fassbinder and bataille

G. Bataille (from eroticism, chapter -de Sade and normal man )

… The extremes are called civilization and barbarism- or savagery. But the use of these words is misleading, for they imply that there are barbarians on the one hand and civilized men on the other. The distinction is that civilized men speak and barbarians are silent, and the man who speaks is always the civilized man. To put it more precisely, since language is by definition the expression of civilized man, violence is silent. Many consequences result from that bias of language. Not only does ‘civilized’ usually mean ‘us’, and barbarous ‘them’, but also civilization and language grew as though violence was something outside, foreign not only to civilization but also to man, man being in the same thing as language. Yet observation shows that the same people are alternately barbarous and civilized in their attitudes. All savages speak and by speaking they reveal their solidarity with decency and kindness that are the root of civilization. Conversely all civilized men who rate themselves as among the most highly civilized of our age. If language is to be extricated from the impasse, we must declare that violence belong to humanity as a whole and as speechless, and that thus humanity as a whole lies by omission and language itself is founded upon this lie.

Violence is silent and de Sade’s use of language is contradiction in terms

Common language will not express violence. It treats it as a guilty and importunate thing and disallows it by denying it any function or any excuse. If violence does occur, and occur it will, it is explained by a mistake somewhere, just as men of backwards civilizations think that death can only happen if someone makes it by magic or otherwise. Violence in advanced societies and death in backwards ones are not just given, like a storm or flood; they can only be the result of something going wrong.

But silence cannot do away with things that language cannot state. Violence is as stubbornly there just as much as death, and if language cheats to conceal universal annihilation, the placid work of time, language alone suffers, language is the poorer, not time and not violence.

Useless and dangerous violence cannot be abolishes by irrational refusals to have any truck with it, any more that the irrational refusals to treat with death can eliminate that. but the expression of violence comes up against the double opposition of reason which denies it and of violence itself which clings to a silent contempt for the words used about it. 


i had a scene in my head- you read the foucalt scene and i will have a huge piece of meat on the flour and i will cut it in pieces rhythmically. i would love to have a hummer. may be this is too literally , but may be other-way around by being literally and doing it for real it can evoke different thoughts. the pleasure of violence and breaking of taboo.  it is also very sexual.