Abstract

The investigation that follows will flex in four directions, backwards and forwards, along the elastic threadthat ties the event of the bullfight to sex and thence a warm spill of sensation. In order to enter the fraythat is the bullfight, I will appropriate a term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari by way of which eachof the four thrusts I advance, or fights I present, can be read as asignifying ruptures [1] . With thisconcept we are encouraged to question the integrity of signification. By breaching the threshold ofsignification there results a momentary loss of the senses, at which point we might take the opportunityto search out or invent other modes of making sense. The activity of writing, for instance, as one meansof experimenting with sense, "has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping,even realms that are yet to come" [2]. Though the bullfight is organised by way of its own particularcodes ofoperation and signification, much is also left to chance and the unexpected [3] . With thisemphasis on unexpected novelty in mind, I ask you to consider this paper as an arena in which fourbullfights will be conducted. The twists and turns of the trope of the bullfight will be surveyed across fourdifferent textual terrains in order to explore the effects that result in bringing these terrains into thevicinity of each other. As such, I will touch upon the work of Georges Bataille, Friedrich Nietzsche,Francis Bacon and Michel Leiris. As Nietzsche has suggested, using the tauromachic trope, to enter intoa "frightful and dangerous" enterprise does not necessarily enable the capture of an enraged bull [4]; atthe outset we cannot necessarily be assured of what will eventuate with the outcome. Furthermore, thatthe bull is always vanquished merely holds to the dictates of good and common sense, conventions that,in this arena, are only tenuously maintained. It is instead the event that surfaces as an incorporeal blocof sensation, exploding in the midst of the spectacle, that this paper determines to pursue.