A Note on Bataille’s Solar Cosmology

09/01/2021

Today I was asked by my friend Jack “what is solar economics?”. This was my response:

It is essentially a (anti-)cosmology The Sun is the truth of the universe which is essentially immanence, i.e., flows of all that is. In the context of his solar cosmology, those flows are of solar energy. We are nothing but effects of the immanent solar flow. But the issue Bataille finds is that because we identify ourselves as individual entities, or to use his term “discontinuous beings,” we see ourselves differentiated from the rest of the solar flow, that is, we see ourselves differentiated from immanence. Thus, we are transcendent. But ultimately, we are fictions. Transcendence is fiction to a degree. Obviously, Bataille would not repeat the theological gesture of positing immanence as all that is “real.” Transcendence is real in its differentiation from immanence. But that which is transcendent and idealistically dissociated from what ‘is’ (base matter; immanent (solar) flow) is fictitious in that it is perceiving itself in an ideal manner. It is seeing things as they should be (ideally). Ultimately, what expenditure (or rather sacrifice, one of the “highest” forms of expenditure) is, is the subject losing itself back into the immanent solar flow. Like a river into the sea…