Solar Politics. Oxana Timofeeva
Чтение книги онлайн.
Читать онлайн книгу Solar Politics - Oxana Timofeeva страница 5
![Solar Politics - Oxana Timofeeva Solar Politics - Oxana Timofeeva](/cover_pre1066177.jpg)
By the end of the book Campanella goes as far as claiming that the sensual sun, whose light Ficino called “obscure,” is actually not even good, as God is, but malevolent, for it “strives to burn up the Earth,” whereas “God guides the battle to great issues.”7 This implies that the ultra-rational organization of the city (which today reads as overregulation and total control) must reckon with the brutality and explosiveness of the sun, rather than seeking inspiration from its goodness.
Now let me scroll up: in Nick Land’s book The Thirst for Annihilation (1992), dedicated to Georges Bataille, the two suns are not visible and invisible, or sensual and spiritual, but simply black and white:
A white sun is congealed from patches of light, floating ephemerally at the edge of blindness. This is the illuminating sun, giving what we can keep, the sun whose outpourings are acquired by the body as nutrition, and by the eye as (assimilable) sensation. Plato’s sun is of this kind; a distilled sun, a sun which is the very essence of purity, the metaphor of beauty, truth, and goodness. Throughout the cold months, when nature seems to wither and retreat, one awaits the return of this sun in its full radiance. The bounty of the autumn seems to pay homage to it, as the ancients also did.8
Against this tradition, the author points to another sun, “the deeper one, dark and contagious.”9 What Plato’s main character, Socrates, disregards, according to Land, is the accursed, destructive aspect of the black sun. This aspect was stressed by Bataille, who sketched his own theory of the two suns in the 1930s. Thus, in his short essay “Rotten Sun” (1930), he distinguishes between a sublime sun of mind, on the one hand, and a “rotten” sun of madness and unheard-of violence on the other. The first sun, “confused with the notion of the noon,” exists as an abstract object “from the human point of view,” whereas the second points to ancient bloody cults and rituals of sacrifice. Bataille recalls the myth of Icarus that “clearly splits the sun in two – the one that was shining at the moment of Icarus’s elevation, and the one that melted the wax, causing failure and a screaming fall when Icarus got too close.”10
Note that between the two suns of Plato, Ficino, and Campanella, on the one hand, and Bataille, on the other, there is a long tradition of praising the black sun in alchemic and occult doctrines. I daresay that this tradition is not so disconnected from Plato’s solar metaphysics, dismissed by Land, but rather historically derives from it – through Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and other esoteric influences from antiquity, Renaissance culture, and Romanticism. Bataille adopted the symbol of the black sun from Christian mystics before it was appropriated by neo-Nazism, modern paganism, and other contemporary esoteric movements.11 While Land’s interpretation comes later, and his own philosophy of the Dark Enlightenment can be interpreted as part of these recent developments, the tendency of portraying Bataille as an oracle of reaction, dressed in black, is wrong, and must be opposed by another vision of Platonism, which does not coincide with Land’s caricatural image of praising exclusively the “distilled” white sun.
Taking off the table the modern desire to rebel against ancient philosophical authorities and the allergy to hierarchizing categories – like the highest good – I invite you to focus on the dialectical aspect of Plato’s thought, which might just happen to stay not that far from the dark side of the sun as addressed by Bataille. Think of a line from La Rochefoucauld: “The eye can outstare neither the sun, nor death”; Bataille quotes this in My Mother, where he also states that death is “no less divine than the 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.