontag pinpoints here the
interlocking of death and eroticism that makes Bataille's work so distinctive. "One reason that Histoire
de l'Oeil and Madame Edwarda make such a strong and upsetting impression is that Bataille
understood more clearly than any other writer I know of that what pornography is really about,
ultimately, isn't sex but death" (60). However, Sontag does not explore either here or in her last book
the comic aspects that arise from Bataille's investigations of death and the laughable attempt to
simulate "absolute risk" in view of the fact that death always remains at the limit of the possible and the
knowable.13 Refusing to let go of the gravity of the situation, "The Pornographic Imagination" avoids an
encounter with Bataille's profound levity and the divinity of laughter. Reviewing the philosopher as
pornographer, Sontag insists that Bataille's "more effective method is to invest each action with a
weight, a disturbing gravity, that feels authentically 'mortal'" (61). While there is no argument regarding
the importance of mortality as a critical concern in all of Bataille's thought, the emphasis on its gravity
alone is quite disturbing. The rhetoric of authenticity weighs heavily around the laughing philosopher's
neck in this formulation of being as "being-toward-death." Indeed, Sontag's analysis has a much too
stuffy existentialist air about it that thoroughly represses what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has termed the
"laughter of being" in a brilliant essay of the same name. For Borch-Jakobsen, Bataille's engagement
with mortality means to "die[] of laughter and laugh[] at dying, bent convulsively over the impossible
abyss of his own finitude" (752).
One of the limits of Sontag's interpretation involves her reading of Bataille's "high regard"
for lingchi in terms of the rhetoric of transfiguration. Sontag's move aligns Bataille's obsession with this
image with "religious thinking" in general and with the Christian transmutation of suffering into sacrifice
in particular. "Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at the sight of this excruciation. But he is
saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of
transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which
links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation" (Regarding 98-99). This is an odd conclusion for a selfprofessed atheological and iconoclastic thinker like Bataille who rebels against the pieties and sanctities
of Christianity, who refuses the mystification of the afterlife, and who resists sublimation, sublation
(Aufhebung), and transfiguration in all forms whether in its Hegelian or in its Christian martyr varieties.
Indeed, Bataille follows Nietzsche in understanding salvation as a Christian mode of escape, as "the
most odious of evasions" (The Inner Experience 12). This lapsed Catholic refuses to transfigure pain
and suffering into a passion of the Christ. Instead, his project is to contaminate binary oppositions like
divine ecstasy and extreme horror. Rather than using the Christian figure of "transfiguration" and its
transcendental overtones, it would be more to the atheological point to speak of a radical reversal when
referring, as here, to the site of excess and surplus where extreme suffering and joy meet and
exchange places. In this way, the "something more" that Sontag invokes would remain on the side of
the remainder (restance). After all, Bataille speaks in The Tears of Eros of the "infinite capacity for
reversal" (renversement14 ) and not in terms of transfiguration. Similarly, the figure and the strategy
of glissement (what makes meaning slide) is more akin to Bataille's atheological practice than is the
glorification (and the raising on high) of a Christian concept like transfiguration. In staking out an
atheological resistance to transfiguration, it is important to mobilize the counterthrust of transgression
as that which is vital to Bataille's pornographic sensibility. Early on Sontag senses this in "The
Pornographic Imagination" when she expresses great admiration for Bataille and his "profound sense of
transgression" (60) and when she even intimates that Bataille outstrips Marquis de Sade in this respect.

In her transformation of transgression into transfiguration, one is left wondering whether the late Sontag
did not experience a kind of religious conversion experience herself.
However, it is by no means correct to say that Bataille necessarily makes a connection between
sacrifice and a state of exaltation. This glosses over the important distinction that must be made
between sovereignty and lordship or mastery (Herrschaft), which offer different approaches to sacrifice
and its "meaning." Sontag's inattention to this nuance returns us to Bataille's confrontation with Hegel in
the essay "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice." In Bataille's reading, Hegel sees the institution of sacrifice as a
profoundly human activity that exposes one to death and that allows one to contemplate the work of the
negative face to face so that the individual "dwells with it" (18). But Bataille also insists that the Hegelian
model of sacrifice is built on a ruse and a subterfuge because the one who sacrifices and who tarries
with the negative in this way must stay alive in order to attain mastery. This leads to the following
comedic paradox as outlined by Derrida: "To stay alive, to maintain oneself in life, to work, to defer
pleasure, to limit the stakes, to have respect for death at the very moment when one looksdirectly at it
such is the servile condition of mastery and of the entire history it makes possible" (255). Hegel's
conception of sacrifice and of "the servile condition of mastery" therefore always holds something back,
in contrast to Bataille's insistence that "sovereignty is NOTHING" (The Accursed Share Vol. 3
430).15 Bataille exposes the comedy at the heart of Hegel's theory of sacrifice and the mastery or
lordship that it pretends to maintain as sovereignty laughs at the recognition that it needs to stay
alive.16 "In the sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies himself with the animal that is struck down dead . But
it is a comedy!" ("Hegel, Death and Sacrifice" 19). Bataille concludes the essay by suggesting that
sacrifice remains servile when it is tied to the production of meaning and that it can only become
sovereign and approach the state of exaltation when it sacrifices or lets go of meaning and the desire to
make a meaning out of death. This is when it becomes, in Derrida's words, the "heedless sacrifice of
presence and meaning" (257). Bataille concludes: "Sacrifice, consequently, is
a sovereign,autonomous manner of being only to the extent that it is uninformed
by meaningful discourse. To the extent that discourse informs it, what is sovereign is given in terms
of servitude. Indeed by definition what is sovereign does not serve" (25-26). Returning to Sontag, this
close reading helps to qualify her statement that the state of exaltation necessarily follows from sacrifice
while foregrounding that her own relationship to (the representation of) pain and sacrifice remains
servile because she earnestly wants to figure out "What to do with such knowledge as photographs
bring of faraway suffering" (99) rather than opening up to the burst of sovereign laughter that arises out
of these photographic exposures of and to nonknowledge. In this context, it is well to recall a pithy
statement from Bataille in the lecture "Nonknowledge, Laughter and Tears," where he underscores that
"the unknown makes us laugh" (The Unfinished System 135).
One can also take issue with Sontag's assurance that "Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at
the sight of this excruciation" (98-99). Sontag is careful here not to make Bataille into a sexual pervert
or sadist who would derive pleasure from the witnessing of violent torture. Nevertheless, the attempt to
shield Bataille completely from the pleasure principle and from any enjoyment of this image can only be
done at the expense of overlooking those transgressive aspects of his work. In "The Tears of
Photography," Herta Wolf accurately pinpoints such ambivalent combinations as "agony and laughter"
(74) and "laughter and mourning" (77) that are crucial to The Tears of Eros as a whole and that Sontag
does not articulate in her analysis of Bataille. Given Bataille's complex ideas about laughter and tears,
pleasure and pain are intertwined in an impossible knot that cannot be so easily disentangled when it
comes to his experience of the lingchi photographs. Derrida is also fascinated by the anguished burst of
Bataillian laughter that breaks out when confronted with the comedy of Hegelian philosophy, with its
notion of sublation (Aufhebung) that works to preserve meaning, and with the idealist conceit that
"nothing must be definitely lost in death" (256-257). Derrida continues, "Absolute comicalness is the
anguish experienced when confronted by expenditure on lost funds, by the absolute sacrifice of
meaning: a sacrifice without return and without reserves" (257). It is this unsavory mixture of anguish
spiked with laughter that Bataille experiences when casting his eyes upon the excruciating losses
suffered by the lingchi victims, by these sacrifices without return and without reserves. Indeed, Bataille's

horrifying laughter affirms the absolute rending that cannot be contained by the Hegelian (or Sontagian)
work of the negative. One encounters the same type of laughter in Bataille's erotic classic The Story of
the Eye, but here the tone becomes more mocking, shocking, and scandalous. It should be recalled
that the pseudonymous and excremental author of this book is Lord Auch, a shortened form of aux
chiottes (to the shithouse). In light of this discussion, Lord Auch should be viewed in the context of the
passage from lordship to sovereignty. Bataille's biographer Michael Surya believes that "[o]f all the
books he wrote it is certainly the one in which laughter is the most perceptible" and that it marks the
"obscene laugh of an apostate" (102). The sexual and criminal adventures of the narrator, Simone, and
of Sir Edmond as they carouse their way through Spain and that climax in their murder and rape of a
Catholic priest laughs in the face of Christian pieties and organized religious institutions and elucidates
another facet of Bataille's atheological deployment of a derisive and obscene laughter that functions as
a mode of transgression.
Returning to Sontag's review of the Chinese torture victim, one notices that she conflates him with
the Christian martyr by bridging the religious symbolism of Eastern and Western visual cultures. While
Bataille's original publication contains an illustration of Aztec human sacrifice (ca. 1500) to serve as a
visual comparison with the Chinese torture victim, Sontag fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian. Rather
than attributing the comfortably numbed expression on the victim's face to the administration of a dose
of opium (which both Bataille and his biographer Michael Surya mention17 ), Sontag refers to "a look on
his upturned face as ecstatic as that of any Italian Renaissance Saint Sebastian" (Regarding 98).
Sontag invokes a comparison with this Christian saint and martyr whom the Roman emperor Diocletian
in the third century A.D. had tied to a post and shot through with arrows. Saint Sebastian would become
a favorite subject of many paintings of the Renaissance such as those by the Paduan artist Andrea
Mantegna in the late 1400s. The ecstatic again becomes an unmarked term for Sontag as it is placed in
the redemptive light of both Christian salvation and Renaissance art. However, it is important to
reiterate that Bataille introduces the term "ecstatic" at the beginning of the section "Chinese Torture" in
The Tears of Eros with a question mark.18 There is a mark of uncertainty as to whether Bataille feels
comfortable in invoking this term in reference to the Chinese torture victim. Even when Bataille refers to
ecstasy without question or mark further on in this same text, it is not to be taken uncategorically as
something that is revelatory or that offers salvation. The ambivalence and the capacity for radical
reversal continue here as "religious ecstasy" is coupled with that perverse mode of eroticism known as
"sadism" (206), and is then followed by the unnatural pairing of "divine ecstasy and its opposite,
extreme horror" (207). In these ways, the ecstatic in The Tears of Eros inscribes a contaminating
movement of transgression rather than a state of redemptive transfiguration. It also should be recalled
that the ecstatic is inextricably linked for Bataille to the pursuit of sovereignty. Bataille's atheological
pursuit of ecstasy at the limits of knowledge leaves one with that same empty-headed feeling from
which laughter bursts--anguished gaiety. As he says, "I would gladly define ecstasy: feeling gay but
anguishedfrom my immeasurable stupidity."19 In contrast to any knowledge of the ecstatic that could
be derived from Sontag's comparative investigations of art historical discourse along with its gallery of
tortured figures of Christian piety, Bataille's transgressive unknowing empties out onto a logical abyss in
an aporetic structure that confronts the "identity of these perfect contraries" (Tears of Eros 207).
In resisting Sontag's theological recuperation of the lingchi photographs, it is also important to
remember that according to Bataille's atheological investigations of the religious life and the spiritual
domain, "God is an effect of nonknowledge" (The Unfinished System 146). Atheologyas the study of
the effects of nonknowledgecan take many forms, but for Bataille it always places us in relation to
something impossible. As Bataille writes in (and with) "Nietzsche's Laughter," "Fundamentally, the
spiritual domain is that of the impossible. I will say that ecstasy, sacrifice, tragedy, poetry, laughter are
forms whereby life situates itself in proportion to the impossible" (The Unfinished System 21). The
impossiblewhere knowledge ends and where sovereign laughter breaks outmust have its place
when Regarding the Pain of Others, when reading these war photographic exposures of pain, suffering,
and death. However, such sovereign laughter has been repressed in Sontag's account of the pain of
others, where for her, the only morally sanctioned sentiments appear to be mourning and memorializing

and where any other response is viewed as disrespectful or morally suspect. Faced with such images,
Sontag writes: "No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this
degree of ignorance, or amnesia. There now exists a vast repository of images that make it harder to
maintain this kind of moral defectiveness" (Regarding 114-115). But from Bataille's perspective, an
account that takes these images as deadly serious and that seeks to learn from them leads only to
mental servitude. One sees again how Sontag's Regarding cannot extricate herself from Hegelian
dialectics as she disregards Bataille's sovereign insistence that "[t]aking death seriously tends one
toward servitude" (The Unfinished System 254).
In contrast, Bataille reinscribes the concept of ignorance in terms of the (non)concept of
nonknowledge. Bataille addresses this point at the conclusion of "Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears"
in his discussion of Ernest Hemingway's writings. "In any case, it seems to me that if what is seductive
about Hemingway, which is connected to ignorance, might be attained by us, it can only be attained on
one condition, that of having first been to the end of the possibilities of knowing. It is only beyond
knowledge, perhaps in the nonknowledge that I have presented, that we could conquer the right to
ignorance" (The Unfinished System 150). While Sontag's ignorance bespeaks of an innocence to which
no one has a right anymore, Bataille's is a second naivete that we must earn the right to have once
again. Bataille's ignorance is not constituted by the gaps within knowledge that are waiting to be filled.
Instead, ignorance comes from "having first been to the end of the possibilities of knowing" (150). It is
something derived from coming up against the limits of knowledge (as a limit experience), and it can in
no way be considered as a moral defect. In contrast to Sontag's version, ignorance of the type that
goes beyond knowledge inhabits this photographic discourse of death and the sovereign loss of its
meaning by necessity, and it is in a state of such ignorance that an anguished laughter bursts out. For
the consequences of nonknowledge lead to the reversal of any grim apprehension of these images. In
"The Consequences of Nonknowledge," Bataille babbles: "Faced with nonknowledge, I experienced the
feeling of performing in a comedy, of having a kind of weakness in my position. At the same time, I am
in front of you as a babbler, offering all the reasons I would have for keeping my mouth shut" (The
Unfinished System 115). Unlike Sontag's Regarding, Bataille looks to these deathly images in terms of
an ethics of the impossible and risks bringing together nonknowledge, laughter, and tears.20
The comically repressed returns with a vengeance, however, at the end of Regarding the Pain of
Others. For the photographic encounter with nonknowledge and the question of sovereign laughter
(laughing at nothing) invades Sontag's final analysis of Jeff Wall's theatrical tableau, Dead Troops Talk
(A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), 1992.
Interestingly enough, Dead Troops Talk is the only avowedly fictional and staged photograph that is
analyzed in the book, and perhaps this is what gives Sontag the license to speculate and to imagine at
the limits and to move beyond the "truth-telling" approach to photography that guides her reading of
the lingchi images and of the numerous photojournalistic images that depict the horrors of war. But
before turning to a closer analysis of Wall's image, it is necessary to review (and to question) Sontag's
theorization of the photograph and her arguments as to why and how the photograph offers a privileged
mode of representation. Sontag emphasizes here that Bataille's object of contemplation is a photograph
rather than a painting, an indexical trace of the real rather than an iconic likeness governed by mimesis,
and she consciously differentiates it from Titian's mythological painting of The Flaying of Marsyas (ca.
1575). It is "a photograph, not a painting; a real Marsyas, not a mythic oneand still alive in the
picture"(Regarding 98). It could be argued that the sobriety of Sontag's account is derived in large part
from her assumptions about photographs as bearers and witnesses of the truth of the world and in
providing documentary evidence of its atrocities. It also should be noted that Sontag asserts this point
of view in spite of the fact that she recounts a few well-known historical examples of manipulated war
photographs in the book. But Sontag's discussion of Alexander Gardner'sHome of a Rebel
Sharpshooter, Gettysburg (1863) and of other staged images is still predicated on the assumption that
the photograph is indexical of truth. So while we may be "surprised to learn [that] they were staged, and
always disappointed" (Regarding 55), the existence of such images in no way challenges the view that
even these photographs are tied to the (falsified) real. Sontag asserts that the superiority of

photography over painting and other earlier modes of representation is derived from its status as a
physical trace and that this is particularly important when dealing with the remembrance of things past
and in respect to the dead. "Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company
with death. Because an image produced with a camera is, literally, a trace of something brought before
the lens, photographs were superior to any painting as a memento of the vanished past and the dear
departed" (Regarding 24).
In keeping company with death in this way, photography forges our being-in-common and utters the
truth of community. This recalls Jean-Luc Nancy's definition of community in (and of) The Inoperative
Community. Nancy writes, "A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth" (15). In
recalling death as the (groundless) ground of community, photographic theory that is responsive to
such "community exposed photography" affords another approach. This is a point of view that is less
concerned with Sontag's emphasis on indexical reference and much more interested in photography as
that which exposes the limits of our knowing. An expository approach to photography, with its emphasis
on exposure (as being posed in exteriority), provides being-in-common with both the medium of its
sharing and the incompleteness of its sharing. In The Tears of Eros, Bataille moves away from indexical
concerns (e.g., the acknowledgement of the veracity of photographic representation) toward the way in
which these images of torture touch him in a visceral way and expose him to the anguish and
intoxication of the mortal truth of community. Such an exposure is accompanied by a distribution of the
sensible that fails to make sense. Confronted by this state of unknowing, Bataille comments that "this
straightforward image of a tortured man" opens up "the most anguishing of worlds accessible to us
through images captured on film" (Tears 205). These Chinese torture photographs foreground for
Bataille the experience of limits situated at the precipice of non-knowledge, laughter, and tears. They
leave us with question marks and lay bare the disquieting magnitude of a horror at the heart of being
human that remains very difficult to accept or comprehend fully. Contemplating the same torture
photographs in Guilty, Bataille asks rhetorically: "Who can accept that a horror of this magnitude would
express 'what you are' and lay bare your nature?" (39).21 While Sontag's book certainly does review
how images of war and torture induce a range of emotions from horror to numbness to compassion,
such considerations move analysis away from the concrete moral knowledge obtained from the
contemplation of these images as photographic indices. In contrast to Bataille's naked exposures of a
loss or surplus of meaning, Sontag's focus on (and regarding of) the pain of others seeks to make
sense of suffering and loss and to ask "What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of
faraway suffering" (Regarding 99).
In reviewing Sontag's writings on photography, one notices that Regarding the Pain of Others is just
one of a number of occasions when Sontag relies on a medium-specific binary opposition between
painting and photography and in a way that privileges photography and its relationship to truth or reality.
In "The Heroism of Vision," Sontag offers the conventional wisdom that the photograph represents the
truth that painterly mimesis cannot hope to capture, locating the basis for this position in nineteenthcentury discourses and aligning this belief with the ethics of realism found in both "literary models" and
"independent journalism." Sontag writes:
The consequences of lying have to be more central for photography than they ever can be
for painting, because the flat, usually rectangular images which are photographs make a
claim to be true that paintings can never make. A fake painting (one whose attribution is
false) falsifies the history of art. A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or
tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality. The history of photography could
be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which
comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of valuefree truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from
nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent
journalism."
(On Photography 86)

Here Sontag opens up photography to the larger discursive spaces of the nineteenth century and
argues that it shares the space of "truth telling" with the empirical sciences, investigative reporting,
literary realism, and the disciplinary practice of history itself. All of these discourses share a belief in the
transparency of their signifiers (whether using language, laboratory equipment, or images) to access
the truth of the real. In delivering the physical trace of the referent in its images, photographic realism
again grounds its claims to truth telling in its indexical status. By insisting upon the further dichotomy
between "beautification" (derived from the fine arts) and "truth-telling" (derived from the sciences),
Sontag finds yet another way to contrast photography and painting and to reinforce the binary
opposition between the photographic index and the painterly icon.
This semiotic distinction between photographs and paintings as two distinct types of signs has its
source and fullest expression in the writings of Charles Saunders Peirce at the end of the nineteenth
century. Peirce differentiates photographs from mimetic likenesses or icons because photos are direct
emanations and/or physical traces of the referent. Peirce writes, "this resemblance is due to the
photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to
correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those
by physical connection" (106). As smoke is to fire or as a footprint is to the foot that deposited it, so is
the photograph to its reference. In "The Image World," Sontag alludes directly to one of Peirce's
examples and adds another of her own (in a way that furthers the relationship of photography and
death) as she again privileges the photograph over painting on account of the material structure of the
trace.
[A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real;
it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask.
While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never
more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of
an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)a material vestige of its subject in a way
that no painting can be.
(On Photography 154)
From a postmodern perspective, this is a bold and dangerous claim because it would keep photography
immune from Nietzsche's famous dictum that there are "no facts, only interpretations" by granting it a
sacred space of registration and emanation that is somehow exempt from either a logic of mediation or
an ideological contest of positions. Nietzsche's dictum is useful for challenging any dogmatic
acceptance of photographic facts because it insists that the facticity ascribed to photography by Sontag
on account of its indexical status is virtually meaningless without its immediate immersion into a field of
interpretative contexts and possibilities. One can apply Nietzsche's query in The Genealogy of
Morals to Sontag as follows: "What does that mean? For this fact has to be interpreted: in itself it just
stands there, stupid to all eternity, like every 'thing-in-itself'" (107). The invocation of Nietzsche here is
also particularly apt for a critique of the author of Regarding the Pain of Others in that Nietzsche does
not believe that even pain is immune from the work (and play) of interpretation and the specificity of
context. To recite The Genealogy of Morals, "I consider even 'psychological pain' to be not a fact but
only an interpretation" (129). With an absolute insistence on the photograph as the material trace of the
absent referent, Sontag uses the medium of photography to make a claim about knowledge (and
certainty) that is a far cry from Nietzsche's ongoing suspicion of the claim to the noumenon (and the
numinous) or from Bataille's incessant and insistent practice of unknowing. The aforementioned
quotation from Sontag, with its privileging of photography over painting on the grounds of indexical
registration and emanation, would also be rather troubling to Bataille in light of his views on sovereignty
and loss. It is as if Sontag wants to use this presumption about the certainty of the index as a means to
catapult discussion about photography beyond troubling questions that come with representation and
the opening of a necessary gap between the referent and the indexical trace. But there always has to
be an excess of or loss in photographic representation, and one can argue that this is exactly the type
of irreducible loss that defines the sovereignty that is championed by Bataille. As Uziel Awret puts it,

"For Batailles [sic], 'sovereignty' denotes a form of theoretical thinking that accounts for the irreducible
loss in representation and meaning that any representation entails" (28-29). The fact that Sontag
remains immune to the possibility of such a contamination of the real and its transparency by the
apparatus of representation points to the ultimately modernist presuppositions of her photo-critical
project in Regarding the Pain of Others.
Another pressure on the truth claims that Sontag attributes to the photographic index has come with
the rise of digital photography. Digital media are closely connected to a painterly and iconic mode of
rendering even if they visually simulate the indexical signs of photographic media. This relation has
been widely theorized by writers on digital photography such as Florian Rtzer, Lev Manovich, and
Peter Lunenfeld. Lunenfeld's essay "Art Post-History: Digital Photography and Electronic Semiotics" is
particularly relevant for this discussion because he specifically takes up this rupture with the Peircean
legacy in the section "Semiotics, Photography & Truth Value of the Electronic Image." Lunenfeld
argues, "The inherent mutability of the digital image poses a challenge to those who have striven to
create a semiotic of the photographic" (94). Taking his cue from Hollis Frampton and putting pressure
on indexical truth, Lunenfeld invokes the phrase "dubitative" (or inclined to doubt) to characterize the
digital image and its reinsertion of the painterly icon into photography. "What has happened to this class
of signs, and to the semiotics of the image in general, with the advent of digital photography? With
electronic imaging, the digital photographic apparatus approaches what Hollis Frampton refers to as
painting's 'dubitative' processes: like the painter, the digital photographer 'fiddles around with the picture
till it looks right'" (95). The rhetoric of the dubitatively digital and the doubt it tends to produce would
appear to be more in line with Bataille's affirmation of nonknowledge and his suspicion of "a certain
stability of things known" (The Unfinished System 133).

Click for larger view

Fig. 2.
Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan,
winter 1986). 1992. Silver dye bleach transparency in aluminum lightbox, 229 x 417 cm. Jeff Wall.
Courtesy of the artist.
Returning to Jeff Wall's Dead Troops Talk, it is important to point out that the artist has used digital
photography for many years and that this particular image evinces its dubitative quality and iconic
characteristics. The digital aspect of Dead Troops Talk must be stressed over and above the overt
staging and theatricality of this famous 7 13 feet photograph, displayed in a light box, that
resonates with the genre of grand history paintings. Breaking with the rhetoric of the index, Wall
discusses the "hallucinatory image that [he] wanted to make" in a recent interview. He confesses that
"this was one of the first or second things that I ever did with a computer" and that it was
"photographing things that could never have happened" so that it became a "kind of a release of all the
constraints of the actual photography."22 Dead Troops Talk is also described in the recent Tate Modern
retrospective on Wall's photography as follows: "The figures were photographed separately or in small
groups and the final image was assembled as a digital montage."23 While Sontag refers to Dead Troops
Talkas "the antithesis of a document" (123) in Regarding the Pain of Others, she does not mention that
digital manipulation is part and parcel of its fabrication. This oversight further illustrates that while
Sontag can acknowledge the constructed nature of this photograph (because this does not challenge
the index, only suggesting that some photographers do lie), she does not acknowledge that Dead
Troops Talk is actually a digital photograph because of the risks that the dubitatively iconic image
brings to the truth claims of the indexical photograph.
Jeff Wall's photograph stages a ghastly scenario where Soviet soldiers killed in an ambush in the war
in Afghanistan in the mid-eighties seem to rise up from the dead to speak of the horrors of war. In
looking at Wall's image, one is reminded of Bataille's "The Practice of Joy Before Death" and its

affirmation of an explosive laughter that cannot recuperate violence, destruction, and general havoc.
One overhears a divine laughter capable of affirming its own demise and ruin when Bataille writes the
following: "There are explosives everywhere that perhaps will soon blind me. I laugh when I think that
my eyes persist in demanding objects that do not destroy them" (Visions of Excess 239).24 In this
hallucinatory vision, one sees the dead soldiers talking, joking, and laughing with each other. One of
these ghoulish characters even holds up a rat to the face of his companion as if to underscore that one
must laugh in the face of death. But Sontag's review of Dead Troops Talk avoids the mention of any
such prankster antics on the part of the dead troops and offers a more somber reading that is devoid of
Bataille's anguished gaiety. While touching on the impossible and on the limits of saying, Sontag
imagines for us what Wall's "stupor troopers" would say about the horrors of war if they were to return
to the land of the living. She does this by staging an archetypical scene that founds community around
the death of others, which recalls Maurice Blanchot's idea that "[i]f the community is revealed by the
death of the other person, it is because death is itself the true community of mortal beings: their
impossible communion" (11). But in stark contrast to Jean-Luc Nancy's "inoperative community" and its
resistance to the communal fusion of the mass subject, Sontag assumes the voice of being-in-common
such that she becomes the medium that channels these dead talkers. (This is a doubly ironic scene
when one considers that an image has been asked to do the talking.) Paradoxically, Sontag intervenes
to speak their silence and to speak for all of us in this rather totalizing and presumptuous gesture:
"What would they have to say to us? 'We'this 'we' is everyone who has never experienced anything
like what they went throughdon't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like.
We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes" (Regarding 125126). Finally, the communication cuts off so that Sontag's transmissions from the dead break down and
lose their subjects: "Can't understand. Can't imagine" (126). From Bataille's perspective, Sontag's
gesture is a classic pedagogical ruse that plays at imagining what cannot be imagined (what comes
from the dead), and that feigns and simulates the teaching of death from the land of the living. To recall
Bataille's remarks on this impossible subject: "We often imagine ourselves in the position of those who
we see dying, but we can only justifiably do this on the condition of living" (The Unfinished System 119).
Sontag turns from the dead to those lucky enough to be alive as she concludes: "Can't understand.
Can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer
who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby,
stubbornly feels. And they are right" (Regarding 126). Following Bataille and his laughter, the last
sentence of Sontag's book offers her final recuperation of the unimaginable (and its sovereignty) into
the service of righteous knowledge (and its mastery).
In these ravings from beyond the grave that signal the incommensurability between the living and the
dead, between the photographic witness and the war victim, as well as between lordship/mastery and
sovereignty, the death sentences of Dead Troops Talk on their loss of subjectivity recall another line
from Bataille's impossible text "The Teaching of Death" (1952). "Of course," Bataille intones, "talking
about death is the most profound practical joke" (119). One can only wonder what a different
text Regarding the Pain of Others would have been if Sontag had incorporated here and elsewhere in
her book the morbidly witty lesson of Dead Troops Talk as they touch upon the impossible and as they
expose themselves and their viewers to Bataille's triple threat of unknowing, laughter, and tears. What if
a more self-ironic Susan Sontag had taken Georges Bataille's and Jeff Wall's profound lesson of
nonknowledge to heart when writing about this image and about all the other images in the book
classified as documentary photographs that cloak themselves in the "reality effect" of the index and, in
this way, hold themselves sacrosanct? But these horrific imagesfor all their ethical demands and their
calls for decisive actioncannot defend themselves against the debilitating effects of unknowledge and
the surge of derision (and indecision) that they bring in their wake and in their unworking. Thus
Bataille's unknowing and his anguished gaiety ponder the profound practical joke that has been played
on Sontag's Regarding. "Reflection on death is much more seriously derisive than living, it is always
scattering our attention, and we speak in vain about exerting ourselves, when death is at stake" (119).
Louis Kaplan

Louis Kaplan is Associate Professor of history and theory of photography and new media at the
University of Toronto and Director of the Institute of Communication and Culture at the University of
Toronto Mississauga. His books include Laszlo Moholy-Nagy: Biographical Writings (1995), American
Exposures: Photography and Community (2005), and The Strange Case of William Mumler, Spirit
Photographer (2008). He is co-editing (with John Paul Ricco) "Regarding Jean-Luc Nancy" as a special
issue of the Journal of Visual Culture (April 2010). Another essay, on "Bataille's Laughter," is
forthcoming in John Welchman, ed., Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art (J.R.P./Ringier).
Endnotes
1. While one might see the criticism of a popular intellectual like Susan Sontag as too easy a target
for the postmodern and poststructuralist arsenal deployed here, it is important not to underestimate
Sontag's influence in contemporary debates in post 9/11 visual culture regarding images of war and
terror. This essay joins a number of recent texts by important voices that have encountered (and
countered) Sontag in scholarly journals. These include Judith Butler (2005), Karen Beckman
(2009), Manisha Basu (2006), and Herta Wolf (2007). Of these accounts, it should be noted that only
Herta Wolf's "The Tears of Photography" takes up Sontag's reading of Bataille and
the lingchi images. Wolf takes Sontag to task for "ignoring the sequential nature of this portrayal of
torture" as well as ignoring "her own postulated obligation to critically assess her reception of images
of torture" (75). More importantly, Wolf emphasizes the "horrifying laughter" (77) provoked by these
images for Bataille in the section of her essay entitled "Agony and Laughter." The ambivalent
combination "of laughter and mourning" (77) as opposites that do not contradict each other drops out
of Sontag's reading completely; this is one of the prime movers of the present essay.
2. Sontag addresses the Abu Ghraib photographs in her 2004 essay "Regarding the Torture of
Others."
3. Eduardo Cadava's keynote address, "Palm Reading: Fazal Sheikh's Handbook of Death," was
delivered at The Photograph Conference in Winnipeg, Canada on March 11, 2004. I return to death's
problematic pedagogyfor both teaching and learningat the conclusion of this essay.
4. This linkage is at the basis of such key photo-theoretical texts as Barthes's Camera Lucida:
Reflections on Photography and Cadava's Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History.
5. Influenced by the thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy, I have explored photography as a discourse of
exposure that exposes our being-in-common and in relation to death and finitude, thereby opening a
Bataillian space of nonknowledge, in American Exposures: Photography and Community in the
Twentieth Century (2005). I refer to this expository approach to photography at various points in
order to contrast it with Sontag's emphasis on the index. For a further analysis of the challenge to
the index offered to theorists like Bazin and Sontag by Nancy's thinking, see my forthcoming essay
"Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy's Recasting of the Photographic Image."
6. The source of the reference to "absolute dismemberment" comes from Hegel's The
Phenomenology of Spirit. Bataille quotes the master: "Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in
absolute dismemberment" (18).
7. I have benefited greatly from Arkady Plotnitsky's essay, "Effects of the Unknowable: Materialism,
Epistemology, and the General Economy of the Body in Bataille" (2001). This includes his nuanced
delineation of Bataille's non-concepts (e.g., sovereignty, general economy, and unknowledge) as
well as a rigorous attention to Bataille's writings as an "encounter with the impossible" (17).
8. Plotnitsky also points out that Bataille's "general economy entails a deployment of restricted
economy" (21) because there is no such thing as "purely unproductive expenditure" (22).

See Bataille, The Accursed Share (Vol. 1) 12. In this way, one avoids the misunderstanding that
Bataille's thought is "uncritically idealizing expenditure, loss, and so forth" (22).
9. Nancy concludes with the insistence that rather than merely scoff at the meaninglessness of
Bataille's project of unknowing, one should read and savor the words of Bataille's exscripted text for
"the absolute meaning of their nonsignification" (65).
10. See the comprehensive website devoted to "Chinese Torture/Supplice chinois: Iconographic,
Historical, and Literary Approaches to an Exotic Representation at http://turandot.ishlyon.cnrs.fr/ [accessed January 11, 2009]. In addition to the reproduction of the infamous images that
are under consideration here, two of Jrme Bourgon's essays discuss Bataille in particular. See
"Bataille et le supplici chinois: erreurs sur la personne" and "Photographing 'Chinese Torture.'"
11. Bataille's Les Larmes d'Eros was originally published by Editions J-J. Pauvert in Paris in 1961.
12. I address the question of "Bataille's Laughter" extensively in an essay in Black Sphinx: On the
Comedic in Modern Art. Ed. John Welchman.
13. Here I follow Derrida's analysis of Bataille's sovereign operation in "From Restricted to General
Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve." Derrida ponders, "Thus it must simulate, after a fashion,
the absolute risk, and it must laugh at this simulacrum" (256). Laughter in the face of death and the
impossible is crucial to Derrida's analysis of Bataille's (non)concept of sovereignty and of the way it
exceeds lordship/mastery. I will return to this point in greater detail below.
14. In the section of Les Larmes d'Eros entitled "Supplice Chinois," Bataille writes in the original
French: "Ce fut cette occasion que je discernai, dans la violence de cette image, une valeur infinie
de renversement" (Oeuvres completes X 627).
15. This is the famous formulation that concludes the third volume of The Accursed Share and that
sets sovereignty on the path of the impossible. "The main thing is always the same: sovereignty is
NOTHING."
16. Derrida situates the laughable situation in which sovereignty finds itself. To fill in the passage
previously cited, "Laughter, which constitutes sovereignty in its relation to death, is not a negativity,
as has been said. And it laughs at itself, a 'major' laughter laughs at a 'minor' laughter, for the
sovereign operation also needs lifethe life that welds the two lives togetherin order to be in
relation to itself in the pleasurable consumption of itself. Thus, it must simulate, after a fashion, the
absolute risk, and it must laugh at this simulacrum" (256).
17. "The hallucinatory appearance of these photographs is dueperhaps because of the injection
of doses of opiumto the fact that the victim looks 'ravished' and ecstatic" (Surya 94).
18. In an e-mail to the author on November 12, 2004, James Elkins writes that his own research
"traces the origin of that '(?)' in [Georges] Dumas's text." Elkins is referring here to the French
psychologist George Dumas's discussion and publication of two of the lingchi images in his Trait de
psychologie. Bataille notes in The Tears of Eros that "one of these shots was reproduced in Georges
Dumas's Trait de psychologie" and that "Dumas insists upon the ecstatic appearance of the victim's
expression" (205). Elkins depicts and discusses another set oflingchi photographs in The Object
Stares Back, 108-115.
19. Bataille, "Method of Meditation," in The Unfinished System of Knowledge, 83. This definition
coincides with Jacques Derrida's reading of the ecstatic in Bataille as the eruption "of sovereign
speech" which is not to be understood as the attainment of another discourse but rather an
acknowledgment of the necessary blindspots that open up every discourse to the loss of its own

meaning to the extent that Bataille's writing becomes the commentary on its own absence of
meaning. For Derrida, "The poetic or the ecstatic is that in every discoursewhich can open itself up to
the absolute loss of its sense, to the (non-)base of the sacred, of nonmeaning, of un-knowledge or of
play" (261). One notes here Bataille's insistence that the sacred is also located at the limit (or the
beyond) of knowledge. If the sacred is linked to ecstasy (or to Sontag's "sacrifice to exaltation"), this
is not to be conflated in any way with the attainment of any knowledge of the sacred, for these are
dependent upon extreme acts of transgression that entail the loss of meaning. If this were not the
case, then such a move would threaten to collapse Bataille's sovereignty into Hegel's lordship yet
again.
20. Bataille's important lecture was delivered on February 9, 1953 at the Collge Philosophique in
Paris.
21. This passage begins with a description of the torture images from the subject position of the
executioner (i.e., from the sadistic point of view) and it marks the intertwining of photography and
haunting. "The Chinese executioner of my photo haunts me: there he is busily cutting off his victim's
leg at the knee. The victim is bound to a stake, eyes turned up, head thrown back, and through a
grimacing mouth you see teeth. The blade's entering the flesh at the knee" (Guilty 38-39).
22. Wall is quoted in Peter Darbyshire. For the on-line version of the part of the interview that deals
with Dead Troops Talk, see http://cancult.ca/2008/05/27/the-globe-talks-to-jeff-wall/[accessed
January 11, 2009].
23. This text and image is found on the website for the retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern in
London entitled Jeff Wall Photographs 1978-2004.
Seewww.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/rooms/room8.shtm [accessed January 11, 2009].
24. This was originally published in Acphale V (June 1939): 1-8. Bataille makes a similar point in
"Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears." "The strangest mystery to be found in laughter is attached to
the fact that we rejoice in something that puts the equilibrium of life in danger. We even rejoice in the
strongest way" (144).
Works Cited
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