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January 30, 2004
Trevor,
In the light of the visual turn I've just taken as a recoil from the linguistic turn of both analytic and continental philosophy, I've been reading Bataille's various texts on vision or the eye.
A quick glance at these suggests that Bataille is undercutting the privileging of the eye and vision in philosophy (eg., Plato's turning away from false reflections towards the truth with his analogy of those who broke the chains of the cave and stepped out into the blinding light of the sun). For us, in Australia, the blinding light of the sun is the light of scientific reason that lightens up, and rolls back, the darkness of myth, superstition, prejudice and ignorance.
In the 'Solar Anus' text (reprinted in Visions of Excess) Bataille connects the sun with violent aggression rather than with Platonic illumination; and links the eye to the anus---or the lower and dirty part of the body. Bataille identifies with the sun and says that he is a filthy parody of the torrid and blinding sun.
In this reversal the solar anus is of the night (the darkness of Plato's cave.) I suggest that reversal can be read as part of the overturning of Platonism that was begun by Nietzsche.
I would suspect that the eye as sun also signifies the circularity of Hegel's dialectic: its stifling logic, rationalism and emphasis on categories or concepts.
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Re our sun: It seems to me that the light and force of the Australian sun is very violent in its illumination. It might promise absolution, but if it does deliver this it is not through the elevations of enlightenment, but rather the perverse and ruthless destruction and reversal of ideals. In this regard it is perhaps quite a Bataillian sun. And we are, after all, at the arse end of the Earth.