Le gros orteil est la partie la plus humaine du corps humain….
[The big toe is the most human part of the human body….]
Bataille took a firm stand (so to speak):
full-page reproductions of friendly big toes and a commentary setting
out to argue that if the foot is laden with taboos and is an object of
erotic fetishism, this is because it reminds man, whose feet are planted
in the mud and whose head is raised toward heaven, that his life is no
more than a “back-and-forth movement from ordure to ideal and back
to ordure.”
Michel Leiris, “From the Impossible Bataille to the Impossible Documents,”
Brisées, trans. Lydia Davis (San Francisco: North Point,
1989), 244.
La vie humaine comporte en fait la rage de voir qu’il s’agit d’un mouvement de va-et-vient de l’ordre à l’idéal et de l’idéal à la ordure, rage qu’il est facile de passer sur un organe aussi bas qu’un pied.
[Human life entails, in fact, the rage of seeing oneself as a back and forth movement from refuse to the ideal, and from the ideal to refuse--a rage that is easily directed against an organ as base as the foot.]
on conçoit qu’un orteil, toujours plus or moins taré et humilitant soit analogue, psychologiquement, à la chute brutale d’un homme, ce qui revient à dire à la mort.
[one can imagine that a toe, always more or less damaged and humiliating, is psychologically analogous to the brutal fall of a man--in other words, to death.]
M. Leiris:
This anti-idealist passion
was to find its most perfect expression in “Le
Bas Matérialisme et la gnose,” a text of Manichaean inspiration,
devoted, in principle, to Gnostic intaglios…
[These photographs appeared with the original publication of “Le gros orteil” in Documents; they were not included with A. Stoekl's English translation.]