Solar Politics. Oxana Timofeeva

sun.”¹² And yet we keep looking at it, and the divine eye of the sun keeps looking at us, although – as Bataille intimates particularly in “The Story of the Eye” – it is blind. If we assume that Bataille and Socrates praise the same sun, then what is really demonic in Socrates’ daemon is an insinuation that we always already connected to its darkness through the light, which is all around. We bear it in our eyes. Dialectically speaking, we do not really choose between black and white; in accepting the one, we get both together. The color shifts from black to white and back depending on the light refraction angle, when in the mirror of the sun we relate to the form and matter of sovereignty which suggests itself as the principle of political communities. It is this principle that Land attacks in the first place: “For there is still something Promethean about Socrates; an attempt to extract power from the sun.”¹³

What does this mean – to extract power from the sun? Through the lens of political theology, the sun represents the source of authority, and equates not only to god, but also to earthly sovereigns, like Louis XIV – le Roi Soleil – in France or Vladimir, the Fair Sun, in Russia. The solar circle thus becomes one of the signs of supremacy accredited by god to the one on the top of the social pyramid. Through the lens of economics, the sun is literally a fuel, a source of energy that can be extracted, converted, consumed and stored. The sun of theology is a master at whose brilliance everyone must look delightedly, whereas the sun of economics is instead exploited or even enslaved, as is every natural resource in what we call the age of Anthropocene, when planets and stars are no longer considered gods. Both perspectives, indeed, refer to the Promethean myth alluded to by Land, in which the figure of the sun is offered as an answer in two senses to the question “How to build an ideal city?” First, it presents the model of the good that gives the light of knowledge and allows selected people to govern a society, presumably in the best possible way. Second, it appears as the disposable resource of an infinite pure energy in which today’s proponents of green capitalism place their hopes.

Does this mean that we must simply abandon the Promethean tradition – which begins by venerating the sun, but gradually substitutes it with god, king, emperor, etc. – or replace it with some new metaphysics, deriving, for instance, from worshipping Gaia or chthonic cults? Although this trend is explicit in contemporary theoretical work, my idea is different. I imagine that solar tradition can overcome itself from within, by its own means. In other words, the principle of solarity – which does not separate from, but unites Bataille with Plato, Ficino, Campanella, and many other authors submitting their own proposals for the great project of City of the Sun – from the very beginning contains in itself the grain of politics that I would call solar, and which can develop into an antidote to such Promethean tendencies as extractivism and the abuse of power. Solar politics is a pathway between these Scylla and Charybdis. In what follows, I will try to approach it through the set of reflections inspired by my reading of Bataille in a virtual dialogue with other writers on solarity, politics, and violence in our times of political, ecological, and social mess, against the background of neoliberal capitalism, the COVID-19 pandemic, and anthropogenic climate change.

Bataille was an untimely thinker. Definitely not an academic philosopher, he developed conceptions that were too radical to be included in the official theoretical canon. In an age of rising fascist mobilization, he was trying to reappropriate notions of the sacred, violence, and sovereignty, and make them work against fascism. Militantly unsystematic, he did not respect disciplinary borders: in his writings, anthropology, political economy, philosophical ontology, psychoanalysis, literary and art criticism intertwine at maximum speed. One of the first to do so in Europe, Bataille began to articulate a connection between economy and ecology, and to reflect on planetary processes, which human beings cannot really estimate, and of which they are nevertheless a part. Bataille’s earlier conception of base materialism that considers heterogeneous matter as analogous to the Freudian unconscious and his later theories of nature and society throw fresh light on environmental issues that are extensively discussed today. Bataille’s theory of the general economy suggests new ways of creating a utopia based on the visions of the sun in its striking bifurcation.

In The Solar Anus (1931) the sun is listed together with coitus, cadavers, or obscurity, among the things that human eyes cannot tolerate. Here, Bataille’s cosmology is presented in a very condensed fashion: the essay draws a picture of a dynamic and decentered universe where each thing “is the parody of another, or is the same thing in a deceptive form.”¹⁴ Each thing can be equally proclaimed as the principle of all things, and is dragged into the two primary motions that transform into each other – “rotation and sexual movement, whose combination is expressed by the locomotive’s wheels and pistons.”¹⁵ The circulation of planetary and cosmic energies finds its expression in a seemingly impossible, parodic unity of opposites.¹⁶ Parody is the principle of Bataille’s base materialism, which inscribes solar bifurcation at the junction of eroticism, ontology, politics, and epistemology. Stripped of its metaphysical mask of the supreme good, parodied by all kinds of erections (plants, trees, animal bodies) and involved in a constant movement of the “polymorphous and organic coitus”¹⁷ with the Earth, Bataille’s sun directs toward it its “luminous violence,” whose perfect image is a volcano.

      Associating the image of the sun with violence features as a constant theme of Bataille’s writings. Sometimes he gives to it a sense that – with certain reservations – one can define as “positive,” for he sides with the violence of the sun which runs wild and identifies with the source of this violence – although the word “positive” does not really fit here, because Bataille is a philosopher of negativity, a radical Hegelian, as it were. So, to be more precise, he sides with the negative of the sun, which is, in his perspective, the site of violence. What kind of violence does he mean? How can the sun or any other nonhuman thing ever be violent? What is the place of violence within the framework of the discussion of a possible solar politics? Before touching upon these questions, I will introduce a way of conceptualizing violence beyond commonplace ideas that are more or less familiar to all of us from the contexts of contemporary life and theory.

Notes

      1 1. Plato, Republic, trans. John Llewelyn Davies and David James Vaughan (London: Macmillan, 1885), 508a.

      2 2. Ibid., 509b.

      3 3. Ibid., 515–517.

      4 4. Marsilio Ficino, The Book of the Sun (de Sole), http://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~alfar2/ficino.htm.

      5 5. Ibid.

      6 6. Tommaso Campanella, The City of the Sun, A Poetical Dialogue between a Grandmaster of the Knights Hospitallers and a Genoese Sea-captain, his Guest (The Floating Press, 2009), 68–69.

      7 7. Ibid., 71.

      8 8. Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and the Virulent Nihilism (An Essay on Atheistic Religion) (London: Routledge, 1992), 28–29.

      9 9. Ibid., 29.

      10 10. Georges Bataille, Visions of Excess: Selected Writings 1927–1939 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 58.

      11 11. See on this, for example: Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, Black Sun: Aryan Cults, Esoteric Nazism and the Politics of Identity (New York: New York University Press, 2002).

      12 12. Georges Bataille, My Mother; Madam Edwarda; The Dead Man, trans. Austryn Wainhouse (London: Marion Boyars, 1989), 50.

      13 13. Land, The Thirst for Annihilation, 28.

      14 14. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 5.

      15 15. Ibid., 6.

      16 16. See Stuart Kendall, Georges Bataille (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 55.

      17 17. Bataille, Visions of Excess, 7.