More, these are western interpretations of - projections upon - an image marked as fundamentally outside in a tableau irresistibly blending the colonizer and the colonized. It’s no idle point to say that all this reads quite a lot into a single frame that may not be all that representative of the moment, though that wouldn’t necessarily diminish Bataille’s gist. It is a view of suffering, of the pain of others, that is rooted in religious thinking, which links pain to sacrifice, sacrifice to exaltation - a view that could not be more alien to a modern sensibility. But he is saying that he can imagine extreme suffering as a kind of transfiguration. … Bataille is not saying that he takes pleasure in the sight of this excruciation. To contemplate this image, according to Bataille, is both a mortification of the feelings and a liberation of tabooed erotic knowledge - a complex response that many people must find hard to credit. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag explained the mystical nexus of pleasure and pain Fou Tchou-Li’s torture suggested to the French theorist, aptly comparing it to graphic but pre-photographic exaltations of torture in the western artistic tradition, such as Saint Sebastian: The different, unnamed man who as “Fou Tchou-Li” riveted Bataille is pictured here. Notice, however, that it’s not the one pictured here - the scholar who maintains this page claims the man’s identity became confused by western interlocutors. Agony and ecstasy? A sequence of images, strong stuff in spite of their low quality, describing Fou Tchou-Li’s execution can be viewed here.
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