Laughter Georges Bataille Laugh and laugh at the sun at the nettles at the stones at the ducks at the rain at the pee-pee of the pope at mommy at a coffin full of shit. Nick Land’s comment (from The Thirst for Annihilation). This poem introduces three of the most crucial themes traversing Bataille’s writing: laughter, excrement, and death. Such “themes” are suspended only momentarily at the lip of philosophical intelligibility, and then released into a euphoric immolation upon the burn-core of literature, disintegrating into a senseless heterogeneous mass. His texts obsessively reiterate that the decomposed body is excremental, and that the only sufficient response to death is laughter. The corpse not only dissolves into a noxious base matter analogous to excrement, it is also in fact defecated as waste by the life of the species.For the corpse is the truth of the biological individual, its consummate superfluity. It is only through the passage into irredeemable waste that the individual is marked with the delible trace of its excess. It is because life is pure surplus that the child of “Laughter”—standing by the side of of his quietly weeping mother and transfixed by the stinking ruins of his father—is gripped by convulsions of horror that explode into the peals of mirth, as uncompromising as orgasm. “Laughter” is, in part, a contribution to the theory of mourning. Laughter is a communion with the dead, since death is not the object of laughter: it is death itself that finds a voice when we laugh. Laughter is that which is lost to discourse, the hemorrhaging of pragmatics into excitation and filth. It is said that on the sabbath the sorcerers would lift their naked asses toward the sun, and would put a flaming sheet of toilet paper in their assholes to cast light on the mass. Intense sensation is what destroys order, and I don’t think it has to do with anything but that. It is essential that people manage to totally destroy the servile state they’re kept in, due to the fact that they built their world, a human world, a world I live in, er, a world I live off, but which either way has a kind of charge to it, something infinitely heavy that is found in all our anxieties, and which need to be removed in one way or another.
Posted on: Tue, 24 Jun 2014 18:29:59 +0000
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