The Solar Anus: A Traversal

Didi Chang-Park

The Solar Anus first struck me for its title

A strange concatenation of the high, distant, celestial body upon which we cannot directly look
nor touch

and the dark, fleshy, orifice taboo to touch, difficult to see

yet intimately part of our bodies.

What motivates this forceful push

to place these distant concepts together?

What function does it serve, what frustrations does it create?

And why does this strange term attract me?

It remains unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, why, what, how the Solar Anus is

But in traversing the labyrinth of language that Georges Bataille creates

Ive come to see

a language of renewed urgency

of an erotic unboundedness

that ties the intellectual to the somatic

a language that seeks to speak the unspeakable:

signified by the solar anus,

a chimerical, monstrous form

an unspeakable Minotaur.

The Solar Anus:

Written in 1929 by Georges Bataille, a French theorist

of erotic excess

It is his first text

in a body of work that explores the limits

of human experience.

At 64 sentences

The Solar Anus is one of his shortest published texts

but far from being insubstantial

it is, in its brevity

like a tablet of stone

an ancient myth

as old as the Cretan tale of the labyrinth which it invokes.

For what broader, more ancient statement could one begin with than this:

It is clear that the world is purely parodic,

in other words,
that each thing seen is the parody of another,
or is the same thing in a deceptive form.

Like an alchemist, a wizard presenting a metaphysics of equivalence, of unity, identity,

Bataille continues

Ever since sentences started to circulate in brains devoted to reflection,

an effort at total identification has been made,
because with the aid of a copula each sentence ties one thing to another;
all things would be visibly connected
if one could discover at a single glance
and in its totality
the tracings of Ariadnes thread
leading thought into its own labyrinth.

What Bataille does here is posit language

as the fundamental connective force of being.

And not just any connective the connective of Ariadnes thread

Of Ariadnes thread leading thought into its own labyrinth.

Bataille thus grounds us in the primordial

the Cretan myth of the Minotaur and the labyrinth.

Queen Pasiphas sexual passion for a bull

Begets a monster, the Minotaur, both man and animal.

King Minos, angered at his wifes perversion

Calls for Daedalus, paragon of artistry and craft

To construct a labyrinth in which to hide the beast

And each year young men are brought in

To be sacrificed to the Minotaur

Until Theseus, with the aid of Ariadne, who has fallen in love with him

Finds his way in and out of the maze

with the thread she provides.

Slaying the Minotaur,

Liberating the city from its ritualistic past,

Theseus thus destroys the perverted body,

The abject, the queer, the unspeakable body.

But Bataille Bataille with this tangled thread that leads thought into itself

Defies interiority, exteriority, entrance and exit

through his act of writing.

Batailles vortex of entanglement is embodied perhaps

by his strange, complex metaphors:

A dog devouring the stomach of a goose,

a drunken vomiting woman,
a sobbing accountant,
a jar of mustard represent the confusion
that serves as the vehicle of love.

Batailles thread of thought is messy,

as messy as the flesh, for

the copula of terms is no less irritating

than the copulation

of bodies.

And when I scream I AM THE SUN

an integral erection results

because the verb to be

is the vehicle

of amorous frenzy.

Batailles copula is not one of tekhne

Not a simple tool with which to solve a spatial problem

But an erotic force in itself.

An embodied thread, one of amorous frenzy.

As Bataille follows his entangled thread he approaches The Solar Anus

Exclaiming, When my face is flushed with blood, it becomes red and obscene.

No longer able to point at his thoughts using words that pre-exist in this universe

he creates his own term,

The Jesuve,

This unspeakable Jesuve, portmanteau of Jesus and Vesuvius

Is the godly sun and the volcanic anus of the earth.

It is

the image of an erotic movement

that burglarizes the ideas contained in the mind

giving them the force of a scandalous eruption

In a striking act of identification Bataille exclaims,

Love, then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and
blinding sun.

Here Bataille reaches ecstatic union with the unspeakable, the Solar Anus which never appears
verbatim in the text.

Instead of killing the Minotaur or being killed by it, he becomes one with it, rapt in spiritual
ecstasy

The Minotaur is Love is I is the Jesuve is the Solar Anus.

Bataille provides a new mythology

One not of conquering, of domination, but of

Love

Love that is unspeakable, that topples hierarchies, systems of knowledge.

Love that writes, that is written.

Love that is incommensurable.

For while The sun exclusively loves the night

it finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze of the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial
expanses head continuously towards the indecency of the solar ray.

Ok. This is a lot.

Ive been saying is a lot.

This erotics of Bataille are a lot, maybe too much for 9:30 in the morning.

So I want to step back. And situate this labyrinth which Ive just described

Within a broader intellectual question.

Shortly after Batailles death in 1962

The French journal Critique published an issue, Hommage Georges Bataille.

Michel Foucault contributes to this issue an essay entitled A Preface to Transgression

A standalone essay, but A Preface To

Foucault calls for a writing that Bataille inspires in him

but that does not yet exist.

Transgressive writing

It is defined as

Anti-Hegelian

Against the binary and the synthesis of opposition.

Foucault lauds Batailles work as a spiral structure, resistant to the simple crossing-over of a line

a spiral which no simple infraction can exhaust

perhaps it is like a flash of lightning in the night which,

from the beginning of time, gives a dense and black intensity to the night it denies

Could not Foucault describe the Solar Anus better?

But thinking alongside Foucault, I ask, is The Solar Anus transgressive

that is,

Does its form take us somewhere new,

Does it inspire us, whether or not we resonate with Bataille's eroticism

Does this text have value to the person who does not want to fuck a monster.

In light of this I reconsider the title:

The Solar Anus

Could anything be more dialectical than a phrase

that merges the solar thesis and the anal antithesis?

the masculine le soleil

the feminine la nuit

the bright sun

the dark anus

I struggle to crown this a text transgressive when it relies

so clearly on the dialectic of

violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.

Entrapped in his own system

Bataille operates on the phallic transgression of la femme

Positing the woman as the dark, the unspeakable

It is perhaps his insistence or

his inability to break out of this essentialized binary

that renders his text so

inoperative, so

alienating.

Thus, I take The Solar Anus

as a challenge.

A challenge to inherit

the labyrinth

the labyrinth as a myth to be rewritten

A challenge to see if we can make the labyrinth

more transgressive than Bataille was able to

To make a labyrinth no longer reliant

On tired old notions of high and low, of masc and femme

To queer the labyrinth

To make language fit our bodies, our erotic, somatic desires

To escape from the crushing dialectics that the figure of a minotaur, or a solar anus might create

How can we make language for ourselves, embodied, connective

What is our labyrinth

What labyrinths will we create?