mankind, be vigilant; we loved you

John Singer Sargent, ‘Gassed’ and ‘Six Studies for Gassed’ (1918)

In Gassed there is little suffering. Or rather, what suffering there is is outweighed by the painting’s compassion. In spite of the vomiting figure the scene has almost nothing in common with Owen’s vision of the gas victim whose blood comes ‘gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs’. What Sargent has depicted, instead, is the solace of the blind: the comfort of putting your trust in someone, of being safely led.

"[Sarah] Bernhardt appeared in a bat costume for a dramatic reading of poems Les Chauves-Souris (The Bats), a volume of poems by the dandy-aesthete Robert de Montesquiou-Fézensac. Yet long before this book's publication in 1893, Bernhardt manifested a fetishistic attachments to bats. As early as 1870, visitors to her Paris apartments remarked on her black satin draperies embriodered with bats, a mirror in one corner of her bedroom with a bat perched on its frame, and other elements of bat decor and dress. The bat, a sightless mammal with wings that sleeps upside down and emerges at dusk to naviagate the dark mysteriously, functioned as well as a trope encoding homosexuality. The bat was also a popular Art Nouveau motif, but Bernhardt's identification with the creature undoubtedly lent impetus to its legibility winhin both male and female homosexual circles as a symbol of nonnormativity. When, in 1899, the courtesan Liane de Pougy offered Natalie Barney a ring that deatured a moonstone encircled by a silver bat the message was clearly queer."

The confusion that is constitutive of horror . . . is irrevocably linked to the complete perversion of a phenomenal field: if everyday intelligibility is organized around cultural heights seeking to secure the functioning of the phenomenal field, horror crystallizes in the decline and folding up of phenomena. It presupposes this downward trend of intelligibility that distorts and disrupts the phenomenality but that at the same time claims for itself a certain positivity and a certain appearance of this positivity. Horror announces itself as a phenomenon at the cost of folding up the cultural phenomenality; being born out of the straining of the symbolic system of a given culture and pulling off its horizons, horror swoops directly against the very deployment of a given cultural phenomenal field. Thus, we could describe the phenomenon of horror as a counter-phenomenon [which] deploys its phenomenality at the cost of a foreclosing larger network of phenomena. It endangers, hunts down and exists as a constant reminder of the fragility of the cultural "phenomenal spectrum". As such, it resonates with everything downgrading in a given culture. Horror lives in dirt and decay, it is malicious and violent, it thrives on blood, sufferings, and disappears under the light.