The Gash
GEORGES BUN
THE MALE
satisfaction which is born of the act of gashing must be
considered in connection with some guilty forms of our sadism. Any form
of integrity provokes us.
We do not resist the joy of scribbling on a freshly whitewashed
surface. Any zone of purity as a portion of the absolute scoffs at us;
he who cannot subdue it, soils it. It is the vindictive consciousness of
_our imperfection which condemns us to allow nothing to remain intact.
In this way we see that rape far from satisfying an excess of energy only
affirms an overflow of impotence. It is not hunger, but the need to
wound, to gash,
to
vilify which incites us to leave our tooth-marks in
a piece of fruit which, upon reconsidering, we decide not to eat. Cruelty
proceeds from envenomed despair. The vandal of necessity judges by its
value the edifice which he destroys. Who, with the exception of the
idolator, would waste his time spitting upon an idol? He who decapitates
flowers is but the obsessed victim of his artistic inferiority.
1
We will
note inversely that admiration is not unaccompanied by a desire to
destroy. This too visibly satisfying body of a young woman, this too
inhumanly complete and self-sufficient landscape that forces us into
a spectator's exteriority, how willingly would we ravage it-out of sheer
fervor! We only know intimately that which we have dismembered. We
truly love only
with
fury.
Let us admit it once and for all that beauty
fills us with
indignation!
The only man who is satisfied by a work of
art is the barbarian who consciously destroys it. That is why the dilettante
always becomes an incendiary in the end.
The pleasure of gashing is based on this general need of reducing
and damaging. But it receives its modalities from a complex which is
quite differently characterized: the penchant coupled with horror which
brings us to mutilate ensembles which are too finished or forms which
are too regular. Peter Breughel was able to exorcize with an amazing
luxury of detail and in a satanic swarming this criminal need to split
and amputate. Certain of his prints present a nightmarish heap of
monsters armed with swords and cutlasses who, though fabulously mu–
tilated themselves, are cutting to the quick the flesh of other painting
demons. But the sadism of the gash contains infinitely more than that
1. Baudelaire:
A Girl Too Gay:
"And the spring and verdure have so humi–
liated my heart that I punished a flower for the insolence of Nature."
