Pornography of the Gaze

Pornography of the Gaze is an unflinching, fantastical 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, widely 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 notable acquaintances. In doing so, it draws upon and implicates a series of texts, incidents and accidents: all revolving around the still unanswered question of the gaze; what it means to look and be looked at. Susan Sontag once 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 original story, the verve of such writing is surely never more urgent a response to contemporary utilitarian, restrictive, and homogeneous ways of living.