Sowoon Jung

This article critically rereads Georges Bataille’s concept of inner experience, focusing on the Chinese torture photograph that captivated him for over thirty years. Bataille viewed the experience of approaching death as exposing a common vulnerability and enabling communication through the collapse of the boundaries between self and other. However, an ethical problem arises in The Tears of Eros (1961) when he reads sadomasochistic eroticism and religious ecstasy into a photograph of a Chinese man whose body is being dismembered by lingchi. Several scholars have criticized Bataille for instrumentalizing the suffering of the non-Western other in order to deconstruct the Western subject, thereby aestheticizing politics. He also overlooked the photograph’s imperialist context and the victim’s historical specificity. Yet, drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy’s account of the inoperative community, I argue that inner experience contains the possibility of a primordial solidarity by lacerating the protective subject and exposing it to the shared finitude and absolute vulnerability of the body. Accordingly, while acknowledging the political limitations inherent in The Tears of Eros, I reinterpret Bataille’s passivity in exposing himself to the devastating affect of the photograph as an ethical precondition for responding to violent images. In particular, rather than opposing his affective experience to a political critique of violence, I argue that the former provides the condition for the latter. An ethics of responding to the suffering of others can emerge only when the laceration of the subject is followed by a critical interrogation of the political conditions that made such violence possible.