巴氏較為人熟悉的小說《眼睛的故事》（Histoire de l’Oeil，英譯Story of the Eye），發表於1927年，至1979年始被譯成英文。巴氏的小說，驚艷者眾，談不上「偉大」，其為了賺取稿費而書的短篇，起初也僅被當成二流色情小說去讀，到五、六十年代，評論界才「重新發現」它的僭越性質。其中羅倫．巴特1963年寫的短評〈The Metaphor of the Eye〉，為讀者對這部半自傳小說的賞析推展到一個新的層次。巴特提出，《眼睛的故事》中的色情想像乃非發自「陽物」（Phallic）想像的色情系統；而且，貫穿整部小說出現的各種意象物：眼球、鬥牛的睪丸、雞蛋，與尿液、牛奶、星光、太陽光暈等，成為了兩列對應的隱喻（Metaphor），而兩列隱喻互相交涉與挪用為一換喻（Metanomy）。在巴特而言，《眼睛的故事》並非幾位未成年主角的情慾勾當、涉瘋瀕死與出逃之旅的記事，而是上述換喻物在情節中的行進。小說的情慾主義亦與de Sade的百科全書式的周章繁瑣大異其趣，巴特認為《眼睛的故事》是傾向詩化的一種書寫，巴塔耶關注的是意義（Signification）發生的本質與條件多於意義的傳達，小說中的場景僅是為了上述「換喻鏈」之達成而設置：「如果我們在夜晚的郊野，那是因為月亮會從雲端冒出，照見Marcelle的窗後那床單拍揚、它上面的一處濕了的污漬；如果場景設於馬德里，那是因為那兒有鬥牛，就有活剝公牛睪丸和Granero的眼晴給挖出……」是以，「眼睛」的飛揚換諭、行進過渡而所指不穩，自己成為一個故事／歷史（Histoire）。
—— unmoving, exactly under the arch. She was entirely black, simply there, as distressing as emptiness, a hole. I realised she wasn’t frolicking, wasn’t joking, and indeed that, beneath the garment enfolding her, she was mindless: rapt, absent. Then all the drunken exhilaration drained out of me, then I knew that She had not lied, that she was GOD. Her presence had about it the unintelligible out-and-out simplicity of a stone – right in the middle of the city I had the feeling of being in the mountains at night time, lost in a lifeless, hollow solitude. (3)
Love was dead in those eyes, they contained a daybreak aureate chill, a transparence wherein I read death’s letter. And everything swam drowned in that dreaming stare…
「故事之於人生的意義」，巴塔耶認為在於它源自一種痛苦、一種狂暴，作者唯有接受著它所軀使，作品才能揭示經驗的限界、看見生命的其他面相。(4) 巴塔耶目睹西班牙內戰和兩次世界大戰，倖存於一個淪陷的歐洲，不就是一個焦慮失常、因及渴望自由以至於厭世自毁的人麼？完稿後擱陳多於廿載始於1957年出版的《正午的藍色》(Le Bleu du ciel，英譯The Blue of Noon)，講酗酒頹廢、戀屍癖的主角Henri Troppmann與病萎絕望的妻Dorothea在各自無法收拾的人生中奔趕著不能自拔，正是此種「災難後遺」的寫照，然而它卻是於災難以前所書。
Dying means: you are dead already, in an immemorial past, of a death which was not yours, which you have thus neither known nor lived, but under the threat of which you believe you are called upon to live; you await it henceforth in the future, constructing a future to make it possible at last––possible as something that will take place and will belong to the realm of experience.
—Maurice Blanchot. The Writing of the Disaster. Trans. Ann Smock. Lincoln & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995. p 65.
To see our own face as it is would be madness, since we would no longer have any mystery for ourselves and would, therefore, be annihilated by transparency. Might it not be said that man has evolved into a form such that his face remains invisible to him and he becomes definitively unidentifiable, not only in the mystery of his face, but in any of his desires?
—Jean Baudrillard. The Perfect Crime. Trans. Chris Turner. London & New York: Verso, 2008. p 6-7.
Let us consider a life in whose course there is abundance of repetitions: mine, for example. I never pass in front of the Recoleta without remembering my father, my grandparents, and great-grand parents are buried there, just as I shall be some day; then I remember that I have remembered the same thing an untold number of times already; I cannot walk through the suburbs in the solitude of the night without thinking that the night pleases us because it suppresses idle details, just as our memory does; I cannot lament the loss of a love or friendship without meditating that one loses only what one really never had; every time I cross one of the street corners of the southern part of the city, I think of you, Helen; every time the wind brings me the smell of eucalyptus, I think of Adrogué in my childhood; every time I remember the ninety-first fragment of Heraclitus “You shall not go down twice to the same river”, I admire its dialectical dexterity, because the ease with which we accept the first meaning (“The river is different”) clandestinely imposes upon us the second (“I am different”) and grants us the illusion of having invented it; every time I hear a Germanophile vituperate the Yiddish language, I reflect that Yiddish is, after all, a German dialect, scarcely coloured by the language of Holy Spirit. These tautologies (and others I leave in silence) make up my entire life. Of course, they are repeated imprecisely; there are differences of emphasis, temperature, light and general psychological condition. I suspect, however, that the number of circumstantial variants is not infinite: we can postulate, in the mind of an individual (or of two individuals who do not know of each other but in whom the same process works), two identical moments. Once this identity is postulated, one may ask: Are not these identical moments the same? Is not one single repeated term sufficient to break down and confuse the series of time? Do not the fervent readers who surrender themselves to Shakespeare become, literally, Shakespeare?
— Jorge Luis Borges. “A Refutation of Time.” Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed Donald A. Yates & James E. Irby. London & New York: Penguin, 1970. p258-9
I sing myself to sleep
A song from the darkest hour
Secrets I can’t keep
Inside of the day
I swing from high to deep
Extremes of sweet and sour
Hope that God exists
I hope I pray
Drawn by the under tow
My life is outa’ control
I believe this wave will bear my weight so let it flow
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down down down down down in sympathy
Now I relieved to hear
That you’ve been to some far out places
It’s hard to carry on
When you feel all alone
The wisdom that I seek
Has been found in the strangest places
Feels a lot like love
That I feel for you
Now I’ve swung back down again
And it’s worse than it was before
If I hadn’t seen such riches
I could live with being poor
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down down down down down in sympathy
Those who feel a breath of sadness
Sit down next to me
Those who find they’re touched by madness
Sit down next to me
Those who find themselves ridiculous
In love in fear in hate in tears
In love in fear in hate in tears
In love in fear in hate in tears
In love in fear in hate
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Oh sit down
Sit down next to me
Sit down down down down down in sympathy
A schizophrenic out for a walk is a better model than a neurotic lying on the analyst’s couch.A breath of fresh air, a relationship with the outside world. Lenz’s stroll, for example, as reconstructed by Büchner. This walk outdoors is different from the moments when Lenz finds himself closeted with his pastor, who forces him to situate himself socially, in relationship to the God of established religion, in relationship to his father, to his mother. While taking a stroll outdoors, on the other hand, he is in the mountains, amid falling snowflakes, with other gods or without any gods at all, without a family, without a father or a mother, with nature. “What does my father want? Can he offer me more than this? Impossible. Leave me in peace.” Everything is a machine. Celestial machines, the stars or rainbows in the sky, alpine machines— all of them connnected to those of his body. The continual whirr of machines. “He thought that it must be a feeling of endless bliss to be in contact with the profound life of every form, to have a soul for rocks, metals, water, and plants, to take into himself, as in a dream, every element of nature, like flowers that breathe with the waxing and waning of the moon.” To be a chlorophyll- or a photosynthesis-machine, or at least slip his body into such machines as one part among the others. Lenz has projected himself back to a time before the man-nature dichotomy, before all the co-ordinates based on this fundamental dichotomy have been laid down. He does not live nature as nature, but as a process of production. there is no such thing as either man or nature now, only a process that produces the one within the other and couples the machines together. Producing-machines, desiring machines everywhere, schizophrenic machines, all of species life: the self and the non-self, outside and inside, no longer have any meaning whatsoever.
— Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Deleuze & Guattari.
(Trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, & Helen R. Lane)