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Theory Redux series
Series editor: Laurent de Sutter
Mark Alizart, Cryptocommunism
Armen Avanessian, Future Metaphysics
Franco Berardi, The Second Coming
Alfie Bown, The Playstation Dreamworld
Laurent de Sutter, Narcocapitalism
Roberto Esposito, Persons and Things
Graham Harman, Immaterialism
Helen Hester, Xenofeminism
Srećko Horvat, The Radicality of Love
Lorenzo Marsili, Planetary Politics
Dominic Pettman, Infinite Distraction
Eloy Fernández Porta, Nomography
Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen, Late Capitalist Fascism
Nick Srnicek, Platform Capitalism
Oxana Timofeeva, Solar Politics
Solar Politics
Oxana Timofeeva
polity
Copyright © Oxana Timofeeva 2022
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First published in 2022 by Polity Press
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Acknowledgments
I have been doing research on Georges Bataille’s writings for quite a while, since I was a student; however, his idea of the general, or, to be more precise, solar economy was never really the focus of my interest until the Spring of 2020, when the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic bluntly intervened in my research plans.
I have to thank Imre Szeman and Allan Stoekl, whose work led me to believe that the idea of discussing Bataille today in terms of ecology and energy politics is not insane. Further reflections made me desire to write a philosophical essay on the sun, which I thought I would endlessly postpone, but, luckily, I was contacted by Laurent de Sutter, to whom I am thankful for his kind invitation to collaborate in Polity’s “Theory Redux” series. I am also grateful to John Thompson and the Polity editorial board for valuable tips regarding the initial project; Jeff Diamanti, Benjamin Noys, and Artemy Magun for their comments and critical remarks; Alexander Klose, Benjamin Steiniger, and the “Beauty of oil” collective for insights; Oleg Kharkhordin for not forgetting the Earth, Alexey Zygmont for encouraging me to carry out research on violence, and the students of the Stasis Center for Philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg, Andrew Glukhovsky, Alexey Sergienko, and Michail Fedorchenko, for their suggestions. I wish to express my gratitude to my family, and to my beloved husband Andrew Zmeul, with whom I was sharing initial drafts and ideas, for his amusing excurses into the perspectives of future technological developments of human and posthuman civilizations. Finally, my thanks are due to the comrade sun, who – even in St. Petersburg, where it is usually a rare guest – was so generous during the months when I was writing this book.
Introduction: Two Suns and the City
In 1979, when I was a year old, my family moved from Siberia to Kazakhstan, where my father found employment with a big construction project. On the shores of the great Balkhash Lake, in the grey steppe slipping into a desert, they had to build a city under the name of Solnechny, which translates from the Russian as Sunny, or the City of Sun. It was supposed to be part of a planned industrial construction – of the South Kazakh power station. The first stage of this massive project consisted in preparing the land for construction works – more specifically, they had to transform a hummocky topography into a plain surface. My father was hired as a shot-firer: his job was to blast the hills. We lodged in a very basic wooden barrack, in a small settlement built for construction workers, without basic food and other supplies, eating the meat of rare saiga antelopes that my father was hunting in the steppe, and fish and water taken from the lake. The scariest residents of the steppe were scorpion-sized
