Death by a Thousand Cuts (photo)
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"Massacre en Chine [supplice du lingchi à Pékin aux alentours de 1910]" is the title given to a photograph depicting the Death by a Thousand Cuts or slow slicing execution in 1910 in Peking.
The early 20th century photographs that were taken of this execution were influential to Georges Bataille's sacred/profane philosophy. In 1992, the same photographs were featured on John Zorn's album Leng Tch'e.
The photographs were published by French psychiatrist Georges Dumas in the 1934 Nouveau traité de psychologie , and again by J. M. Lo Duca, who mistakenly appended abstracts of Fou-tchou-li's executions as related by Carpeaux.
Adrien Borel, Georges Bataille's analyst, introduced Bataille to the photographs. Bataille became fascinated by the photographs, reportedly gazing at them daily. He included the photos in his The Tears of Eros. (1961; translated to English and published by City Lights in 1989)
Susan Sontag mentions the 1905 case in Regarding the Pain of Others (2003). One reviewer wrote that though Sontag includes no photographs in her book—a volume about photography—"she does tantalisingly describe a photograph that obsessed the philosopher Georges Bataille, in which a Chinese criminal, while being chopped up and slowly flayed by executioners, rolls his eyes heavenwards in transcendent bliss."
