Abstract
This essay examines the intersection of Georges Bataille’s novella ‘Story of the Eye’ with Surrealist films, focusing on themes of transgression, desire, and the gaze. Through a psychoanalytic and aesthetic reading, the study traces how Bataille’s erotic narrative and its surreal imagery of eyes, eggs, and violence resurface in Surrealist aesthetics, where ritual, voyeurism, and the cultic theater of desire evoke early avant‑garde cinema. The essay situates these works within twentieth-century modernism and postmodernist debates about representation and objectification, drawing on thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Lacan, and Sontag to examine how the erotic imagination challenges moral codes and how cinema and literature reveal the precarious boundary between vision and violence. By mainly comparing the Story of the Eye and Un Chien Andalou, the paper demonstrates that the eye functions as a trope for both erotic curiosity and the dissolution of boundaries between subject and object, while the narrative spaces of the novel and film create overlapping critiques of bourgeois sexual mores and the commodification of intimacy.
Presenters
Chunyu WangStudent, Experimental Humanities and Social Engagement; Digital Humanities, New York University, New York, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Eroticism, Transgression, Desire, Gaze, Psychoanalysis, Critical Theory
