“I AM THE SUN.” Something happens to you when you begin to live Bataille’s philosophy. Philosophy has always been something lived for me. When I studied analytic philosophy at university, my brain reshaped itself into a Rubik’s Cube. I started reading Hegel in my spare time, then Lacan and Žižek, and later Husserl, Heidegger, and the existentialists. And at last, I’ve gotten fucked by Nietzsche, Deleuze, Guattari and Bataille. But you know… In the good way. Like, in the high on acid kind of way.
Each paradigm reformed my mind; my body became a vessel for different modes of becoming. Too much ADHD to approach it methodically, philosophy did not become a registry of condensed concepts, but rather a springboard for new experiences: new eyes, new perspectives, new life‐forms, new subjectivities. I don’t think I’ve ever been a philosopher for that reason. There is a tendency in me to go beyond the academy; to destroy philosophy—not like Wittgenstein or Rorty—but more like Gorgias and Nietzsche. This makes me a sophist in the academy’s eyes; in Plato’s eyes. There is a reason Plato despised artists. The common interpretation—that he hated their recursion into everyday objects—is mistaken. He despised banality: that which blinds people to the knowledge he had carved out of his reality. But everything contains its own parody:
“Everyone is aware that life is parodic and that it lacks an interpretation. Thus lead is the parody of gold. Air is the parody of water. The brain is the parody of the equator. Coitus is the parody of crime.”
—Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus (1931)
Plato hated sophistry and art for the same reason. It wasn’t their ignorance he hated; it was his own. The sun—goodness— is an anus. Plato is a character out of a FromSoftware game; his obsession with the beauty of the sun drove him into a madness that hollowed him out. Sunlight maggots—creatures risen in the sun’s own excrement—were the cause of Solaire’s fall. Plato met the same fate. His love for the highest abstraction led him away from the sun, from beauty and goodness. It is artists and sophists who understand Bataille’s own obsession with the sun:
“Love then screams in my own throat; I am the Jesuve, the filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.
I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night.
The Sun exclusively loves the Night and directs its luminous violence, its ignoble shaft, toward the earth, but finds itself incapable of reaching the gaze or the night, even though the nocturnal terrestrial expanses head continuously toward the indecency of the solar ray.
The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is night.”
—ibid.
Existence is this paradox: everything contains its own destruction. Art, as I have already written here so many times, contains its own destruction. To read philosophy as an artist—to make one’s own life into a work of art and truly live philosophy—entails a constant reckoning with oneself and the universe. By being open to transformation—disgusting, dreadful transformation—we open ourselves like a dish for something new to consume. We are excrement for our own art, for our own thoughts and feelings. Slit open like pine cones. We will not find beauty and goodness unless we can see them in maggots in rotting flesh, in mold over corpses, and in Anwar Congo’s emesis as he individuates his systematic mass murders.
I do not thirst for my own annihilation out of a desire for absolute emptiness, for my own death. I thirst for annihilation because I want to consume myself, because I want to become more than myself, because I love existence so much that I want to go beyond it and all its boundaries. Thus: I AM THE SUN.