Bataille and Eisenstein: In Defense of Michelson's View

Abstract

Abstract In October 188's “Visceral Economies, Queer Dialectics: Eisenstein Meets Bataille,” Elena Vogman argues that there is an “affinity” between Sergei Eisenstein's and Georges Bataille's views, thereby contesting Annette Michelson's verdict that any similarities between them are “superficial.” This article contends that Michelson is right, and that Vogman provides no evidence of an affinity between Eisenstein's and Bataille's thinking. In doing so, I defend the important methodological principle, exemplified by Michelson's work, that theory should not be applied, top down and a priori, to art as if it were mere grist for the theory mill. Eisenstein was a deeply original thinker and filmmaker, and while he might have shared some of Bataille's interests, he did so for reasons antithetical to Bataille's. His work should not, therefore, be appropriated by what Michelson called the “veritable Bataille industry … [that] has proliferated to the point of generating a grille through which the reading of the Eisensteinian text is now proposed.”