The Tears of Eros Paperback – January 1, 2001

The book begins by printing letters that document an illness that became fatal for Georges Bataille as the book was printed, possibly in 1961, and Bataille died in 1962, while JFK was still living as President of the United States of America. A painting from thousands of years before of Joseph and Potiphar's wife reminds me of Vince Foster because Potiphar's wife held on to Joseph's robe to use it as evidence against Joseph to get him into prison in Egypt. Vince Foster escaped modern prisons by being deputy White House Counsel from January 2, 1993 until July 20, 1993, when travelgate and Whitewater wishes of the first lady had a vertiginous connection to his death. Asseveration of vertiginous ineptitude springs from an examination of page 53.the very structure of human beingsVeiled, in the face of oppositionsthat vertiginously disclose themselves,in these newly inaccessible depthswhich are, for me,"the extremes of the possible."Sade and Goya lived at the same time in France and Spain. The French kept Sade in prison for many years and Goya was living in a prison of deafness, which made him heedless of what everybody said about his pictures.

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The Tears of Eros is a fitting culmination of Bataille's search for value through excess. Although Bataille addresses many of the themes touched on here in greater detail in earlier works (Eroticism, The Accursed Share), The Tears of Eros is notable for the significant amount of artwork included to illustrate the connection Bataille develops between sex, death, expenditure, and sovereign value. This is a "must-read" for any serious student of contemporary philosophy and--for that matter--any who would insist that value resides elsewhere than in a petty, bourgeois individualism.

I cannot understand why the fuss over this book. The text is disappointing: repetitive, opinionated, insubstantial, more like desultory notes than anything else. The images are all black-and-white and poorly reproduced, and again repetitive and disconnected.There is too much horror in it. Bataille associates violence, horror, terror, pain, cruelty, with eroticism, madness, ecstasy, the sacred. Perhaps intense cultivation of pleasure creates a corresponding accumulative cultivation of pain. Why should this be so? I don't know except that we have what it takes to explore and we can explore in all and any direction. It's as simple as that.It's possible to write books and essays that are lucid and meaningful and it's possible to write "The Tears of Eros".

The Tears of Eros does no credit to Georges Bataille nor to its publisher. It's not so much an essay as a loose assemblage of remarks, most of which are merely repetitions of points made at greater length, and with much greater force and cohesion, in Bataille's Eroticism. These remarks (repetitious in themselves) are preceded by a self-regarding preface written by Bataille's editor, Joseph Marie Lo Duca, plus nine pages of letters written by the ailing Bataille during the creation of The Tears of Eros. As for the main part of the book, it consists mostly of poor-quality reproductions of photos, prints and paintings, of variable relevance to the text, and sloppily captioned (did nobody at City Lights know the difference between Lucrezia and Lucretius, for instance?). The notoriety of this book rests chiefly on its inclusion of photographs showing the execution, by mutilation, of a man identified here as Fou Tchou Li. Bataille's use of these terrible images, and his observations on them, are the subject of a devastating critique in Death by a Thousand Cuts by Timothy Brook, Jerome Bourgon and Gregory Blue, in a chapter that suggests - in Bataille's defence - that Joseph Marie Lo Duca should be regarded more as the co-author of this shoddy little book than as its editor. If you're new to Bataille, this is emphatically not the place to start. Read Eroticism instead.