Visceral Economies, Queer Dialectics: Eisenstein Meets Bataille

Abstract

Abstract Mapping the encounters between Sergei Eisenstein and Georges Bataille in Paris in 1930, this essay reveals a new dimension of their respective approaches to materialism and the body, as explored, for instance, through a shared cannibalistic and visceral model of mimesis, one that operates below the visual or phenomenological qualities previously addressed by the discourse on the formless carried out by Georges Didi-Huberman, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, and Annette Michelson, among others. The present text argues for the existence of something it calls a visceral economy, pointing to a specific administration and distribution of affect as an aesthetic resource. It is precisely in granting the autonomous organological reactions of attraction and repulsion a function as collective operators of materialism that Bataille and Eisenstein would each formulate and experiment with elements of this visceral economy. While both authors considered sexuality to be a critical force of materialism, Bataille ultimately presumed an essentialized and binary understanding of gender difference that provided the ground for fantasies of excess and transgression. Against this heteronormative tendency, Eisenstein's research into the forces of materialism embraced a queer dialectics, or “bisexuality,” not as an opposition of genders but as a term for a gender-undifferentiated condition.