Dionysos à l’œuvre

Abstract

«Dionysos at work » Given a dualism supposed to set erotic images against pornographic images, what is oblique against what comes straightforwardly, the high and the low, what is univocal against what is ambiguous or equivocal, erotic photography is herein conceptualised as a space for breaking and tearing. Taking into account the apollinian and the dionysiac, two nietzschean categories, it has been theorized that the erotic tension at the heart of the image would result from the shakiness of the beautiful apollinian form and from the intrusion of the dionysiac. Erotic photography would therefore form a their line between purely apollinian images (Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton) and purely dionysiac images in front of which language tends to disintegrate (the so-called Supplice des cent morceaux photography which haunted Georges Bataille). This has paved the way for some work on the forms of the androgyne, the transvestite, the sadistised body or the ill-formed body. But the opposition between eroticism and pornography beeing far too conventional, one subsequently chose to break up the opposition between the high and the low in order to the envisage the possible contamination of eroticism by pornography. The work of Nobuyoshi Araki, more particularly Erotos, could therefore be considered as a visual equivalent of Bataille’ s Histoire de l’œil. One would hence witness a radical and perverse eroticization of the world and of experience.