11- I .

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Luis Bufiuel and Salvador Dali. Film stills

from Un Chlen andolou, 1929. i Les Grands
Films Classiques, Paris. Stills courtesy of
British Film Institute.

Envisioning Surrealism in
Histoire de I'oeil and
La femme 100 tetes
I would like to thank Alyce Mahon for the oppor-
tunity to present an earlier version of this paper
at Body and Soul 2000, the annual conference of
the Association of Art Historians in Edinburgh in
April 2000, and Robert Lubar for invitng me to
present it at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York.
I also thank Robin Greeley and Don LaCoss for
their comments on the draft. Research for this
paper has been partiy funded by the School of
Architecture and Fine Arts, University of Western
Australia, and the University of North Dakota.
The epigraph isfrom G. W. F.Hegel, "Jenaer
Realphilosophie," in Fruhe polidsche Systeme
(Frankfurt Ullstein, 1974); translation quoted
from Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel's Recollection
(Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1985), 7-8; cited in
Slavoj 2ijek, The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso,
1999), 29-30.
1. Georges Bataille, Visions Excess: Selected
Writings, 1927-1939. ed. Allan Stoekl, trans.
Stoekl, Carl R.Lovitt, and Donald M.Leslie, Jr.
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,
1985), 17.
The humari being is thisniaght, this emptyinothing, that contains everything in its simplicity-an
unending wvealth of many representation, images, of which none belongs to him-or which are not
present.This night, this interior of nature, that exists here-pure self-in phantasmagorical represen-
tations, is night all around it, inwhich here shoots a bloody head-there another wvhite ghastly
apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one
looks human beings in the eye-into a night that becomes awvful.
-G.W F.Hegel, "Jenaer Realphilosophie"
In his "Critical Dictionary" entry on the "'Eye"in the September 1929 issue of
Documents Georges Bataille notes the seductive quality of the eye, only to add that
"extreme seduction is probably at the limit of horror." ' As an example of such
horror, he cites the eye-slitting scene from Luis Bufiuel and Salvador Dali's
recently completed film, Un Chien andalou:
In this respect, the eye could be related to the cutting edge, whose appearance
provokes both bitter and contradictory reactions; this is what the makers
of Un Chien andalou must have hideously and obscurely experienced when,
among the first images of the film, they determined the bloody loves of
these two beings. That a razor would cut open the dazzling eye of a young
and charming woman-this is precisely what a young man would have
admired to the point of madness [deraison], a young man
watched by a small, sleeping cat, a young man who by
Raymond Spiteri chance holding in his hand a coffee spoon, suddenly
wanted to take an eye in that spoon.'
Bataille, of course, shared the Surrealists' fascination
with the eye, but what is interesting here is the ambiva-
lence he identifies in the eye-the proximity of seduc-
tion to horror-and its relation to the image. Indeed,
this passage could easily pass as an example of Surreal-
ism that transposes the shock of the lacerated eye from
Un Chien andalou to the image of a spoon enucleating an eye. The proximity of
seduction to horror is also evident in the illustrations that accompanied this
entry: for instance, Bataille juxtaposes an engraving by J.-J. Grandville, First Dream:
Crime and Atonement (1847), with a photograph of the Hollywood starlet Janet
Flynn. The juxtaposition of these images recalls the eye-slitting scene in Un Chien
andalou, particularly the episode in the lower left corner of Grandville's etching,
where the eye approaches a collapsing column. Bataille's discussion of the eye
seems to allude to an element of abyssal negativity that not only transforms the
seductive look into the threatening gaze, but provokes acts of unprecedented
violence-violence also evident in the illustration of the sensational magazine
L'CEil de la police (The Eye of the Police) and Dali's Blood IsSweeter than Honey.
Despite his aversion to idealist philosophy, there is a distinctly Hegelian
aspect to Bataille's discussion of the eye, particularly what Hegel called the
"night of the world"-a night glimpsed "when one looks human beings in
the eye."3 Slavoj 2iiek, in a discussion of the phenomenological tradition from
Immanuel Kant to Martin Heidegger, has recently addressed this aspect in a fasci-
nating account of the deadlock of the transcendental imagination, "the abyss of
radical subjectivity announced in the Kantian transcendental imagination."4 Zizek
5 art journal
 " Derni,s dcssins
dcJ.J. Gramniville Pgeinic Rcvc. - Crine el Expi4tion
AfaFlnb Pitlo"rcsuc. 1847,p.212.
Page from Georges Bataille, Documents I,
no.4 (September 1929),220:J.-J.Grandville,
Frst Dream: Crime andAtonement (1847),
and publicity photograph of Janet Flynn.
Janct llynn. quli
puraitra poclu.neincent au T1isit du CMit
1 X.
unlc
n1tsvenio16 Ia,lsise (IC New Ahxil
discusses the aporia of the transcendental imagination as a way to articulate the
imagination's role in giving ontological consistency to subjective experience.
Whereas traditional accounts describe the imagination as an agency that either
passively receives images from the senses or actively posits images, the transcen-
dental imagination cannot be located fully within this structure: it is both active
and passive. These two aspects are present in Kant's phenomenology, which
nonetheless places the accent on the imagination's power of synthesis, the
three-step passage from the diversity of pure intuition to conceptual cognition
through the synthetic power of the imagination. However, for 2izek, "Kant's
notion of imagination silently passes over a crucial 'negative' feature": that is,
"imagination qua the 'activity of dissolution."' Kant downplays the imagination's
destructive potential to focus on its constructive, synthetic power. Hegel, by con-
trast, acknowledges the violence of the primordial "presynthetic imagination,"
which contains a negative, disruptive feature that gives it the power to dismem-
ber immediate perception into a series of partial objects. At any moment the
imagination may open onto an experience of abyssal negativity that would dissolve
the ontological consistency of the world into a series of spectral images: as Hegel
notes, "here shoots a bloody head-there another white ghastly apparition."
6 WINTER 2004
Page from Georges Bataille, Documents 1,
no. 4 (September 1929),217:L'Eil de la
police and Salvador Dali, Blood Is Sweeter
than Honey, 1927. @ 2004 Salvador Dali,
Gala-Salvador Dali FoundationlArtists
Rights Society (ARS), NewYork.

L'¢il d&1 oic,pages

O , de la couerture onrmolcurs. Nt 26.
- 1908,

2. Ibid., translation modified. Bataille adds in a

footnote: 'This film can be distinguished from
banal avant-garde productions, with which one
might be tempted to confuse it, in that the screen-
play predominates. Several very explicit facts
appear in successive order, without logical con-
nection it is true, but penetratng so far into hor-
ror that the spectators are caught up as directly
as they are in adventure films. Caught up and
even precisely caught by the throat, and without
artifice; do these spectators know, in fact, where
they-the authors of this film, or people like
them-will stop? If Bufnuel himself, after the film-
ing of the slit-open eye, remained sick for a week
.. . how then can one not see to what extent
horror becomes fascinatng, and how it alone is
brutal enough to break everything that sufles?"
Ibid., 19, n. 1. SalvadorDali,L1k an cst plus doux quc le mid (1927).
3. Hegel, iJenaer Realphilosophie," cited in Ziiek, Bareclonc, Coll. pnivie.
29-30.
4. Zizek, 23.
5. A link between German idealism and What do these questions have to do with Surrealism, a movement that
Surrealism can be found in German Romantcism
and French Symbolism, two movements that
seems far removed from the ontological subtleties of Kant or Hegel?The connec-
profoundly influenced the Surrealist sensibility. tion is found in Surrealism's valorization of the imagination.5 The primordial
6. Max Ernst, La femme 100 tetes (Paris: Editons "activity of dissolution" of the presynthetic imagination is operative in Surreal-
du Carrefour, 1930); English translaton by
Dorothea Tanning, The Hundred-Headless Woman ism, not only in the so-called dissident Surrealism commonly associated with
(New York Braziller, 1981); Histoire de l'eil par Bataille, but also, albeit to a lesser degree, in the practice of orthodox Surrealists
Lord Auch (Paris: 1928), repr. in Georges Bataille,
CEuvres completes I: Premiers Ecrits, 1922-1940 associated with Andre Breton. To demonstrate this point I will discuss two works:
(Paris: Gallimard, 1970), 9-78; English translauon Max Ernst's collage-cycle La femme loo tetes (The Hundred-HeadlessWoman) and Georges
byjoachim Neugroschel as The Story of the Eye
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Bataille's erotic narrative Histoire de ]'cil (The Story of the Eye). 6 Immediately, it will
7. See, for instance, 'Corpus Delicti," in Rosalind appear that I have selected examples of so-called "orthodox" and "dissident"
Krauss and Jane Livingstone, L'Amour fou:
Photography and Surrealism (New York Abbeville
Surrealism, inevitably recalling the Breton-Bataille polemic that has assumed a
Press, 1985); Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty pivotal role in recent accounts of Surrealism. 7 However, my intention here is not
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993); Rosalind
to rehearse arguments about Bataille's materialism and Breton's idealism, the
Krauss and Yves-Alain Bois, Formless: A User's
Manual (New York Zone, 1997). uncanny, or the role of the informe; rather, I want to focus on the deadlock of the

7 art journal
Andr6 Masson. Illustration for Histoire de
l'"el par LordAuch, 1928. Lithograph. 5"A(. x
4'% in. (I4.7 x 11.6 cm). Source Bibliotheque
nationale de France. 0 2004 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NewYorldADAGP, Paris.
8. The Breton-Bataille polemic is conventionally
interpreted on a theoretical level as a conflict
between Breton's idealism and Bataille's 'base"
materialism; I would suggest, however, that the
polemic needs to be understood on a sociological
level, in which the principal cause was less theo-
retcal differences than Breton's and Bataille's
proximity within the cultural avant-garde. This
strategy would allow a more nuanced reading of
the polemic.
9. Roland Barthes has discussed the pivotal role of
globular objects in the unfolding of The Story of
the Eye in his essay, "The Metaphor of the Eye."
repr. in Bataille, The Story of the Eye, 119-27; for
a criuque of Barthes's essay see Michael Halley,
". . .And aTruth for a Truth: Barthes on Bataille,"
in On Bataille: Critical Essays, ed. Leslie Anne
Boldt-lrons (Albany SUNY Press, 1995), 285-94.
10. Bataille, The Story of the Eye. 66-67, transla-
tion modified; Bataille's ellipsis.
I1. According to Freud the basis of a fetsh lay
in the disavowal of castration. See Sigmund
Freud, "Fetishism," in 7he Standard Edition of the
Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud,
vol. 21, ed. James Sutachey (London: Hogarth
Press and the Institute of Psycho-Analysis,
1953-66), 147-57.
imagination that both these works seek to render-a deadlock, I would argue,
anterior to the question of orthodox or dissident Surrealism. 8 Indeed, both The
Story of the Eye and The Hundred-HeadlessWoman address a deadlock similar to that of
the transcendental imagination through the motif of the eye, and it is this motif
that links Surrealism with the Hegelian presynthetic "night of the world" and
Bataille's characterization of the eye as the limit of horror.
. . .
Georges Bataille originally published The Story of the Eye in 1928 under the pseudo-
nym Lord Auch in a limited edition of 134 copies, with eight lithographic illus-
trations by Andre Masson. The first-person narrative recounts the lugubrious
erotic adventures of two adolescents-Simone and the unnamed male narrator-
and their erotic obsession with a series of pale globular objects: a saucer of milk,
eggs, bull's testes, and the eye. 9 The narrative is broadly divided into two sec-
tions: the first section, set on the Normandy coast, culminates with the death of
Marcelle, a young friend of Simone and the narrator. The narrative opposes the
impure and debauched Simone to Marcelle's innocence and piety, qualities that
are corrupted through contact with Simone's and the narrator's anarchic desire:
Marcelle is first interned in an asylum, then driven to suicide after becoming
entwined in Simone's and the narrator's erotic obsessions. The second section
takes place in Spain, where Simone and the narrator flee after Marcelle's death,
aided by Sir Edmund, an English libertine. After a bullfight in which the famous
toreador Granero is fatally wounded, his right eye enucleated by the bull's horn,
the narrative culminates in a violent orgy in a Spanish church: here the male nar-
rator, Simone, and Sir Edmund kidnap, rape, and murder a priest.Yet these events
are merely the pretext for the notorious final tableau: not yet satiated, Simone
demands the eye of the unfortunate priest, which Sir Edmund calmly excises and
presents to her; the narrator then forcefully copulates with Simone while Sir
Edmund rolls the eyeball between their bodies:
Simone finally left me, grabbed the beautiful eyeball from the hands of the
tall Englishman, and with a steady and regular pressure from her hands, she
slid it into her slavering flesh, in the midst of the fur. And then she promptly
drew me over, clutching my neck between her arms and smashing her lips
on mine so forcefully that I climaxed without touching her and my come
[foutre] spat all over her fur.
Rising to my feet, I spread Simone's thighs so that she lay stretched on
her side; I then found myself before what-I imagine-I had always been
waiting for, as the guillotine awaits a neck to slice. My eyes, it seemed, were
standing erect from horror; I saw in Simone's hairy vagina, the pale blue eye
of Marcelle, watching me, weeping tears of urine.Threads of fuck in the
steaming fur managed to give this lunar vision a final character of disastrous
sorrow. I held Simone's thighs open and burning urine streamed out from
beneath the eye, falling on the lower thigh . . . '°
It is difficult to know what to make of this scene, which seems to confound
the conventional Freudian narrative of fetishism and sexual difference." It repre-
sents the culmination of the accelerating violence of the preceding narrative,
staging an encounter with the real, the flesh from which all life originates, by
8 WINTER 2004
9 art journal

12. Cf. Jacques Lacan's commentary on Freud's
dream of Irma's injection: "There isa horrendous
discovery here, that the flesh one never sees, the
foundation of things, the other side of the head,
of the face, the secretory glands par excellence,
the flesh from which everything exudes, at the
very heart of the mystery, the flesh in as much as
it issuffering, isformless, in as much as its form
in itself issomething which provokes anxiety.
Spectre of anxiety, identificaton of anxiety, the
final revelation of you are this-You are this, which
isso far from you, this which is the ultimate formless-
ness." Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book I:
The Ego in Freud's Theory and in the Technique of
Psychoanalysis, 1954-1955, ed. Jacques-Alain
Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1988), 154-55.
13. On the informe, see Krauss and Bois, Formless-
for an alternative reading of the role of the
informe, see Georges Didi-Huberman, La Ressem.
blance informe. Le Gai Savoir visuel selon Georges
Bataille (Paris: Macula, 1995); and Pierre Fedida,
'The Movement of the Informe," trans. M.Stone-
Richards and Ming Tiampo, Qui Parle 10 (1996):
49-62.
14. Ernst remained closely associated to the
"orthodox' Surrealist group around Breton untl
1938, and Breton contributed a preface to La
femme 100 tetes upon its publicaton in 1930; see
Andr6 Breton, 'Notice to the Reader of The
Hundred-Headless Woman," in Break of Day, trans.
Mark Polizzotti and Mary Ann Caws (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 45-50.
15. Bataille, "The Big Toe," in Vsions of Excess, 23.
This aversion to poetic transpositon was one
reason why Documents employed photographic
illustraton as a counterpoint to descriptve prose,
precisely because photographic illustrations
appeared to suspend the process of symbolic
mediaton.
conflating the eye as the origin of subjectivity (the "window of the soul") with
the female genitals as the site of castration and sexual difference. "2
In the accompanying illustration, Masson has restaged the scene to focus
the beholder's attention on Marcelle's eye. He depicts the baroque interior of
the church with four figures (Simone, the narrator, Sir Edmund, and the dead
priest); the recumbent Simone is flanked by the standing figures of Sir Edmund
and the narrator, who lean back in spasms of ecstasy so that their heads are
cropped at the eye; the only full head that appears in the image is that of the
dead priest, a thin stream of blood flowing from his empty eye-socket, while
the only eye that appears is that of the priest, relocated to Simone's vagina,
now animated by the memory of Marcelle.The stream of urine that flows
from Marcelle's eye, which echoes the emissions of Sir Edmund and the priest,
emphasizes the phallic character of the eye motif.Yet there is also something
reticent about the eye's phallicism; whereas the phallicism associated with the
male characters is highly visible and localized in the central third of the compo-
sition, thus emphasizing the horizontal axis of the composition, Simone's phal-
lus is reduced to the oval of an eye. Perhaps the best way to describe this effect
is as an instance of anamorphosis, in which the (male) beholder misperceives
the size of Simone's phallus because of his position directly in front of the scene;
yet, equally, this eye "ejaculates" when the beholder acknowledges its gaze.
It could be argued that Bataille's conflation of eye and female genitals is the con-
summate operation of the informe, but this operation does not escape a certain
economy of meaning. IsTo establish this point I want to introduce an image from
Ernst's The Hundred-HeadlessWoman: Germinal, my sister, the hundred-headless wvoman. (In the
back-ground, in the cage, the Eternal Father). There is a subtle parallel between this image
and the final tableau in The Story of the Eye: the figure plays with the eye of a head,
placed in her lap over her genitals. Now, admittedly, there is a striking difference
between the two images, but both establish an equation between the eye, castra-
tion, and the female genitals, a logic reinforced by the figure's exposed breast in
Ernst's image. A comparison with Masson's illustration also reveals opposed com-
positional strategies. Whereas Ernst's collage is structured around the central fig-
ure of Germinal, who occupies a large proportion of the composition and looks
out at the beholder, Masson's illustration is structured around a central void, with
the figures pushed out toward the edges of the composition. Masson depicts the
scene as a play of mechanical forces, seeking to render the event in its actuality,
while Ernst relies on a psychological reading of the figure as a malevolent girl-child.
At this point it would be easy to object that, rather than establishing any
affinity between Bataille and Ernst, this comparison merely reinforces the dis-
tance between their respective positions. 4 For is not Ernst's collage an example
of the type of poetic transposition that substitutes the idea for material reality
that Bataille would criticize in Surrealism? Had not Bataille called for "a direct
and explicit questioning of seductiveness, without taking into account poetic con-
coctions that are, ultimately, nothing but a diversion," and stated: "A return to
reality does not imply any new acceptances, but means that one is seduced in a
base manner, without transpositions and to the point of screaming"?'s Even if
this point is conceded, what is interesting here is the degree to which The Story of
10 WINTER 2004
Max Ernst. Germinal, my sister, the
hundred-headless woman. (In the back-
ground, In the cage, the Eternal Father), 1929.
Plate 23 in La femme 100 tetes (Paris:
Editions du Carrefour, 1929). 5'4%x 5'!. in.
(13.5 x 13.3 cm). @ 2004 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NewYorWADAGP, Paris

I I art journal

16. Sigmund Freud, "Fetishism," 152-53.
17. Bataille, Histoire de I'ceil. 13.
18. The English translation renders cul as "cunt"
rather than "arse," thus sacrificing this aspect of
the French texL
19. Isthis not the significance of Marcelle's eye,
since when Marcelle succumbed to herjouissance,
she rapidly descended into madness and suicide?
20. Ernst not only used repetition to confer a
degree of unity to the cycle, but the eye-motif
lay at the very heart of La femme 100 tetes, its
spherical shape the nexus of an extended chain
of metaphors. The motif of the eye appears in
the globe in Crime ou miracle: un homme complet
(pl. I), the masked face in L'immaculee conception
(pl. 12), the globe-fantfme (pl. 72,75, and 76), the
spherical object ( pl. I08), and the eggs (pl. 132
and 133). This list isby no means comprehensive.
On the role of circular objects in The Story of the
Eye see Barthes, "The Metaphor of the Eye."
the Eye is already ensnared in the very logic of poetic transposition that Bataille
would criticize in Surrealism.
To illustrate this point it would help to draw out some features of the final
tableau in The Story of the Eye, particularly its perverse reworking of the Freudian
scenario of castration anxiety and fetishism. According to Freud, the basis of a
fetish lay in the disavowal of castration: "The fetish is a substitute for the woman's
(the mother's) penis that the little boy once believed in and ... does not want to
give up." 16 Bataille's tableau reworks three aspects of this definition:
i. Simone first demands the priest's eye, in effect symbolically "castrating"
the priest's corpse; then she literally substitutes this phallus for the narrator's
penis. If her desire is related to castration, it is a desire for the severed organ,
detached from the order of nature; that is, her desire is expressed on the
symbolic level.
iB.Whereas the goal of fetishism is to disavow the absence of the maternal
phallus, here the narrator wimesses the return of this phallus. However, this
return is as traumatic as its initial absence. This trauma is registered in a
peculiar way: what the narrator sees lodged in Simone's vagina is not any
eye, and certainly not the eye of the priest-but rather Marcelle's eye.
Indeed, the imagination intervenes at this precise moment, transforming
the dead eye of the priest into Marcelle's living eye.
iii.This scene also contravenes another convention of the text. On the first
page, the narrator signals his preference for the word cul (arse) to describe
Simone's genitals: "le plus joli des noms du sexe." 17Cul represents an infan-
tile confusion between vagina and anus, a confusion absent from the more
explicitly gendered con (cunt).'8 Like the fetish, cul disavows sexual differ-
ence.Yet in the scene of Marcelle's eye the narrator substitutes the descrip-
tive term vagin (vagina) for cul.
What Bataille stages here is precisely the deadlock of the imagination. The
eye functions as a speculum that not only holds open the abyss of the visceral
flesh of the preontological void, but simultaneously returns Marcelle's gaze. The
imagination does not simply intervene at the point where the visceral truth of
feminine jouissance is about to be unveiled, but it is precisely this intervention that
preserves the fantasy of feminine jouissance. Marcelle's eye exists for the narrator;
it is how the maternal phallus-if this is what it is-appears to him, not for
Simone (for whom it does not appear but is experienced on a tactile level).
Indeed, the narrator knows nothing of Simone's jouissance, which remains as
opaque as a dead priest's eye. 19 Here Bataille stages the proximity of seduction
and horror: the horror of the gaze returned by the eye in Simone's vagina, and
the seduction of that gaze being identified with Marcelle's subjectivity.
* * .
In 1929 Ernst published The Hundred-HeadlessWoman, the first of three "collage-nov-
els" he would complete during 1929-33. Like The Story of the Eye, the "narrative"
of The Hundred-HeadlessWoman revolves around the circulation of a series of circular
objects like eggs, eyes, spheres, and wheels. 2 0 Images of blindness and symbolic
castration also abound in The Hundred-HeadlessWoman, but for Ernst they are related
12 WINTER 2004
Max Ernst. The eye without eyes, the hun-
dred-headless woman keeps her secret, 1929.
Plate 133 in La femme 100 tetes (Paris:
Editions du Carrefour, 1929). 4'M. x 5% in.
(12.5 x 13.5 cm).O 2004Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NewYorWADAGP, Paris.
21. This isa recurring theme in Ernst's work;
see, for instance, Les hommes n'en sauront rien
(1923). See Elizabeth M.Legge, Max Ernst The
Psychoanalytical Sources (Ann Arbor UMI
Research Press, 1989), and M. E.Warlick, Max
Ernst and Alchemy: A Magidan inSearch of Myth
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001).
to the theme of poetic revelation, a theme addressed in the book's last chapter.
Seven of the chapter's eighteen plates were based on the theme of "She keeps her
secret," which revolves around images of physical blindness and poetic insight.2 '
The plate The eye without eyes, the hundred-headless voman keeps her secret establishes the
basic topos: a female figure places her outstretched hand over the eye of a male
figure, who is flanked by a child and animals. This basic motif is repeated against
different backgrounds in subsequent plates: an egg floating on the ocean, a nat-
ural landscape, and a bedroom, suggesting different historical periods. The ges-
ture of enucleation, which first appeared in Germinal, my sister, the hundred-headless
wvoman, represents an obvious allusion to castration anxiety; yet this anxiety plays
an ambivalent role in the collage cycle.
One difficulty with The Hundred-HeadlessWoman is related to the role of ambiguity
13 art journal
Max Ernst. The eye without eyes, the hundred-
headless woman and Loplop return to the
savage state and cover [recouvrent] the eyes
oftheir faithfulbirds with fresh leaves, 1929.
Plate 136 in La femme 100 tetes (Paris:
Editions du Carrefour, 1929). 6Y. x 4% in.
(16 x 11.8 cm). © 2004 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NewYorkWADAGP, Paris.
22. Breton, Break of Day. 48.
23. The original French capton reads: L'Leil sans
yeux, la femme 100 tetes et Loplop retoument d l'e
tat sauvage et recouvrent de feuilles fraTches les yeux
de leurs fid8les aiseaux.'
24. Blindness was also an element of the Oedipus
myth: "The blinding in the legend of Oedipus ...
stands for castration." Sigmund Freud, The
Interpretation of Dreams, in Standard Edition, vol. 5,
398, n.l.
25. The mouif of regaining eyes from leaves recalls
the source textures of Ernst's frottages, particu-
larly the nervations of a leaf: see, for instance,
"Les Eclairs au-dessous de quartorze ans," pl. 24
of Histoire naturelle (Paris: Edituons Bucher, 1926).
26. This was the target of Breton's critque of the
realist attitude in the Manifesto of Surrealism; see
Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism. trans.
Richard Seaver and Helen R.Lane (Ann Arbor
University of Michigan Press, 1972), 6-10.
27. The three subsequent plates continue the
'She keeps her secret" theme, but the aspect of
revelation isprogressively obscured. They repeat
the industrial setting of pl. 138, but the eye motif
has been displaced in favor of bodies suspended
from the scaffolding. Similarly, the tiues have con-
tracted to Elie garde son secret (pl. 139-40) and
EJle le garde (pl. 141). Whereas the homopho-
nous phrase "L'oeil sans yeux, la femme 100 tetes
garde son secret," which was based on the alliter-
aton of sans, cent, and son, isopen to multple
interpretation. "Elle garde son secret" and "Elle le
garde" progressively reduce the connotations of
the phrase from "She keeps her secret" or "She
keeps a hundred secrets" to "She keeps it' or
"She keeps him."
in the cycle. Ernst carefully constructed the cycle of images to frustrate interpre-
tation-what Breton called the "will towards complete disorientation" in the
book's preface-so that the act of interpretation would continue the process of
creation. 22 An example of this strategy is evident in The eye without eyes, the hundred-
headless woman and Loplop return to the savage state and cover [recouvrent] the eyes of their
faithful birds with fresh leaves, which provides an important clue to the significance
of the "She keeps her secret" theme. This plate depicts a male and a female figure
surrounded by several gigantic birds, against a backdrop of lush vegetation.
The plate repeats the enucleation gesture of the previous plates, yet reverses the
gender of the protagonist: the female figure languidly rests amid the vegetation,
while the male figure, whose head has assumed simian features, averts his eyes
as he extends one hand toward the bird's eye, and places his other hand in the
bird's open beak. Although both these gestures recall the threat of castration, the
title provides the key to the image, particularly the double meaning of the verb
recouvrent, which is the third person plural of both recouvrir (to cover) and recouvrer
(to regain).2 3 Thus, in the first case the title would read: "The hundred-headless
woman and Loplop return to the savage state and cover the eyes of their faithful
birds with fresh leaves"; in the second case it would read: "The hundred-headless
woman and Loplop return to the savage state and regain the eyes of their faithful
birds from the fresh leaves."
The eye-motif in The Hundred-HeadlessWoman functions as an image of both
revelation and concealment, vision and blindness. If the blinding of an eye is
interpreted in a strict Freudian sense in terms of symbolic castration and sexual
difference, then the image establishes an equation between vision and the phal-
lus, on the one hand, and blindness and the absent phallus, on the other hand.24
Thus the first interpretation suggests a scene of castration and blindness: the
figure's gesture is one of enucleation, the bird is about to bite his hand, and the
title suggests that he covers the bird's eye with leaves.Yet this oedipal gaze is
itself a form of blindness that drains the world of mystery and enigma, reducing
it to an object of rational knowledge.The second interpretation suggests a scene
of poetic revelation: in this context the male figure recovers the bird's eye from
the leaves, in effect restoring sight to the blind. 25 This interpretation not only
suspends the Freudian allusions to castration, but suggests the existence of other
forms of knowledge capable of challenging the proportion and ratio of bour-
geois culture.?6
A number of themes in The Hundred-HeadlessWoman converge in the following
plate, again entitled The eye without eyes, the hundred-headless woman keeps her secret, which
depicts a female figure with a large eye in her abdomen looking at an ambigu-
ous, anthropomorphic form set in an industrial environment. The workers in the
background carry out their labors oblivious to the foreground, where the female
figure contemplates an anthropomorphic form, placing her hand over its head
in a repetition of the enucleation gesture.Yet this figure lacks eyes; it is simply an
inchoate texture almost devoid of human physiognomy. Once again the signifi-
cance of the anthropomorphic figure is ambivalent: on one hand it may have
been blinded and transformed into stone; on the other hand, its evocative texture
recalls Ernst's frottages, suggesting another site of poetic revelation. 2 7 Furthermore,
the association of the eye with the woman's abdomen conflates eye and womb,
suggesting the matrix of the female body as the site of poetic revelation, a theme
14 WINTER 2004
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Max Ernst. The eye without eyes, the hun-
dred-headless woman keeps hersecret, 1929.
Plate 138 in La femme 100 tetes (Paris:
Editions du Carrefour, 1929). 5V/x 6 in.
(134 x 153 cm).@2004 Artists Rights
Society (ARS), NewYorWADAGP, Paris.
28. Sigmund Freud, Leonardo da Vncnd and a
Metnory of His Childhood, in Standard Edition,
vol. II ,57-137.
29. On Emst's involvement with Leonardo's vul-
ture, see Wemer Spies, Max Ernst-Loplop: The
Artist's Other Self (London: Thames and Hudson,
1983), 101-06.
30. 'Je suis tente d'y voir l'exploitation de la
rencontre fortuite de deux realites distantes sur un
plan non-convenant . .. ou pour user d'un terme
plus court, la culture des effets d'un depaysement
that also recalls the immaculate-conception theme of the opening chapter of The
Hundred-Headless Woman.
A second glance at this image reveals a third figure. Ernst has collaged a
beaklike protuberance on the left-hand corner of the eye, so that the eye motif
also suggests the figure of a bird emerging from the woman's skirt, like the
famous vulture hidden in folds of drapery in Leonardo's Madonna and Child with
St.Anne discussed by Freud. 8 Ernst had earlier alluded to this vulture in the paint-
ing ThelVirgin Mary Punishing the Infant Jesus beforeThreeWitnesses (AB, PE, and the Painter). 29
Indeed, in this context the collage exemplifies Ernst's description of the mecha-
nism of collage: by grafting the eye-motif onto the woman's figure, Ernst pro-
duces a "fortuitous meeting" between these elements: woman and eye engage in
a "pure act like that of love," which engenders the bird. 30The sexual character of
the image is highlighted by the nude female figure swinging from the rafters,
who approaches the bird's phallic beak.
16 WINTER 2004

systematique.... La transmutation complete
suivie d'un acte pur comme celul d'amour, se
produira forcement toutes les fois que les condi-
tons seront rendues favorables par les faits don-
nees: accouplement de deux realites en apparence
inaccouplables sur un plan qui en apparence ne leur
convient pas." Ernst, "Au-delA de la peinture,"
Ecitures (Paris: Gallimard,'1970), 253-56.
31. There are clear parallels here with the role
of repetiton in the work of Lacan: as the missed
encounter in which the automaton of representa-
tion encounters the tuche of the Real. See Jacques
Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-
analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan
Sheridan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), par-
ticularly 48-64.
32. The principal cause behind this reading lay
in the polemics on Surrealism in Tel Quel during
1968-73, which valorized the writings of Bataille
and Antonin Artaud against those of Breton. This
reading would significantly influence the reception
of Bataille in the English-speaking world. On Tel
Quel, see Philippe Forest, Histoire de Tel Quel,
1960-1982 (Paris: Seuil, 1995).
33. See, for instance, Foster, Compulsive Beauty,
106, and Michel Surya, Georges Bataille: An Intellec-
tual Biography, trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and
Michael Richardson (London: Verso, 2002), 106.
34. Letter from Andre Breton to Simone Breton,
dated August 18, 1928, cited inAndr6 Breton: La
beaut6 convulsive, exh. cat., ed. Agnes Angliviel de
la Beaumelle and Isabelle Monod-Fontaine (Paris:
Mus6e national d'art modeme, 1991), 188.
In the wake of the foregoing analysis, it is perhaps time to restate my argument
that the positions of Bataille and Ernst (and by extension Breton) are comple-
mentary rather than antagonistic. Although it is easy to characterize Ernst's use of
collage as an example of poetic transposition and contrast it with the uncompro-
mising character of Bataille's writing, to do so would sacrifice what is truly radi-
cal in the travail of the image in Surrealism. The key to a profound reading of
both the The Story of the Eye and The Hundred-HeadlessWoman is to recognize the eye as
an image of the imagination in its disruptive and constructive aspects, of seduc-
tion and horror. The eye is a highly charged object, and the beholder experiences
assaults against it viscerally-something readily evident to any spectator of Un
Chien andalou. In Surrealism, however, it functions as a veil over the preontological
realm of part-objects, the H-Iegelian "night of the world." Any attempt to rend
this veil only results in blindness and castration; yet as a veil the eye also acts as
a screen upon which fantasies can be projected, as in the example of Marcelle's
eye in The Story of the Eye or in the final chapter of The Hundred-HeadlessWoman.
Bataille would repeatedly attempt to take the impossible step beyond con-
ceptual thought to disclose the mechanism behind symbolization, the place
where the image emerges from the abyss of nothingness. 3 ' In keeping with the
dualistic character of Bataille's thought, he opposes rational knowledge to the
immediacy of experience, discovering in the latter something that exceeds the
limits of reason (and thus representation).Yet Bataille is unable to articulate this
experience directly without recourse to the agency of the imagination, albeit as
the "activity of dissolution" that 2izek discerns in the deadlock of the transcen-
dental imagination. In The Story of the Eye, he renders this deadlock through the
figure of Marcelle's eye, and it is at this point that Bataille's work is closest to
Surrealism. Similarly, in The Hundred-HeadlessWoman Ernst turns to the image of
the eye to render the deadlock of the Surrealist imagination through the theme
of vision and blindness.Yet in place of Bataille's attempt to arrest the process
of symbolization, Ernst reconfigures the eye on a thematic level as a symbol of
revelation, transforming blindness into illumination.
Finally, what does this reading contribute to our understanding of the Breton-
Bataille polemic? I believe it demonstrates an underlying affinity between Bataille
and Surrealism, the degree to which his thought was consonant with Surrealism.
Since the late 196os discussions of Surrealism have repeatedly emphasized the
distance between Bataille and Surrealism.32 What these accounts share is the
assumption that Breton was automatically and innately hostile to anything trans-
gressive. Indeed, it is commonly assumed that Breton rejected The Story of the Eye as
an example of the base materialism to which he was constitutionally adverse. 33
Yet, surprisingly, Breton was an enthusiastic reader of the book upon its publica-
tion, as recorded in a letter to his wife, dated August 1928:
Just published, in the same collection as Aragon's book [i.e., Le con d'lrene],
is a book by Bataille, by Georges Bataille: Histoire de l'eil, par Lord Auch. It is
absolutely marvelous. It is not only the most beautiful erotic book that I
know, but it is also one of the seven or so most beautiful books that I have
read.... The intellectual event of the year.34
17 art journal
 High praise indeed.This is 1928, the year Maurice Nadeau described as the
"year of achievements": Breton had just published Le Surrealisme et la peinture and
Nadja, Louis Aragon had published Traite du style, Ernst and Joan Mir6 had just held
successful exhibitions. 3 5Yet against these achievements, Breton still describes
The Story of the Eye as "absolutely marvelous" and "the intellectual event of the
year." If nothing else, this letter underlines the proximity between Bataille and
Surrealism.3 6
Many themes in this paper recall recent discussions of the uncanny in
Surrealism, but I want to distance my interpretation from these readings. It is not
that these readings are incorrect, but rather that they do not go far enough; they
succeed in transposing Surrealism from an aesthetic context to a psychoanalytical
context, yet evade the socio-political dimension that was always central to the
Surrealist enterprise. Nor do I claim that my interpretation escapes the uncanny,
since it undoubtedly revolves around failure and repetition. What I'm attempting
to do is simply open the terms of the debate, to identify the articulation between
the aesthetic, the social, and the political in Surrealism, and, more important, to
suggest that Surrealism's failure was as much sociological as psychological. In
practical terms this means engaging with the minutiae of historical experience,
recovering the contemporaneity of the Surrealist enterprise: that is, to encounter
the deadlock of the Surrealist imagination anew with the hope that its promise
will one day be redeemed.

Raymond Spiteri isLecturer in Art History at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He
coedited Surrealism, Politics, and Culture (Ashgate. 2003) and is currently working on a study of the
Breton-Bataille polemic.

35. Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism,

trans. Richard Howard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 143; Andre Breton,
Conversations: The Autobiography of Surrealism,
trans. Mark Polizzotti (New York. Marlowe,
1993), 105.
36. It isworth noing that Simone Breton shared
her name with the protagonist in The Story of the
Eye, which may have colored Breton's perception
of the narrative. Furthermore, Breton's acrimo-
nious divorce from Simone in 1929 contributed
to the polarization of the Surrealist movement
into antagonistic factions, since the Surrealists
who sided with Simone would also form the
nucleus of the 'dissident" Surrealist group (Max
Morise. Raymond Queneau, Robert Desnos,
Jacques Baron, Roland Tual) who would gather
around Documents after the publication of
Breton's Second Manifesto in December 1929.
On Breton's divorce, see Mark Polizzotti, Revolu-
tion of the Mind: The life of Andre Breton (London:
Bloomsbury, 1996),308-24.

18 WINTER 2004
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TITLE: Envisioning Surrealism in Histoire de l’œil and La

femme 100 têtes
SOURCE: Art J 63 no4 Wint 2004
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