L'Anus Solaire (The Solar Anus)
by Georges Bataille
1927
translated by Jan von Stille
translated by Jan von Stille
It is clear that the world is purely parodical, in the sense that everything we see is the parody of another, or that it is that other, but in disguise.
Since phrases circulate through a brain occupied by reflection, there emerges a total identification such that, by way of a copula, each phrase links one thing to another; and all will be visibly connected if one discovers, by way of a single glance into that totality, the trace left by Ariane’s wire, which conducts thought through its own labyrinth.
But the copula of terms is no less agitating than that of bodies. So when I cry to myself, “I AM THE SUN,” the result is an integral erection, for the verb “to be” is the carrier of amorous frenzy.
All the world is aware that life is parodical and refuses interpretation.
Accordingly, lead is the parody of gold.
Air is the parody of water.
The brain is the parody of the equator.
Sex is the parody of crime.
Gold, water, the equator or crime may each indiscriminately be proclaimed the principle of things.
And if it becomes apparent that planetary soil is not the origin, though it appears foundational, but rather the circular movement that the planets describe around their mobile center; then a car, a clock, or a sewing machine may be called generative principles with equal validity.
The two principal movements are the rotational and the sexual, the combination of which is demonstrated by a locomotive’s wheels and pistons.
These two movements transform reciprocally, the one into the other.
Thus we see that the earth, by turning, makes the animals fuck, makes the people fuck, and (insofar as a result is also the cause of its cause) that the animals and the people make the earth turn by fucking.
It is the mechanical combination or transformation of these movements for which the alchemists searched and which they called the philosopher’s stone.
It is through combining these magical values that we can determine the actual situation of humans in the milieu of elements.
An abandoned shoe, a rotted tooth, a nose too short, a cook spitting into his master’s food are to love what the flag is to the nation.
An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the reek of rotten eggs, the gouged eyes of judges are the roots by which love nourishes itself.
A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunk girl that vomits, a sobbing accountant, a pot of mustard represent the confusion which serves as love’s vehicle.
A person placed in the milieu of others itches to know why he isn’t one of those others.
Settled in a bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he doesn’t know why he is himself instead of being the body he touches.
Knowing nothing, he is tortured by the darkness of the knowledge that keeps him from crying out that he himself is the girl who forgets herself while wiggling in his arms.
Love or infantile rage or the vanity of a country debutante or clerical porn or the solitude of a singer misleads those forgotten people in dusty apartments.
It would be lovely for these characters to seek each other out: They will never find anything but parodical images, and they will fall asleep just as empty as mirrors.
The absent and inert girl suspended dreamless in my arms isn’t any more alienated from me than the door or the window out of which I might look or walk.
I recover indifference (which permits itself to leave me) when I am numbed by my inability to love those around me.
It is impossible to know what she learns when I teach her because she holds obstinately to her complete oblivion.
Planetary systems that turn through space like speeding discs and of which the center displaces itself and describes an infinitely larger orbit never leave their proper positions except in order to return to them at the end of each rotation.
This movement shows the geometry of a love incapable of fixing on one object, a love that passes rapidly from one to the other.
But the oblivion that conditions such a love is nothing but a trick played by memory.
A person awakens just as brusquely as a specter from its coffin and returns to sleep in the same way.
He awakens some hours later, then he drops again, and on and on like this every day: His grand fucking with the celestial atmosphere is ruled by the earth’s rotation in relation to the sun.
And so, though the movements of life on earth derive their rhythm from its rotation, the image of that movement isn’t the turning earth, but rather the cock penetrating the female and then withdrawing completely in order to thrust in again.
Love and life would not seem separate, but for the fact that everything is broken apart by vibrations of stout amplitude and diverse wavelengths.
Nevertheless, there are no vibrations that do not fall into a continuous circular movement, the same as a locomotive that rolls along the earth’s surface, image of continual metamorphosis.
Nothing is destroyed but to be born, like the dick that only leaves the body in order to enter it.
Plants stretch toward the sun and then fall back again toward the sun.
The trees bristle along the terrestrial soil as an uncountable multitude of blooming cocks, stiffened toward the sun.
Those furiously soaring trees will die, scorched by lightning or wilted or uprooted. Returning to the soil, they will rise again with new forms.
But their polymorphic fucking is a function of the uniform terrestrial rotation.
The simplest image of organic life is the tide.
The movement of the seas, this uniform fucking of the earth with the moon, produces the polymorphic and organic fucking of the earth and the sun.
But the first form of solar love is a cloud that has raised itself above the liquid below.
The erotic cloud sometimes becomes a thunderstorm and falls back upon the earth in the form of rain while lightning stones the layers of the atmosphere.
Rain stiffens itself in turn, in the form of the immobile plant.
Animal life issues entirely from the movement of the seas and, inside the body, life continually emerges from salt water.
The seas thus play the role of the cunt, which is made liquid by the excitation of the cock.
The seas vacillate perpetually.
The solid elements contained and embraced by this water, animated by erotic movement, burst forth as flying fish.
Erections and the sun scandalize in the same way as cadavers and the darkness of caves.
Vegetation points uniformly toward the sun, from which, contrarily, human beings must avert their eyes, though they alone among the animals are phallic like trees.
Human eyes do not accept the sun, nor fucking, nor cadavers, nor darkness, but reject them by different reactions.
When my face is flushed with blood it becomes red and obscene.
It betrays simultaneously, by morbid reflex, a bloody turbidity and a demanding thirst for chaos and criminal debauchery.
Thus I am not afraid to affirm that my face is a scandal and that my passions are not expressed but by the JESUVE.
The terrestrial globe is covered with volcanoes that serve as its anuses.
Although the globe eats nothing, it sometimes spews out the contents of its entrails.
These contents burst forth with fury and fall back streaming onto the slopes of JESUVE, flooding the earth with death and terror.
In effect, the erotic movements of the ground are not fertile like those of water but move much more quickly.
The earth sometimes vacillates in a frenzy, and its skin crawls.
The JESUVE is thus the image of the erotic movement produced by the bursting forth of all those ideas which contain the force of scandalous eruption.
Those in whom the force of such an eruption accumulates are necessarily at the bottom.
The communist workers appear to the bourgeoisie just so dirty and ugly as the sexual hairy low parts: Sooner or later there will be a scandalous eruption, in the course of which the asexual noble bourgeois heads will be severed.
Disasters, revolutions, and volcanoes do not make love with the stars.
Erotic, revolutionary, and volcanic explosions are at war with the heavens.
Like violent love, they produce themselves by disrupting the clarion call of fertility.
Terrestrial disasters oppose this celestial fertility; image of terrestrial love without condition; erection without source and without rule; scandal and terror.
It is thus that love screams from my throat: I am the JESUVE, filthy parody of the full and blinding sun.
I want to be killed while violating that woman of whom I can say: You are the Night.
The Sun loves the Night exclusively and drags over the earth his luminous violence, his infamous cock, but he finds himself incapable of reaching sight or Night, although the nocturnal masses of earth are continually drawn toward the filth of solar rays.
The solar ring is the unbroken anus of its eighteen-year-old body, so blinding that it cannot be compared to anything except the sun itself, although this anus is the night.
