from Catherine Millet, The Sexual Life of Catherine M., trans. Adriana Hunter (2002), pp. 176-177:
Description cuts bodies into pieces, satisfies the need to fetishize them, to instrumentalize them. That famous scene in Godard’s Le Mépris, when, word for word, Piccoli runs over Bardot’s body, is a beautiful transposition of the two-way traffic between sight and speech, each word bringing into focus a part of the body. How many times people say “Look!” when they’re fucking. Of course, you are at your leisure to see things close at hand, but in order to see well, we sometimes also need to stand back, they way we move back from an exhibit in a museum. Undressing, I love to gaze at a promising-looking cock. Abiding by the law of the Gestalt theory, it looks enormous in relation to the body, which becomes almost fragile in its — sometimes laughable — seminudity and its unexpected isolation in the middle of the room; in any event, the cock certainly looks bigger than it would if I was looking at it on its own. In the same way, I can, without any warning, break out of the game and go and stand a couple of meters away, with my back turned, my hands forced onto my buttocks to spread them as far apart as possible, bringing into the same sight line both the brownish crater of the asshole and the crimson valley of the vulva. An invitation become imperative, like a greengrocer saying: “You must taste this fruit,” I’m saying, “You must look at my ass.” And because things are more picturesque when they are animated, I make it quiver.
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image above: Jean-Luc Godard, Le Mépris