Postlude
Postlude
This book concludes by discussing a short pornographic novel written in the fall of 1941, which Bataille characterizes as key to understanding his theoretical text Inner Experience. Amy Hollywood, in Sensible Ecstasy, describes the opening scene of this novel as something that “looks like a classic moment of fetishization” to bolster her contention that “for Bataille, the female sex is a wound, a terrifying and beautiful mark of castration, of the emergence of life out of laceration.” This scene is crucial to assessing Bataille's representation of women, not because, as Hollywood suggests, it looks like the fetishistic drama, but precisely because it looks quite unlike it, assigning new roles and reactions to the actors, culminating in an alternate climax.
Keywords: pornographic novel, Bataille, Inner Experience, Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, fetishization, female sex
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