Publisher's Synopsis
Pornography of the Gaze is an unflinching meditation on love, sex, and death. It is composed as an explicit re-writing of Histoire de l'Oeil, the French surrealist classic by Georges Bataille, regarded an erotic masterpiece of the 20th Century. Here, the novelistic account similarly charts a wild, lewd and transgressive journey of two young lovers and their acquaintances. It draws upon and implicates a series of texts, incidents and accidents: revolving around the still unanswered question of the gaze. Susan Sontag wrote of the 'considerable gain in truth' to be made from attending to the literary genre of pornography. Nearly a hundred years on from Bataille's story, the verve of such writing is surely never more urgent a response to contemporary utilitarian and homogeneous ways of living.
