Unknowing Susan Sontag's Regarding: Recutting with Georges Bataille Louis Kaplan University of Toronto louis.kaplan@utoronto.ca Real reading goes forward unknowing, it always opens a book like an unjustifiable cut in the supposed continuum of meaning. It must go astray at this break. --Jean-Luc Nancy, "Exscription" In confronting the visual representation of pain and suffering as its object of study and the role that the medium of photography plays in this global enterprise, Susan Sontag's final book Regarding the Pain of Others (2003) has served as a touchstone for post-9/11 political and ethical debates, especially in connection with the amorphous "war on terror" that has been waged during the Bush administration, when the state of emergency became standard in American foreign policy.1 The book took on an even greater resonance in the spring of 2004 with the release of the Abu Ghraib torture photographs in Iraq and against the backdrop of revelations of the harsh treatment of prisoners (or so-called "enemy combatants") in Guantanamo Bay.2 Regarding the Pain of Others contains Sontag's conscientious reflections and objections to the images of death and destruction that constitute the genres of war and torture photography. Her account traces the venerable history of war photography from Roger Fenton's propagandistic images in the Crimean War that served the nationalist agenda of the British sovereign in 1855 through the Golden Age of photojournalism featuring the auteurship of such celebrated figures as Robert Capa and W. Eugene Smith in the Spanish Civil War and World War II to more recent examples of the horrors and disasters of war in places like Rwanda, Somalia, and Sarajevo. Completely lacking in photographic illustrations, Sontag's survey carefully avoids visual spectacle. Instead, the book features an onslaught of horrific photographs that flash up and pass away in the minds' eyes of her readers. Eduardo Cadava theorizes the reading and regarding of photographic images as a way we learn about death -- as a way of "learning to die."3 As Cadava and others argue, this lesson relies in large part on the relationship of the photographic image to time -- as it exposes finitude and mortality as markers of our being-in-common.4 While one is tempted to generalize this as the property of every photograph, it is the unfortunate characteristic of war photography that it puts the corpse (of the dead soldier or civilian) and the ruin (of the destroyed building) at the center of its action. As Sontag writes quite early in her book and in a manner that articulates her view that the photograph is an indexical trace of the referent and therefore cannot but tell the truth: "Look, the photographs say, this is what it's like. This is what war does. And that, that is what it does, too. War tears, rends. War rips open, eviscerates. War scorches. War dismembers. War ruins" (Regarding 8). Sontag's description of what war photography does foregrounds a litany of destruction -- of violent actions that rip open and break apart the body politic and the soldiers who serve its commands (tearing, rending, dismembering, ruining, etc.). But rather than envisioning these images as indexical traces to be comprehended in terms of a transparent logic of appearance ("this is what it's like"), it would be more to the point in the face of the destruction and the havoc wreaked by and in these images to view these photographs as deadly exposures that occur at the limits of meaning and understanding. Here I am recalling the etymological root of exposure as "being posed in exteriority."5 Such deadly exposures and scorched illuminations put both photography and the reading of photographs on a perpetual war footing. [Image] Fig. 1. Jacket design by Susan Mitchell from Regarding the Pain of Others by Susan Sontag. Jacket design copyright 2003 by Susan Mitchell. Jacket art: Plate 36 ("Tampoco") of The Disasters of War, 1810-20, first published 1863, etchings by Francisco Goya y Lucientes (1746-1828). Private collection /Index/Bridgeman Art Library. Jacket design reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. It is interesting to note that the violent imagery that is conjured here--of tearing and rending, of ripping open and eviscerating--returns later in the book with Sontag's close reading of a photograph that depicts the infamous Chinese torture of a hundred cuts (lingchi). This leads Sontag to the ideas and desires of Georges Bataille and to a group of lingchi photographs derived from the beginning of the twentieth century, from before this practice was outlawed in China in 1905. The images were taken by French troops stationed in cities like Beijing and Tianjin and were first published by Louis Carpeaux just a few years later in France. These photographs were to become a crucial site for philosophical reflection (as well as Buddhist meditation) throughout Bataille's life, especially after he was given one of these images as a present by his psychoanalyst, Dr. Adrien Borel, in 1925. While Sontag seeks to enlist Bataille's support for her own arguments, the question remains whether this post-Nietzschean philosopher of laughter and unknowing can be made to serve the somber rhetoric of Sontag's Regarding. For when Bataille introduces us to something like absolute dismemberment or rending in one of his subversive readings of Hegel and the master/slave dialectic, it is framed in terms of the complicated (or even tortuous) concept of anguished gaiety. In contrast to Sontag, Bataille writes in "Hegel, Death, and Sacrifice" with the blackest of humors: "On the contrary, gaiety, connected with the work of death, causes me anguish, is accentuated by anguish, and in return exacerbates that anguish: ultimately, gay anguish, anguished gaiety cause me, in a feverish chill, 'absolute dismemberment,' where it is my joy that finally tears me apart, but where dejection would follow joy were I not torn all the way to the end, immeasurably" (25). What happens to the anguished gaiety of Bataille's gaze upon the work of death and dismemberment and/as the (immeasurable) loss of meaning, which he associates with a practice of sovereignty, that could only take place at the limits or the interruption of discourse--what happens to that gaiety when it becomes appropriated by Sontag's Regarding, enmeshed as it is in a discourse that seeks to give a sense and a meaning to the pain of others and that thereby practices a form of Hegelian mastery that would claim to avoid the loss of meaning? In this regard, Sontag's confident and transparent assertions about the photography of war and its horrors (with statements like "this is what it's like") mirror Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit and a practice of lordship and mastery (Herrschaft) wherein, as Bataille states, "[d]ismemberment is, on the contrary, full of meaning" (27).6 It is important to stress that Sontag's discussion of the lingchi photographs never invokes Bataille's practice of sovereignty and its impossible (or even laughable) relationship with death. According to Arkady Plotnitsky, the sovereign operation marks for Bataille the "irreducible loss of meaning which is also always excessive, in particular with respect to any possibility of containing it by presence, consciousness, or meaning."7 The sovereign operation would disenable Sontag from making sense of the pain of others through the medium of photography and to enlist these images as a type of moral knowledge that is therefore full of meaning. In addition to ignoring the sovereign operation, Sontag overlooks Bataille's engagement with general economy as the science or the theory of such sovereign practice that manifests at the level of political economy. Finally, rather than acknowledging Bataille's (non)concept of nonknowledge (nonsavoir) in relationship to the lingchi photograph, Sontag insists that the contemplation of this image offers "a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge" (Regarding 98). In these ways, Sontag's writing on Bataille remains embroiled in a practice of mastery and in a restricted economy that excludes the practice of sovereignty. However, this is not to overlook that Bataille's sovereign operation also involves mastery within certain reconfigured limits.8 This recalls one of the crucial points that Jacques Derrida makes in his groundbreaking essay on Bataille, "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve." Derrida insists that the sovereign operation reconfigures meaning by marking its limits within an excessive field of chance, nonsense, play, and non-knowledge. This is exactly how Bataille practices a "Hegelianism without reserve" and why Derrida writes that unreserved play or chance includes the work of meaning not in terms of any regime of knowledge but in terms of the force of inscription. In the sovereign operation, meaning becomes a function of play and non-knowledge through a process of reinscription or what Jean-Luc Nancy calls "exscription." Derrida's review of Hegel's blindspots would also apply to Sontag's Regarding the Pain of Others in terms of its "conscientious suspension of play" in the face of the disasters of war. Derrida writes that Hegel has bet against play, against chance. He has blinded himself to the possibility of his own bet, to the fact that the conscientious suspension of play (for example, the passage through the certitude of oneself and through lordship as the independence of self-consciousness) was itself a phase of play; and to the fact that play includes the work of meaning or the meaning of work, and includes them not in terms of knowledge, but in terms of inscription: meaning is a function of play, is inscribed in a certain place in the configuration of a meaningless play. (260) We also need to ask what happens to Sontag's Regarding and the insistence that "the moral capacity of the photograph is repeatedly defined by its relative ability to confer knowledge and understanding on the viewer" (Beckman 119) if and when one applies Bataille's radical and unconditional unknowing to it. What is to be done in the face of Bataille's sovereign insistence upon the "exscription" of meaning? How does one regard that which seeks to expose what Jean-Luc Nancy has called the "infinite discharge of meaning" or that which "withdraws from all signification" ("Exscription" 64)?9 This essay addresses such questions by comparing the ways Sontag and Bataille analyze and interpret -- as well as fail to analyze and interpret -- these infamous and painful lingchi photographs poised at the limits of the sayable and the knowable. In contrast to Sontag's mastery, Bataille's (non)concepts (e.g., sovereignty, unknowledge) and the specialized ways in which he deploys them seek to make meaning slide -- or even to go beyond meaning -- as they laugh in the face of death and the impossible. Following Nancy, the goal of unknowing Sontag's regarding would be "to read in every line the work or the play of writing against meaning" (62). For a long time, scholars believed that the images that were in Bataille's possession illustrated the torture of the political prisoner Fu-Zhu-Li, who had been found guilty of the murder of Prince Ao-Han-Oun and who was executed by lingchi on April 10, 1905. However, recent research by Jerome Bourgon at the East Asian Institute at the University of Lyon has clarified that the victim in Bataille's photographs was not actually Fu-Zhu-Li but another, unknown criminal from the same period.10 There are eight extant images from this execution, and four of them were published by Bataille in the final section of The Tears of Eros, his magisterial survey that examines the history of art at the intersection of eroticism and death.11 The confusion stems from the addition of a caption in the book that accompanies one of the photographs and that recites Carpeaux's summary of the execution of Fu-Zhu-Li. Offering readers a date for one of these images that turns out to be five years later than the abolition of lingchi in the Chinese penal code, Sontag introduces the image in the following way: One of the great theorists of the erotic, Georges Bataille, kept a photograph taken in China in 1910 of a prisoner undergoing 'the death of a hundred cuts' on his desk, where he could look at it every day. (Since become legendary, it is reproduced in the last of Bataille's books published during his lifetime, in 1961, The Tears of Eros.) 'This photograph,' Bataille wrote, 'had a decisive role in my life. I have never stopped being obsessed by this image of pain, at the same time ecstatic and intolerable.'" (Regarding 98) Before delving further into this passage, one notes that an extra cut has taken place in Sontag's transcription of the citation from The Tears of Eros. While the original quotation has a question mark after the word "ecstatic" -- "ecstatic(?)" -- this has been cut out of Sontag's version, making for a world of difference. While Sontag calls Bataille the philosopher of Eros, she does not mention here that he is the philosopher for whom Eros is always bound to Thanatos, the promiscuous coupling of sexuality and death that is not that far from Bataille's Surrealist nemesis Andre Breton's concept of "convulsive beauty" to which Sontag also refers elsewhere in the book (Regarding 23). This contrasts with an earlier essay, "The Pornographic Imagination," in which Sontag writes that what "Bataille exposes in extreme erotic experience is its subterranean connection with death" (61). In this context, one also recalls the title of one of Bataille's books that binds Eros and Thanatos via the violent acts of the sensual body--Erotism: Death and Sensuality. In the "Introduction," Bataille states the following formula: "Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life up to the point of death" (11). The paradoxical formula structures erotism as an exuberance of life that strives for death as its limit experience. Bataille sees death as the continuity of being that discontinuous beings strive for in the passionate embrace of erotic activity. In light of Bataille's formulation, it is not surprising that the orgasmic climax of sexual release is called the petit mort. The domain of eroticism is marked by violation and the transgression of discontinuous bodies. Bataille writes about this in a way that again invokes the limit. "What does physical eroticism signify if not a violation of the very being of its practitioners?--a violation bordering on death, bordering on murder?" (17). While ignoring the consequences of nonknowledge, this background about erotic violation unto death helps to flesh out and elucidate Sontag's assertion in Regarding the Pain of Others that the contemplation of this harrowing and tortuous image and its violent depiction of death involves the "liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge" (Regarding 98). [IMAGE] Fig. 2. Anonymous, The Chinese Torture of One Hundred Cuts, ca. 1905. For Sontag, Bataille clearly had an obsessive and intimate relationship with these photographs, and his regard for them (and upon them) took on the aspect of a daily ritual. In turning and returning to these images, from which others would want to turn away, it seems clear that Bataille wanted to remind himself of something. Sontag comes up with three reasons Bataille would have wanted to gaze upon these gruesome images. These involve taking courage, numbing down, and attesting to injustices. She writes, "As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible" (Regarding 98). But Sontag does not consider another reason why images of the atrocious can become objects of contemplation, one that was very close to Bataille's heart: to laugh in the face of death and the impossible. Steeped in solemnity, Sontag's Regarding does not tap into the resources of the Nietzschean gay science (frohliche Wissenschaft) that were pivotal to Bataille's thinking and his laughter.12 Time and again in his writings, Bataille turns to "Nietzsche's Laughter." He quotes the following as a laudable model: "To see tragic characters founder and to be able to laugh, despite the profound understanding, emotion and sympathy that we feel: this is divine" (The Unfinished System 22). Bataille's compulsive return to these images stages an encounter with the impossible that goes far beyond an acknowledgment of the existence of the incorrigible and that remains open to the effects of nonknowledge. But this divine laughter derived from excess and full of anguish cannot be read simply as sadistic pleasure or mere maliciousness, for it acknowledges its own foundering and ruin in the same mortal breath. In meditating on his fascination with this Chinese torture victim in The Inner Experience, Bataille considers laughter in the face of ruin without any hope of salvation: "The young and seductive Chinese man of whom I have spoken, left to the work of the executioner--I loved him with a love in which the sadistic instinct played no part: he communicated his pain to me or perhaps the excessive nature of his pain, and it was precisely that which I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin" (120). This inclusive view of the photographic exposure of suffering as both shared communication and as anguished gaiety is very different from Sontag's perspective in an earlier essay, "The Image World" in On Photography, which argues that the "feeling of being exempt from calamity stimulates interest in looking at painful pictures, and looking at them suggests and strengthens the feeling that one is exempt" (168). Sontag's disregard for this vital strand of anguished gaiety that marks the Bataillian corpus seems peculiar because she began her intellectual career in close connection with the renegades of French Surrealism and their transgressions. First of all, one thinks of her edition of Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings (1976), which includes a considered and affirmative introduction to his work. Even more relevant to this discussion, one recalls her rigorous analysis of the transgressive eroticism of Bataille's The Story of the Eye in "The Pornographic Imagination," published in Styles of Radical Will (1969). Sontag pinpoints here the interlocking of death and eroticism that makes Bataille's work so distinctive. "One reason that Histoire de l'Oeil and Madame Edwarda make such a strong and upsetting impression is that Bataille understood more clearly than any other writer I know of that what pornography is really about, ultimately, isn't sex but death" (60). However, Sontag does not explore either here or in her last book the comic aspects that arise from Bataille's investigations of death and the laughable attempt to simulate "absolute risk" in view of the fact that death always remains at the limit of the possible and the knowable.13 Refusing to let go of the gravity of the situation, "The Pornographic Imagination" avoids an encounter with Bataille's profound levity and the divinity of laughter. Reviewing the philosopher as pornographer, Sontag insists that Bataille's "more effective method is to invest each action with a weight, a disturbing gravity, that feels authentically 'mortal'" (61). While there is no argument regarding the importance of mortality as a critical concern in all of Bataille's thought, the emphasis on its gravity alone is quite disturbing. The rhetoric of authenticity weighs heavily around the laughing philosopher's neck in this formulation of being as "being-toward -death." Indeed, Sontag's analysis has a much too stuffy existentialist air about it that thoroughly represses what Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen has termed the "laughter of being" in a brilliant essay of the same name. For Borch-Jakobsen, Bataille's engagement with mortality means to "die[] of laughter and laugh[] at dying, bent convulsively over the impossible abyss of his own finitude" (752). One of the limits of Sontag's interpretation involves her reading of Bataille's "high regard" for lingchi in terms of the rhetoric of transfiguration. Sontag's move aligns Bataille's obsession with this image with "religious thinking" in general and with the Christian transmutation of suffering into sacrifice in particular. "Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at the sight of this excruciation. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as something more than just suffering, as a kind of transfiguration. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation" (Regarding 98-99). This is an odd conclusion for a self-professed atheological and iconoclastic thinker like Bataille who rebels against the pieties and sanctities of Christianity, who refuses the mystification of the afterlife, and who resists sublimation, sublation (Aufhebung), and transfiguration in all forms whether in its Hegelian or in its Christian martyr varieties. Indeed, Bataille follows Nietzsche in understanding salvation as a Christian mode of escape, as "the most odious of evasions" (The Inner Experience 12). This lapsed Catholic refuses to transfigure pain and suffering into a passion of the Christ. Instead, his project is to contaminate binary oppositions like divine ecstasy and extreme horror. Rather than using the Christian figure of "transfiguration" and its transcendental overtones, it would be more to the atheological point to speak of a radical reversal when referring, as here, to the site of excess and surplus where extreme suffering and joy meet and exchange places. In this way, the "something more" that Sontag invokes would remain on the side of the remainder (restance). After all, Bataille speaks in The Tears of Eros of the "infinite capacity for reversal" (renversement14 ) and not in terms of transfiguration. Similarly, the figure and the strategy of glissement (what makes meaning slide) is more akin to Bataille's atheological practice than is the glorification (and the raising on high) of a Christian concept like transfiguration. In staking out an atheological resistance to transfiguration, it is important to mobilize the counterthrust of transgression as that which is vital to Bataille's pornographic sensibility. Early on Sontag senses this in "The Pornographic Imagination" when she expresses great admiration for Bataille and his "profound sense of transgression" (60) and when she even intimates that Bataille outstrips Marquis de Sade in this respect. In her transformation of transgression into transfiguration, one is left wondering whether the late Sontag did not experience a kind of religious conversion experience herself. However, it is by no means correct to say that Bataille necessarily makes a connection between sacrifice and a state of exaltation. This glosses over the important distinction that must be made between sovereignty and lordship or mastery (Herrschaft), which offer different approaches to sacrifice and its "meaning." Sontag's inattention to this nuance returns us to Bataille's confrontation with Hegel in the essay "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice." In Bataille's reading, Hegel sees the institution of sacrifice as a profoundly human activity that exposes one to death and that allows one to contemplate the work of the negative face to face so that the individual "dwells with it" (18). But Bataille also insists that the Hegelian model of sacrifice is built on a ruse and a subterfuge because the one who sacrifices and who tarries with the negative in this way must stay alive in order to attain mastery. This leads to the following comedic paradox as outlined by Derrida: "To stay alive, to maintain oneself in life, to work, to defer pleasure, to limit the stakes, to have respect for death at the very moment when one looks directly at it--such is the servile condition of mastery and of the entire history it makes possible" (255). Hegel's conception of sacrifice and of "the servile condition of mastery" therefore always holds something back, in contrast to Bataille's insistence that "sovereignty is NOTHING" (The Accursed Share Vol. 3 430).15 Bataille exposes the comedy at the heart of Hegel's theory of sacrifice and the mastery or lordship that it pretends to maintain as sovereignty laughs at the recognition that it needs to stay alive.16 "In the sacrifice, the sacrificer identifies himself with the animal that is struck down dead . . . . But it is a comedy!" ("Hegel, Death and Sacrifice" 19). Bataille concludes the essay by suggesting that sacrifice remains servile when it is tied to the production of meaning and that it can only become sovereign and approach the state of exaltation when it sacrifices or lets go of meaning and the desire to make a meaning out of death. This is when it becomes, in Derrida's words, the "heedless sacrifice of presence and meaning" (257). Bataille concludes: "Sacrifice, consequently, is a sovereign, autonomous manner of being only to the extent that it is uninformed by meaningful discourse. To the extent that discourse informs it, what is sovereign is given in terms of servitude. Indeed by definition what is sovereign does not serve" (25-26). Returning to Sontag, this close reading helps to qualify her statement that the state of exaltation necessarily follows from sacrifice while foregrounding that her own relationship to (the representation of) pain and sacrifice remains servile because she earnestly wants to figure out "What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering" (99) rather than opening up to the burst of sovereign laughter that arises out of these photographic exposures of and to non-knowledge. In this context, it is well to recall a pithy statement from Bataille in the lecture "Nonknowledge, Laughter and Tears," where he underscores that "the unknown makes us laugh" (The Unfinished System 135). One can also take issue with Sontag's assurance that "Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure at the sight of this excruciation" (98-99). Sontag is careful here not to make Bataille into a sexual pervert or sadist who would derive pleasure from the witnessing of violent torture. Nevertheless, the attempt to shield Bataille completely from the pleasure principle and from any enjoyment of this image can only be done at the expense of overlooking those transgressive aspects of his work. In "The Tears of Photography," Herta Wolf accurately pinpoints such ambivalent combinations as "agony and laughter" (74) and "laughter and mourning" (77) that are crucial to The Tears of Eros as a whole and that Sontag does not articulate in her analysis of Bataille. Given Bataille's complex ideas about laughter and tears, pleasure and pain are intertwined in an impossible knot that cannot be so easily disentangled when it comes to his experience of the lingchi photographs. Derrida is also fascinated by the anguished burst of Bataillian laughter that breaks out when confronted with the comedy of Hegelian philosophy, with its notion of sublation (Aufhebung) that works to preserve meaning, and with the idealist conceit that "nothing must be definitely lost in death" (256-257). Derrida continues, "Absolute comicalness is the anguish experienced when confronted by expenditure on lost funds, by the absolute sacrifice of meaning: a sacrifice without return and without reserves" (257). It is this unsavory mixture of anguish spiked with laughter that Bataille experiences when casting his eyes upon the excruciating losses suffered by the lingchi victims, by these sacrifices without return and without reserves. Indeed, Bataille's horrifying laughter affirms the absolute rending that cannot be contained by the Hegelian (or Sontagian) work of the negative. One encounters the same type of laughter in Bataille's erotic classic The Story of the Eye, but here the tone becomes more mocking, shocking, and scandalous. It should be recalled that the pseudonymous and excremental author of this book is Lord Auch, a shortened form of aux chiottes (to the shithouse). In light of this discussion, Lord Auch should be viewed in the context of the passage from lordship to sovereignty. Bataille's biographer Michael Surya believes that "[o]f all the books he wrote it is certainly the one in which laughter is the most perceptible" and that it marks the "obscene laugh of an apostate" (102). The sexual and criminal adventures of the narrator, Simone, and of Sir Edmond as they carouse their way through Spain and that climax in their murder and rape of a Catholic priest laughs in the face of Christian pieties and organized religious institutions and elucidates another facet of Bataille's atheological deployment of a derisive and obscene laughter that functions as a mode of transgression. Returning to Sontag's review of the Chinese torture victim, one notices that she conflates him with the Christian martyr by bridging the religious symbolism of Eastern and Western visual cultures. While Bataille's original publication contains an illustration of Aztec human sacrifice (ca. 1500) to serve as a visual comparison with the Chinese torture victim, Sontag fixes on the figure of Saint Sebastian. Rather than attributing the comfortably numbed expression on the victim's face to the administration of a dose of opium (which both Bataille and his biographer Michael Surya mention17 ), Sontag refers to "a look on his upturned face as ecstatic as that of any Italian Renaissance Saint Sebastian" (Regarding 98). Sontag invokes a comparison with this Christian saint and martyr whom the Roman emperor Diocletian in the third century A.D. had tied to a post and shot through with arrows. Saint Sebastian would become a favorite subject of many paintings of the Renaissance such as those by the Paduan artist Andrea Mantegna in the late 1400s. The ecstatic again becomes an unmarked term for Sontag as it is placed in the redemptive light of both Christian salvation and Renaissance art. However, it is important to reiterate that Bataille introduces the term "ecstatic" at the beginning of the section "Chinese Torture" in The Tears of Eros with a question mark.18 There is a mark of uncertainty as to whether Bataille feels comfortable in invoking this term in reference to the Chinese torture victim. Even when Bataille refers to ecstasy without question or mark further on in this same text, it is not to be taken uncategorically as something that is revelatory or that offers salvation. The ambivalence and the capacity for radical reversal continue here as "religious ecstasy" is coupled with that perverse mode of eroticism known as "sadism" (206), and is then followed by the unnatural pairing of "divine ecstasy and its opposite, extreme horror" (207). In these ways, the ecstatic in The Tears of Eros inscribes a contaminating movement of transgression rather than a state of redemptive transfiguration. It also should be recalled that the ecstatic is inextricably linked for Bataille to the pursuit of sovereignty. Bataille's atheological pursuit of ecstasy at the limits of knowledge leaves one with that same empty-headed feeling from which laughter bursts--anguished gaiety. As he says, "I would gladly define ecstasy: feeling gay but anguished--from my immeasurable stupidity."19 In contrast to any knowledge of the ecstatic that could be derived from Sontag's comparative investigations of art historical discourse along with its gallery of tortured figures of Christian piety, Bataille's transgressive unknowing empties out onto a logical abyss in an aporetic structure that confronts the "identity of these perfect contraries" (Tears of Eros 207). In resisting Sontag's theological recuperation of the lingchi photographs, it is also important to remember that according to Bataille's atheological investigations of the religious life and the spiritual domain, "God is an effect of nonknowledge" (The Unfinished System 146). Atheology--as the study of the effects of nonknowledge--can take many forms, but for Bataille it always places us in relation to something impossible. As Bataille writes in (and with) "Nietzsche's Laughter," "Fundamentally, the spiritual domain is that of the impossible. I will say that ecstasy, sacrifice, tragedy, poetry, laughter are forms whereby life situates itself in proportion to the impossible" (The Unfinished System 21). The impossible -- where knowledge ends and where sovereign laughter breaks out -- must have its place when Regarding the Pain of Others, when reading these war photographic exposures of pain, suffering, and death. However, such sovereign laughter has been repressed in Sontag's account of the pain of others, where for her, the only morally sanctioned sentiments appear to be mourning and memorializing and where any other response is viewed as disrespectful or morally suspect. Faced with such images, Sontag writes: "No one after a certain age has the right to this kind of innocence, of superficiality, to this degree of ignorance, or amnesia. There now exists a vast repository of images that make it harder to maintain this kind of moral defectiveness" (Regarding 114-115). But from Bataille's perspective, an account that takes these images as deadly serious and that seeks to learn from them leads only to mental servitude. One sees again how Sontag's Regarding cannot extricate herself from Hegelian dialectics as she disregards Bataille's sovereign insistence that "[t]aking death seriously tends one toward servitude" (The Unfinished System 254). In contrast, Bataille reinscribes the concept of ignorance in terms of the (non)concept of nonknowledge. Bataille addresses this point at the conclusion of "Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears" in his discussion of Ernest Hemingway's writings. "In any case, it seems to me that if what is seductive about Hemingway, which is connected to ignorance, might be attained by us, it can only be attained on one condition, that of having first been to the end of the possibilities of knowing. It is only beyond knowledge, perhaps in the nonknowledge that I have presented, that we could conquer the right to ignorance" (The Unfinished System 150). While Sontag's ignorance bespeaks of an innocence to which no one has a right anymore, Bataille's is a second naivete that we must earn the right to have once again. Bataille's ignorance is not constituted by the gaps within knowledge that are waiting to be filled. Instead, ignorance comes from "having first been to the end of the possibilities of knowing" (150). It is something derived from coming up against the limits of knowledge (as a limit experience), and it can in no way be considered as a moral defect. In contrast to Sontag's version, ignorance of the type that goes beyond knowledge inhabits this photographic discourse of death and the sovereign loss of its meaning by necessity, and it is in a state of such ignorance that an anguished laughter bursts out. For the consequences of nonknowledge lead to the reversal of any grim apprehension of these images. In "The Consequences of Nonknowledge," Bataille babbles: "Faced with nonknowledge, I experienced the feeling of performing in a comedy, of having a kind of weakness in my position. At the same time, I am in front of you as a babbler, offering all the reasons I would have for keeping my mouth shut" (The Unfinished System 115). Unlike Sontag's Regarding, Bataille looks to these deathly images in terms of an ethics of the impossible and risks bringing together nonknowledge, laughter, and tears.20 The comically repressed returns with a vengeance, however, at the end of Regarding the Pain of Others. For the photographic encounter with nonknowledge and the question of sovereign laughter (laughing at nothing) invades Sontag's final analysis of Jeff Wall's theatrical tableau, Dead Troops Talk (A vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986), 1992. Interestingly enough, Dead Troops Talk is the only avowedly fictional and staged photograph that is analyzed in the book, and perhaps this is what gives Sontag the license to speculate and to imagine at the limits and to move beyond the "truth-telling" approach to photography that guides her reading of the lingchi images and of the numerous photojournalistic images that depict the horrors of war. But before turning to a closer analysis of Wall's image, it is necessary to review (and to question) Sontag's theorization of the photograph and her arguments as to why and how the photograph offers a privileged mode of representation. Sontag emphasizes here that Bataille's object of contemplation is a photograph rather than a painting, an indexical trace of the real rather than an iconic likeness governed by mimesis, and she consciously differentiates it from Titian's mythological painting of The Flaying of Marsyas (ca. 1575). It is "a photograph, not a painting; a real Marsyas, not a mythic one--and still alive in the picture" (Regarding 98). It could be argued that the sobriety of Sontag's account is derived in large part from her assumptions about photographs as bearers and witnesses of the truth of the world and in providing documentary evidence of its atrocities. It also should be noted that Sontag asserts this point of view in spite of the fact that she recounts a few well-known historical examples of manipulated war photographs in the book. But Sontag's discussion of Alexander Gardner's Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gettysburg (1863) and of other staged images is still predicated on the assumption that the photograph is indexical of truth. So while we may be "surprised to learn [that] they were staged, and always disappointed" (Regarding 55), the existence of such images in no way challenges the view that even these photographs are tied to the (falsified) real. Sontag asserts that the superiority of photography over painting and other earlier modes of representation is derived from its status as a physical trace and that this is particularly important when dealing with the remembrance of things past and in respect to the dead. "Ever since cameras were invented in 1839, photography has kept company with death. Because an image produced with a camera is, literally, a trace of something brought before the lens, photographs were superior to any painting as a memento of the vanished past and the dear departed" (Regarding 24). In keeping company with death in this way, photography forges our being-in-common and utters the truth of community. This recalls Jean-Luc Nancy's definition of community in (and of) The Inoperative Community. Nancy writes, "A community is the presentation to its members of their mortal truth" (15). In recalling death as the (groundless) ground of community, photographic theory that is responsive to such "community exposed photography" affords another approach. This is a point of view that is less concerned with Sontag's emphasis on indexical reference and much more interested in photography as that which exposes the limits of our knowing. An expository approach to photography, with its emphasis on exposure (as being posed in exteriority), provides being-in-common with both the medium of its sharing and the incompleteness of its sharing. In The Tears of Eros, Bataille moves away from indexical concerns (e.g., the acknowledgement of the veracity of photographic representation) toward the way in which these images of torture touch him in a visceral way and expose him to the anguish and intoxication of the mortal truth of community. Such an exposure is accompanied by a distribution of the sensible that fails to make sense. Confronted by this state of unknowing, Bataille comments that "this straightforward image of a tortured man" opens up "the most anguishing of worlds accessible to us through images captured on film" (Tears 205). These Chinese torture photographs foreground for Bataille the experience of limits situated at the precipice of non-knowledge, laughter, and tears. They leave us with question marks and lay bare the disquieting magnitude of a horror at the heart of being human that remains very difficult to accept or comprehend fully. Contemplating the same torture photographs in Guilty, Bataille asks rhetorically: "Who can accept that a horror of this magnitude would express 'what you are' and lay bare your nature?" (39).21 While Sontag's book certainly does review how images of war and torture induce a range of emotions from horror to numbness to compassion, such considerations move analysis away from the concrete moral knowledge obtained from the contemplation of these images as photographic indices. In contrast to Bataille's naked exposures of a loss or surplus of meaning, Sontag's focus on (and regarding of) the pain of others seeks to make sense of suffering and loss and to ask "What to do with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering" (Regarding 99). In reviewing Sontag's writings on photography, one notices that Regarding the Pain of Others is just one of a number of occasions when Sontag relies on a medium- specific binary opposition between painting and photography and in a way that privileges photography and its relationship to truth or reality. In "The Heroism of Vision," Sontag offers the conventional wisdom that the photograph represents the truth that painterly mimesis cannot hope to capture, locating the basis for this position in nineteenth-century discourses and aligning this belief with the ethics of realism found in both "literary models" and "independent journalism." Sontag writes: The consequences of lying have to be more central for photography than they ever can be for painting, because the flat, usually rectangular images which are photographs make a claim to be true that paintings can never make. A fake painting (one whose attribution is false) falsifies the history of art. A fake photograph (one which has been retouched or tampered with, or whose caption is false) falsifies reality. The history of photography could be recapitulated as the struggle between two different imperatives: beautification, which comes from the fine arts, and truth-telling, which is measured not only by a notion of value-free truth, a legacy from the sciences, but by a moralized ideal of truth-telling, adapted from nineteenth-century literary models and from the (then) new profession of independent journalism." (On Photography 86) Here Sontag opens up photography to the larger discursive spaces of the nineteenth century and argues that it shares the space of "truth telling" with the empirical sciences, investigative reporting, literary realism, and the disciplinary practice of history itself. All of these discourses share a belief in the transparency of their signifiers (whether using language, laboratory equipment, or images) to access the truth of the real. In delivering the physical trace of the referent in its images, photographic realism again grounds its claims to truth telling in its indexical status. By insisting upon the further dichotomy between "beautification" (derived from the fine arts) and "truth- telling" (derived from the sciences), Sontag finds yet another way to contrast photography and painting and to reinforce the binary opposition between the photographic index and the painterly icon. This semiotic distinction between photographs and paintings as two distinct types of signs has its source and fullest expression in the writings of Charles Saunders Peirce at the end of the nineteenth century. Peirce differentiates photographs from mimetic likenesses or icons because photos are direct emanations and/or physical traces of the referent. Peirce writes, "this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection" (106). As smoke is to fire or as a footprint is to the foot that deposited it, so is the photograph to its reference. In "The Image World," Sontag alludes directly to one of Peirce's examples and adds another of her own (in a way that furthers the relationship of photography and death) as she again privileges the photograph over painting on account of the material structure of the trace. [A] photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask. While a painting, even one that meets photographic standards of resemblance, is never more than the stating of an interpretation, a photograph is never less than the registering of an emanation (light waves reflected by objects)--a material vestige of its subject in a way that no painting can be. (On Photography 154) From a postmodern perspective, this is a bold and dangerous claim because it would keep photography immune from Nietzsche's famous dictum that there are "no facts, only interpretations" by granting it a sacred space of registration and emanation that is somehow exempt from either a logic of mediation or an ideological contest of positions. Nietzsche's dictum is useful for challenging any dogmatic acceptance of photographic facts because it insists that the facticity ascribed to photography by Sontag on account of its indexical status is virtually meaningless without its immediate immersion into a field of interpretative contexts and possibilities. One can apply Nietzsche's query in The Genealogy of Morals to Sontag as follows: "What does that mean? For this fact has to be interpreted: in itself it just stands there, stupid to all eternity, like every 'thing-in- itself'" (107). The invocation of Nietzsche here is also particularly apt for a critique of the author of Regarding the Pain of Others in that Nietzsche does not believe that even pain is immune from the work (and play) of interpretation and the specificity of context. To recite The Genealogy of Morals, "I consider even 'psychological pain' to be not a fact but only an interpretation" (129). With an absolute insistence on the photograph as the material trace of the absent referent, Sontag uses the medium of photography to make a claim about knowledge (and certainty) that is a far cry from Nietzsche's ongoing suspicion of the claim to the noumenon (and the numinous) or from Bataille's incessant and insistent practice of unknowing. The aforementioned quotation from Sontag, with its privileging of photography over painting on the grounds of indexical registration and emanation, would also be rather troubling to Bataille in light of his views on sovereignty and loss. It is as if Sontag wants to use this presumption about the certainty of the index as a means to catapult discussion about photography beyond troubling questions that come with representation and the opening of a necessary gap between the referent and the indexical trace. But there always has to be an excess of or loss in photographic representation, and one can argue that this is exactly the type of irreducible loss that defines the sovereignty that is championed by Bataille. As Uziel Awret puts it, "For Batailles [sic], 'sovereignty' denotes a form of theoretical thinking that accounts for the irreducible loss in representation and meaning that any representation entails" (28-29). The fact that Sontag remains immune to the possibility of such a contamination of the real and its transparency by the apparatus of representation points to the ultimately modernist presuppositions of her photo-critical project in Regarding the Pain of Others. Another pressure on the truth claims that Sontag attributes to the photographic index has come with the rise of digital photography. Digital media are closely connected to a painterly and iconic mode of rendering even if they visually simulate the indexical signs of photographic media. This relation has been widely theorized by writers on digital photography such as Florian Rotzer, Lev Manovich, and Peter Lunenfeld. Lunenfeld's essay "Art Post-History: Digital Photography and Electronic Semiotics" is particularly relevant for this discussion because he specifically takes up this rupture with the Peircean legacy in the section "Semiotics, Photography & Truth Value of the Electronic Image." Lunenfeld argues, "The inherent mutability of the digital image poses a challenge to those who have striven to create a semiotic of the photographic" (94). Taking his cue from Hollis Frampton and putting pressure on indexical truth, Lunenfeld invokes the phrase "dubitative" (or inclined to doubt) to characterize the digital image and its reinsertion of the painterly icon into photography. "What has happened to this class of signs, and to the semiotics of the image in general, with the advent of digital photography? With electronic imaging, the digital photographic apparatus approaches what Hollis Frampton refers to as painting's 'dubitative' processes: like the painter, the digital photographer 'fiddles around with the picture till it looks right'" (95). The rhetoric of the dubitatively digital and the doubt it tends to produce would appear to be more in line with Bataille's affirmation of nonknowledge and his suspicion of "a certain stability of things known" (The Unfinished System 133). [IMAGE} Fig. 3. Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk (a vision after an ambush of a Red Army patrol, near Moqor, Afghanistan, winter 1986). 1992. Silver dye bleach transparency in aluminum lightbox, 229 x 417 cm. Copyright Jeff Wall. Courtesy of the artist. Returning to Jeff Wall's Dead Troops Talk, it is important to point out that the artist has used digital photography for many years and that this particular image evinces its dubitative quality and iconic characteristics. The digital aspect of Dead Troops Talk must be stressed over and above the overt staging and theatricality of this famous 7 ½ x 13 feet photograph, displayed in a light box, that resonates with the genre of grand history paintings. Breaking with the rhetoric of the index, Wall discusses the "hallucinatory image that [he] wanted to make" in a recent interview. He confesses that "this was one of the first or second things that I ever did with a computer" and that it was "photographing things that could never have happened" so that it became a "kind of a release of all the constraints of the actual photography."22 Dead Troops Talk is also described in the recent Tate Modern retrospective on Wall's photography as follows: "The figures were photographed separately or in small groups and the final image was assembled as a digital montage."23 While Sontag refers to Dead Troops Talk as "the antithesis of a document" (123) in Regarding the Pain of Others, she does not mention that digital manipulation is part and parcel of its fabrication. This oversight further illustrates that while Sontag can acknowledge the constructed nature of this photograph (because this does not challenge the index, only suggesting that some photographers do lie), she does not acknowledge that Dead Troops Talk is actually a digital photograph because of the risks that the dubitatively iconic image brings to the truth claims of the indexical photograph. Jeff Wall's photograph stages a ghastly scenario where Soviet soldiers killed in an ambush in the war in Afghanistan in the mid-eighties seem to rise up from the dead to speak of the horrors of war. In looking at Wall's image, one is reminded of Bataille's "The Practice of Joy Before Death" and its affirmation of an explosive laughter that cannot recuperate violence, destruction, and general havoc. One overhears a divine laughter capable of affirming its own demise and ruin when Bataille writes the following: "There are explosives everywhere that perhaps will soon blind me. I laugh when I think that my eyes persist in demanding objects that do not destroy them" (Visions of Excess 239).24 In this hallucinatory vision, one sees the dead soldiers talking, joking, and laughing with each other. One of these ghoulish characters even holds up a rat to the face of his companion as if to underscore that one must laugh in the face of death. But Sontag's review of Dead Troops Talk avoids the mention of any such prankster antics on the part of the dead troops and offers a more somber reading that is devoid of Bataille's anguished gaiety. While touching on the impossible and on the limits of saying, Sontag imagines for us what Wall's "stupor troopers" would say about the horrors of war if they were to return to the land of the living. She does this by staging an archetypical scene that founds community around the death of others, which recalls Maurice Blanchot's idea that "[i]f the community is revealed by the death of the other person, it is because death is itself the true community of mortal beings: their impossible communion" (11). But in stark contrast to Jean-Luc Nancy's "inoperative community" and its resistance to the communal fusion of the mass subject, Sontag assumes the voice of being-in-common such that she becomes the medium that channels these dead talkers. (This is a doubly ironic scene when one considers that an image has been asked to do the talking.) Paradoxically, Sontag intervenes to speak their silence and to speak for all of us in this rather totalizing and presumptuous gesture: "What would they have to say to us? 'We'--this 'we' is everyone who has never experienced anything like what they went through--don't understand. We don't get it. We truly can't imagine what it was like. We can't imagine how dreadful, how terrifying war is; and how normal it becomes" (Regarding 125-126). Finally, the communication cuts off so that Sontag's transmissions from the dead break down and lose their subjects: "Can't understand. Can't imagine" (126). From Bataille's perspective, Sontag's gesture is a classic pedagogical ruse that plays at imagining what cannot be imagined (what comes from the dead), and that feigns and simulates the teaching of death from the land of the living. To recall Bataille's remarks on this impossible subject: "We often imagine ourselves in the position of those who we see dying, but we can only justifiably do this on the condition of living" (The Unfinished System 119). Sontag turns from the dead to those lucky enough to be alive as she concludes: "Can't understand. Can't imagine. That's what every soldier, and every journalist and aid worker and independent observer who has put in time under fire, and had the luck to elude the death that struck down others nearby, stubbornly feels. And they are right" (Regarding 126). Following Bataille and his laughter, the last sentence of Sontag's book offers her final recuperation of the unimaginable (and its sovereignty) into the service of righteous knowledge (and its mastery). In these ravings from beyond the grave that signal the incommensurability between the living and the dead, between the photographic witness and the war victim, as well as between lordship/mastery and sovereignty, the death sentences of Dead Troops Talk on their loss of subjectivity recall another line from Bataille's impossible text "The Teaching of Death" (1952). "Of course," Bataille intones, "talking about death is the most profound practical joke" (119). One can only wonder what a different text Regarding the Pain of Others would have been if Sontag had incorporated here and elsewhere in her book the morbidly witty lesson of Dead Troops Talk as they touch upon the impossible and as they expose themselves and their viewers to Bataille's triple threat of unknowing, laughter, and tears. What if a more self-ironic Susan Sontag had taken Georges Bataille's and Jeff Wall's profound lesson of nonknowledge to heart when writing about this image and about all the other images in the book classified as documentary photographs that cloak themselves in the "reality effect" of the index and, in this way, hold themselves sacrosanct? But these horrific images -- for all their ethical demands and their calls for decisive action -- cannot defend themselves against the debilitating effects of unknowledge and the surge of derision (and indecision) that they bring in their wake and in their unworking. Thus Bataille's unknowing and his anguished gaiety ponder the profound practical joke that has been played on Sontag's Regarding. "Reflection on death is much more seriously derisive than living, it is always scattering our attention, and we speak in vain about exerting ourselves, when death is at stake" (119). NOTES 1. While one might see the criticism of a popular intellectual like Susan Sontag as too easy a target for the postmodern and poststructuralist arsenal deployed here, it is important not to underestimate Sontag's influence in contemporary debates in post 9/11 visual culture regarding images of war and terror. This essay joins a number of recent texts by important voices that have encountered (and countered) Sontag in scholarly journals. These include Judith Butler (2005), Karen Beckman (2009), Manisha Basu (2006), and Herta Wolf (2007). Of these accounts, it should be noted that only Herta Wolf's "The Tears of Photography" takes up Sontag's reading of Bataille and the lingchi images. Wolf takes Sontag to task for "ignoring the sequential nature of this portrayal of torture" as well as ignoring "her own postulated obligation to critically assess her reception of images of torture" (75). More importantly, Wolf emphasizes the "horrifying laughter" (77) provoked by these images for Bataille in the section of her essay entitled "Agony and Laughter." The ambivalent combination "of laughter and mourning" (77) as opposites that do not contradict each other drops out of Sontag's reading completely; this is one of the prime movers of the present essay. 2. Sontag addresses the Abu Ghraib photographs in her 2004 essay "Regarding the Torture of Others." 3. Eduardo Cadava's keynote address, "Palm Reading: Fazal Sheikh's Handbook of Death," was delivered at The Photograph Conference in Winnipeg, Canada on March 11, 2004. I return to death's problematic pedagogy -- for both teaching and learning -- at the conclusion of this essay. 4. This linkage is at the basis of such key photo-theoretical texts as Barthes's Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography and Cadava's Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. 5. Influenced by the thinking of Jean-Luc Nancy, I have explored photography as a discourse of exposure that exposes our being- in-common and in relation to death and finitude, thereby opening a Bataillian space of nonknowledge, in American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century (2005). I refer to this expository approach to photography at various points in order to contrast it with Sontag's emphasis on the index. For a further analysis of the challenge to the index offered to theorists like Bazin and Sontag by Nancy's thinking, see my forthcoming essay "Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy's Recasting of the Photographic Image." 6. The source of the reference to "absolute dismemberment" comes from Hegel's The Phenomenology of Spirit. Bataille quotes the master: "Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment" (18). 7. I have benefited greatly from Arkady Plotnitsky's essay, "Effects of the Unknowable: Materialism, Epistemology, and the General Economy of the Body in Bataille" (2001). This includes his nuanced delineation of Bataille's non-concepts (e.g., sovereignty, general economy, and unknowledge) as well as a rigorous attention to Bataille's writings as an "encounter with the impossible" (17). 8. Plotnitsky also points out that Bataille's "general economy entails a deployment of restricted economy" (21) because there is no such thing as "purely unproductive expenditure" (22). See Bataille, The Accursed Share (Vol. 1) 12. In this way, one avoids the misunderstanding that Bataille's thought is "uncritically idealizing expenditure, loss, and so forth" (22). 9. Nancy concludes with the insistence that rather than merely scoff at the meaninglessness of Bataille's project of unknowing, one should read and savor the words of Bataille's exscripted text for "the absolute meaning of their nonsignification" (65). 10. See the comprehensive website devoted to "Chinese Torture/Supplice chinois: Iconographic, Historical, and Literary Approaches to an Exotic Representation at http://turandot.ish-lyon.cnrs.fr/ [accessed January 11, 2009]. In addition to the reproduction of the infamous images that are under consideration here, two of Jerome Bourgon's essays discuss Bataille in particular. See "Bataille et le supplicie chinois: erreurs sur la personne" and "Photographing 'Chinese Torture.'" 11. Bataille's Les Larmes d'Eros was originally published by Editions J-J. Pauvert in Paris in 1961. 12. I address the question of "Bataille's Laughter" extensively in an essay in Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art. Ed. John Welchman. 13. Here I follow Derrida's analysis of Bataille's sovereign operation in "From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism Without Reserve." Derrida ponders, "Thus it must simulate, after a fashion, the absolute risk, and it must laugh at this simulacrum" (256). Laughter in the face of death and the impossible is crucial to Derrida's analysis of Bataille's (non)concept of sovereignty and of the way it exceeds lordship/mastery. I will return to this point in greater detail below. 14. In the section of Les Larmes d'Eros entitled "Supplice Chinois," Bataille writes in the original French: "Ce fut à cette occasion que je discernai, dans la violence de cette image, une valeur infinie de renversement" (Oeuvres completes X 627). 15. This is the famous formulation that concludes the third volume of The Accursed Share and that sets sovereignty on the path of the impossible. "The main thing is always the same: sovereignty is NOTHING." 16. Derrida situates the laughable situation in which sovereignty finds itself. To fill in the passage previously cited, "Laughter, which constitutes sovereignty in its relation to death, is not a negativity, as has been said. And it laughs at itself, a 'major' laughter laughs at a 'minor' laughter, for the sovereign operation also needs life -- the life that welds the two lives together -- in order to be in relation to itself in the pleasurable consumption of itself. Thus, it must simulate, after a fashion, the absolute risk, and it must laugh at this simulacrum" (256). 17. "The hallucinatory appearance of these photographs . . . is due -- perhaps because of the injection of doses of opium--to the fact that the victim looks 'ravished' and ecstatic" (Surya 94). 18. In an e-mail to the author on November 12, 2004, James Elkins writes that his own research "traces the origin of that '(?)' in [Georges] Dumas's text." Elkins is referring here to the French psychologist George Dumas's discussion and publication of two of the lingchi images in his Traite de psychologie. Bataille notes in The Tears of Eros that "one of these shots was reproduced in Georges Dumas's Traite de psychologie" and that "Dumas insists upon the ecstatic appearance of the victim's expression" (205). Elkins depicts and discusses another set of lingchi photographs in The Object Stares Back, 108-115. 19. Bataille, "Method of Meditation," in The Unfinished System of Knowledge, 83. This definition coincides with Jacques Derrida's reading of the ecstatic in Bataille as the eruption "of sovereign speech" which is not to be understood as the attainment of another discourse but rather an acknowledgment of the necessary blindspots that open up every discourse to the loss of its own meaning to the extent that Bataille's writing becomes the commentary on its own absence of meaning. For Derrida, "The poetic or the ecstatic is that in every discourse which can open itself up to the absolute loss of its sense, to the (non-)base of the sacred, of nonmeaning, of un-knowledge or of play" (261). One notes here Bataille's insistence that the sacred is also located at the limit (or the beyond) of knowledge. If the sacred is linked to ecstasy (or to Sontag's "sacrifice to exaltation"), this is not to be conflated in any way with the attainment of any knowledge of the sacred, for these are dependent upon extreme acts of transgression that entail the loss of meaning. If this were not the case, then such a move would threaten to collapse Bataille's sovereignty into Hegel's lordship yet again. 20. Bataille's important lecture was delivered on February 9, 1953 at the College Philosophique in Paris. 21. This passage begins with a description of the torture images from the subject position of the executioner (i.e., from the sadistic point of view) and it marks the intertwining of photography and haunting. "The Chinese executioner of my photo haunts me: there he is busily cutting off his victim's leg at the knee. The victim is bound to a stake, eyes turned up, head thrown back, and through a grimacing mouth you see teeth. The blade's entering the flesh at the knee" (Guilty 38-39). 22. Wall is quoted in Peter Darbyshire. For the on-line version of the part of the interview that deals with Dead Troops Talk, see http://cancult.ca/2008/05/27/the-globe-talks-to-jeff-wall/ [accessed January 11, 2009]. 23. This text and image is found on the website for the retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern in London entitled Jeff Wall Photographs 1978-2004. See www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/jeffwall/rooms/room8.shtm [accessed January 11, 2009]. 24. This was originally published in Acephale V (June 1939): 1-8. Bataille makes a similar point in "Nonknowledge, Laughter, and Tears." "The strangest mystery to be found in laughter is attached to the fact that we rejoice in something that puts the equilibrium of life in danger. We even rejoice in the strongest way" (144). Works Cited Awret, Uziel. "Las Meninas and the Search for Self-Representation." Journal of Consciousness Studies 15. 9 (2008): 7-34. Web. 15 Aug. 2009. Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang, 1981. Print. Basu, Manisha. "The Hamartia of Light and Shadow: Susan Sontag in the Digital Age." Postmodern Culture 16. 3 (2006). Web. Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy. Vol. 1. Consumption. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1988. Print. ---. The Accursed Share. Volumes II & III. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books, 1993. Print. ---. Erotism: Death and Sensuality. Trans. Mary Dalwood. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1986. Print. ---. Guilty. Trans. Bruce Boone. Venice: Lapis Press, 1988. Print. ---. "Hegel, Death and Sacrifice." Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 9-28. Web. ---. The Inner Experience. Trans. Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988. Print. ---. Les Larmes d'Eros. Paris: Jean-Jacques Pauvert, 1961. Print. ---. Oeuvres completes, Vol. X. L'erotisme - Le proces de Gilles de Rais - Les larmes d'Eros. Paris: Gallimard, 1987. Print. ---. The Tears of Eros. Trans. Peter Connor. San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1989. Print. ---. The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge. Trans. Michelle Kendall and Stuart Kendall. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print. Beckman, Karen. "Nothing to Say: The War on Terror and the Mad Photography of Roland Barthes." Grey Room 34 (2009): 104-134. Web. Blanchot, Maurice. The Unavowable Community. Trans. Pierre Joris. Barrytown: Station Hill Press, 1988. Print. Borch-Jacobsen, Mikkel. "The Laughter of Being." MLN 102. 4 (1987): 737-760. Web. Bourgon, Jerome. "Chinese Torture/Supplice chinois: Iconographic, Historical, and Literary Approaches of an Exotic Representation." Web. 11 Jan. 2009. Butler, Judith. "Photography, War, Outrage." PMLA 120. 3 (2005): 822-827. Print. Cadava, Eduardo. Words of Light: Theses on the Photography of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. Print. Carpeaux, Louis. Pekin qui s'en va. Paris: Maloine, 1913. Print. Darbyshire, Peter. "Vancouver artist Jeff Wall Discusses Five of His Better Known Works." The Toronto Globe and Mail, 27 May 2008. Web. 11 Jan. 2009. Derrida, Jacques. Writing and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978. Print. Dumas, Georges. Traite de psychologie. Paris: Felix Alcan, 1923-4. Print. Elkins, James. The Object Stares Back: On the Nature of Seeing. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Print. Kaplan, Louis. American Exposures: Photography and Community in the Twentieth Century. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005. Print. ---. "Bataille's Laughter." Black Sphinx: On the Comedic in Modern Art. Ed. John Welchman. Zurich: J.R.P/Ringier, forthcoming 2010. Print. ---. "Photograph/Death Mask: Jean-Luc Nancy's Recasting of the Photographic Image." Journal of Visual Culture (forthcoming April 2010). Web. Lunenfeld, Peter. "Art Post-History: Digital Photography and Electronic Semiotics." Photography after Photography: Memory and Representation in the Digital Age. Ed. Hubertus v. Amelunxen. Amsterdam: G+B Arts, 1996. 92-98. Print. Nancy, Jean-Luc. "Exscription." Yale French Studies 78 (1990): 47-65. Web. ---. The Inoperative Community. Ed. and Trans. Peter Connor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. Print. Nietzsche, Friedrich. On the Genealogy of Morals. Trans. Walter Kauffman. New York: Vintage Books, 1989. Print. Peirce, Charles Sanders. "Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs." Philosophic Writings of C.S. Peirce. New York: Dover Publications, 1955. Web. Jan. 11, 2009. Plotnitsky, Arkady. "Effects of the Unknowable: Materialism, Epistemology, and the General Economy of the Body in Bataille." Parallax 7.1 (2001): 16-28. Web. Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1977.Print. ---. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003. Print. ---. "Regarding the Torture of Others." New York Times Magazine 23 May 2004: 24-29, 42. Print. ---. Styles of Radical Will. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969. Print. ---. Ed. Antonin Artaud: Selected Writings. New York: The Noonday Press, 1976. Print. Surya, Michel. Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography. Trans. Krzysztof Fijalkowski and Michael Richardson. London: Verso, 2002. Print. Tate Modern. Jeff Wall Photographs 1978-2004. 21 October 2005 - 8 January 2006. Web. 11 Jan. 2009. Wolf, Herta. "The Tears of Photography." Grey Room 29 (Fall 2007): 66-89. Web. ILLUSTRATIONS Figure 1. Book Cover for Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 2003. Figure 2. Anonymous, The Chinese Torture of One Hundred Cuts, ca. 1905. Figure 3. Jeff Wall, Dead Troops Talk, 1991-1992. Silver dye bleach transparency in aluminum lightbox, 229 x 417 cm.