Heliocentric Slavery? Geocentric Slavery?

07/02/2021

Reza Negarestani has written extensively about the Sun but what I’ve noticed is that the explicit references to Georges Bataille are very few. Now, one of the few times I’ve found him explicitly mention Bataille, it is in the form of a critique. So, the purpose of the essay is to respond to it.

In Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss, Reza Negarestani argues against what he calls “heliocentric slavery”. He sees that “[t]he marriage between the sublunary terrestrial slum and the Sun has become a strictly monogamous model”.[1] What Negarestani desires is to recognize and embrace “the Earth as a fractal clump rather than an exotic blue marble,” and that the Sun is “already-dead”.[2] Negarestani wants to move away from those “vitalistic” and “necrocratic” conceptions of the “relationship between the Earth and the Sun”.[3] This is to say that purely viewing the aforementioned relationship from a perspective of life and death is problematic. For Negarestani, one mustn’t view the Sun as that which gives life to the Earth, nor as that which is killing the Earth. And the Earth mustn’t be seen as the bastion of life, nor as that place of mass death. Negarestani wants our view to look at the aforementioned relationship with “an ecology permeated with radical contingencies of the cosmic abyss [that] can reinvent the Earth in the direction of the great outdoors” [emphasis mine].[4] This is an ecology which holds that “every moment is an apocalypse which cannot be culminated”.[5] This is an ecology which sees that “the Sun is not the heart of darkness but that which cauterizes the gaping wound from which pulverizing contingencies (or climates) of the cosmic abyss bleed into our world”.[6]

For Negarestani, the Sun “must also be stripped of both its stellar privileges and hegemonic ecological imports” because “the Sun is only an inevitable blind spot for the Earth that bars the scope of the abyss” [emphasis mine].[7] This is to say that the Sun is that place which blocks out the abyss, it keeps us blind to it, and Negarestani argues that it is because of this reason that “the Sun should neither be embraced as the dark flame of excess nor glorified as a luminos end, but reconsidered and rediscovered as an infernal element in the chain of complicities which open the Earth into a universe that is more weird than infernal, its climatic events are more asymptotically non-eventful rather than catastrophically climatic, its exteriority is more immanent to the inside rather than the outside” [emphasis mine].[8] Let’s note how ‘immanent’ is used here. That which is immanent, for Bataille, is necessarily not. That is to say that those things which are immanent do not have an inside nor an outside. Bodies are never stable. One must ask the question “when Bataille speaks of disequilibrium becoming the ‘anti-state’ of immanence, can one really argue that things are?”. The answer is definitively “no” in that in immanence, things dissolve due to the fact that things are only fictions which are seen under the veil of maya that is the transcendent position. In other words, the restricted view of the Sun, that is, the view of the Sun as a thing is problematic in the first place.

Negarestani takes issue with viewing the Sun as “the dark flame of excess” because he sees the Sun as the “blind spot” of the Earth. But the usage of ‘blind spot’ is so curiously Bataillean. If the Sun is any sort of blind spot then it must necessarily be of excess because the blind spot is that nonknowledge which causes the ground under the epistemologist’s feet to become uncertain and then fall in. This is to say, in the position of the blind spot, one must ask “why is it blinding?” and one can only answer with “not because it is bright, for it is black, rather because that which would want to view the Sun, self-consciousness, necessarily breaks down into immanence after the veil of maya dissolves”.

Negarestani wants to see the Earth, in the light of this radical ecology, as nothing more than the product “of an abyss” that is “an abyssal cosmos where heliocentric slavery has been abolished”.[9] Let us pause here for a moment.

What has been said thus far? Negarestani opts to not view the relationship of the Sun and the Earth in a certain way because the Sun is nothing more than a blind spot that prevents the Earth to see the totality that is the abyss. This is to say that really nothing has been said thus far. Negarestani is right when he says that the Sun is dead. But it is the very fact that the Sun is dead that is problematic for him due to the fact that the Bataillean idea of death necessary correlates with nonknowledge, expenditure, etc..

Negarestani argues that this “cosmic abyss and its radical ecology find their blackening expression in the water of life where all climates (biological, social, political, etc.) are terminally determined by chemistry or the contingent dynamics of radical exteriority”.[10] For Reza, capitalism, driven by this water of life (oil?), “becomes a perfect locus for chemical twists of an abyss”.[11] This is where he stops with the first part of his essay. On to the second, though this first section is abstract and rough, that is to say that it is without warranting and being grounded in appeals that have no identifiable logic behind them. It is this roughness that calls for further analysis later on in this essay.

Negarestani then looks at what he calls the “history of solar bondage” which is the history of heliocentric slavery. He sees that “[a]ccording to the energetic models of psychology (Freud, Reich, Ferenczi, et al.) the organic system — by virtue of its conservative and economical nature — seeks to fixate upon the first exorbitant source of energy that it directly encounters. This source of energy must surpass the lifespan of the organic system and issue forth a problematic amount of energy that exceeds the capacity of the organic system”.[12] This is such an interesting proposition. Is there potential for a psychoanalytic grounding of general economics? Negarestani then confirms our suspicion that there is when he says, “Consumption of this exorbitant energy, therefore, becomes a problem for the organism. For the organism, consequently, modes or courses of life are in fact solutions found and developed by the organism to confront the problem of consumption … ideas of how to live are reduced to solutions to afford the exorbitant energy”.[13] Now, this is problematic in that the organism necessarily could not be in expenditure in the sense that the organic subject must necessarily dissolve. There are no ideas of how to live life by way of expenditure, because one cannot live by way of expenditure due to the fact that expenditure is death. But, nevertheless, Negarestani, operating off a false premise, says, “The more diverse the solutions of the organism become, the easier the organism can maneuver between different courses of life and the firmer the organism is fettered to its exorbitant source of energy”.[14] This is where Reza becomes boldly unappealing for the fact he is speaking what the body without organs speaks, that is “sheer unarticulated blocks of sound”.[15] He says, “This growing dependency on the exorbitant source of energy through the ever-increasing shackles of life singularizes the exorbitant source of energy as the only model of dissipation for the organism i.e. the only model of death and the only way out”.[16] So what has Reza said thus far? He has said that the psychologist says that an organism centralizes its focus on the first source of excess energy which surpasses itself and that his fixation causes the organism to only look towards the problem of consumption. He then furthers that the ways to deal with the problem of consumption becomes how one lives. But it is this proliferation of solutions to the problem of consumption that only signifies our growing enslavement to this originally fixated upon object. For Reza, this slavey is also demonstrated by the fact that we copy its model of energy dissipation too. I laugh. Firstly, these psychological theories, especially Freud, have inherent to them, and I have written about this before, a fundamental failure. What I mean by this is that they are necessarily nothing more than “bourgeois sciences” in the sense that they are ideology which is predicated on the restricted economy. I say this because the general economic view of the psyche is one that isn’t a view at all, as we become blind in the face of its heterogeneity. Second, he identifies the organism as a conservative structure. Now, we do not take issue with this in the sense that the subject is an conservative structure but what is being put forward is that the organism doesn’t need the Sun to live. That is what is being said by Reza. There is no other option. What I mean by this is that Reza is necessarily arguing that we become dependent on the Sun due to the fact it is the thing we first fixate on. I disagree due to the fact that this not only presupposes these theories of the restricted economy to be true but, it also presupposes a metaphysics. Another question we must ask is the question “can we make ourselves not fixated upon the Sun?”. The answer is always going to be “no”. Negarestani is necessarily caught up in a performative contradiction here because he is trying to denounce the fixation upon the Sun while fixating on the Sun. Taking more from a Hegelian schema, consciousness still exists before it recognizes anything, but the question is of if it becomes self-conscious. This would be problematic for Reza because he would have to acknowledge that the only solution to his problem of the organism doing volitional action, that is intentional action (in the Husserlian sense), would be the general economic solution that is the destruction of the subject. But then he makes one stunning critique which makes us stop. He argues that we, due to our growing-dependency on this firstly fixated object of expenditure, start to singularize our model of death, of expenditure, after that first object. But again, this presupposes those psychological theories of the restricted economy to be true. It also doesn’t come to terms with the fact that the general economic perspective would still be the solution in the sense that the general perspective does not see the expending subject as a subject at all. This is to say that there is no model of dying. There is no model of expenditure. Death cannot be modeled. Expenditure cannot be modeled. One cannot model something they never experience nor know of by intuition, which expenditure and death, which are outside of the realm of knowledge, could not be known by.

Negarestani continues with this argument by saying that because of the fact that the model of death and expenditure (which we know cannot exist) has become singularized, “the exorbitant energy instigates and imposes plurality in modes of life but only in accordance with the conservative and economical nature of the organism”.[17] This is to say that “[t]he plurality of life is enforced at the expense of monism in death. And it is the monism in death — as a mode of inflection upon the outside (or what is exterior to the organism) — that rigidly restricts the image of exteriority associated with the cosmic abyss and in doing so forestalls a radical change in life and its ventures”.[18] Here he is arguing that, operating off his false premises, the advent of a plurality in how life can be lived necessarily implies a monism of death, that is, a singular model of how death can happen. Death, again, has no model. But, let us look at this more later. Now, he does argue that this model of death is a “expenditure” of energy outside oneself and that restricts how we view the radical exterior which is the cosmic abyss. How? It must be the argument that one can expend themself inside themself, that is to say, Reza must believe that one can lose themselves in themselves which is an illogical stance due to the fact that one would be in a pseudo-state of “regeneration”.

Reza argues that “the organism tends to use the same energetic model for its death — or openness to that which is exterior to it — as the model that it had previously used for conserving energy and living”.[19] These latter words of Reza Negarestani just demonstrate his lack of knowledge on how dépense “works”. Presupposing that it even has a model, dépense is the radical undoing of the subject and is necessarily unproductive consumption and expenditure. This is where his whole argument he has built falls. He misidentifies the consumption of the Sun as productive when it is in fact unproductive. If the subject is consuming in order to (this implies teleological action) conserve its energy and life, then this is productive consumption which is completely outside the general economy and firmly within the restricted economy. Thus, he has a very misidentification of solar bondage, of helocentric slavery, within his critique as there would not be a plurality of ways to live because the general economy that is the Sun is the realm of death and death alone. But let us continue as if we are incorrect, though we are not.

Negarestani writes that “[t]his [aforementioned] energetic model is fundamentally established by the source of the exorbitant energy and thereby, implements both the traumatizing effects of excessive energy and the inherent limitations of the source of energy which itself is another interiorized horizon enveloped against its abyssal cosmic backdrop”.[20] But of course, he is operating off the false notion that he understands the Sun as well as the problem of consumption. Now the issue with Reza’s conception of the Sun is that it has an interior. The Sun is in a constant “state” of expenditure, it necessarily is not Reza’s presupposed conception of the Sun, which is extremely occidental and Platonic, because of the fact that a Sun in the constant “state” of expenditure is a black Sun. Now, Reza again makes this argument that it is just another horizon against the cosmic abyss but this is another fundamental failure in his understanding of the general economy that is on the level of the universe. Reza fails to recognize that the universe, that the cosmic abyss is, is the general economy. He fails to understand that Bataille’s conception of the Sun is mythological. Reza, assuming his false and restricted economic view of the universe to be true, then argues that it is because of his understanding of the universe that “although life can manifest itself plurally as opportunities for diversification and complexification brought about by different economical ways for conservation of the exorbitant energy, death or binding exteriority is only possible in one and only one way”.[21] So… how does he think death is possible? He thinks that death is possible in only one way: “This way is both qualitatively and quantitatively restricted in that it strictly corresponds to the fundamental limitations of the exterior source of energy and how these limitations are increased in the conservative economy of the organism. Any image of exteriority that the exorbitant source of energy promises or creates for the organism will remain within the confines and limits of that source of energy itself”.[22] Now, Reza’s failure to understand that Bataille had a mythological conception of the Sun becomes even more pronounced when he says that the Sun is limited. For Bataille, the Sun is necessarily infinite. So, Reza has just put forth a non-argument.

Negarestani then starts his specific critique of Bataille. He says that “this [aforementioned] exorbitant source of energy is the Sun and its solar economy. The solar excess has developed a conservative image of thought in which one can only dissipate or die according to the model of energetic dissipation that the Sun has engrained within the terrestrial organisms. One can afford numerous modes of conservation or live in different ways but must die solely in the way that has been dictated by the energy model of dissipation inherent to the Sun”.[23] We have already debunked his first premise due to the fact he misunderstands Bataille’s conception of the Sun, and how necessarily no living organism lives like the Sun as that would entail them dying. So, the only thing we really have to deal with is Reza invocation of the Sun’s supposed monism of death.

Reza then says, “It is in this sense that Georges Bataille’s model of general or non-restricted solar economy is itself a form of restricted economy whose restriction does not find its expression in its relatively diverse modes of living but in the rejection of those modes of death or binding exteriority which cannot be indexed by the economical correlation between the solar excess and the conservative structures of the terrestrial biosphere”.[24] But what modes of death are these? Does this not presuppose that there are multiple forms of death? Multiple modes of death? What is death? Well, we can note two things: 1. Negarestani failed to do a close reading of The Thirst for Annihilation and 2. Negarestani necessarily makes death “so sublimely metaphysical”.[25]

Reza argues, “For the terrestrial biosphere, the dominant model of dying, or more precisely, ‘openness to the outside’ is limited to ‘being open to the Sun’, that is to say, finding a generally affordable consumptive solution to the problem of solar expenditure. To put it differently, openness to the Sun does not conjure a hyperbolic Icarian humanism as some might object but rather a restricted Inhumanism for which exteriority is only perpetuated by the solar economy and inflection upon death and exteriority is limited to dying by the Sun and through the dissipative model of energy that it dictates”.[26] So, we realize that Negarestani doesn’t take issue with death being openness to the outside but rather, he takes issue with death as being open to the Sun? What does this even mean? Well, apparently it is finding an affordable solution to the problem of consumption. This is laughable. One wouldn’t care for conservation, for limiting losses, for affordability, if they were following the Sun which squanders itself without return, without end, without compensation. So… I don’t understand how Reza’s conception of the dominant model of dying has anything to do with Bataille’s Sun? All I see is restricted economism trying to pose itself as general economism. Again, Reza’s misunderstanding of Bataille’s conception of the Sun comes to show. The Sun limits nothing. I say this because of the fact that the Sun is NOTHING! How can NOTHING limit something? This is the issue once more: metaphysics. Negarestani is necessarily making these things too metaphysical in the sense he is seeing Bataille from the lense of logos when Bataille operated off the lens of mythos. I also take issue with Negarestani’s conception of the organic subject as independent of the Sun. What I mean by this is damning. Necessarily, when the subject is viewed by Bataille as a solar ray, then we aren’t limited, we don’t have conservative structures in that Negarestani’s eyes are shrouded by the veil of maya, of representation, of spatio-temporality. The latter issue of spatio-temporality is pronounced in Reza’s understanding of the Sun. Necessarily, as Land went over in the chapter “The labyrinth” from The Thirst for Annihilation, the space of immanence is not analogous to our understanding of space from a position of transcendence. So, when Reza critiques the Sun as limiting, he does mean this partly in the sense of physical limitation, no? He obviously does due to the fact that he sees the cosmic abyss as necessarily taking more space than the Sun. Thus, Reza commits a fallacious conflation of sponge-space with “space proper”.

Negarestani furthers, when he says, “For this reason, solar economy is a straitened model of openness or inflection upon death and exteriority insofar as it entails the possibility of pluralism in life only at the cost of a strict monism in death. A vector of thought configured by solar economy knows of the freedom of alternatives in regard to death as a vector of exteriorization of loosening into the cosmic abyss”.[27] But again, where is this monism? What is death? How can we know that it moves in this way? I want to stress this fact: there is a domestication going on here. Death in the way it is described as going outside of oneself or as the limit-experience, etc. is domesticated in its description. Now, of course we agree with Bataille here in that he acknowledges this too, so does Land. We acknowledge the fact that what we are trying to describe is beyond linguistic description.

Reza then says, “Hence, the Descartesian dilemma, ‘What course in life shall I follow?’ should be bastardized as ‘Which way out shall I take’ It is the latter question that radically breaks away from life-oriented models of emaniciaption whose putative opportunities in life and dismissal of death are none other but manifests of heliocentric slavery”.[28] None. No course at all. Bataille doesn’t place exigencies upon the individual subject that would necessarily ontologically fragment them… or at least he would not “support” any exigency of that sort (or maybe any at all).

Building off his previous arguments, Negarestani argues, “If Solar economy and its associated capitalism are inflexibly monistic in death, it is because Sun itself is a contingency whose interiorized conception is in the process of loosening into the abyss — a contingency that tends to manifest as a necessity so as to inhibit the irruption of other contingencies qua climates”.[29] But the Sun isn’t an interiorized conception at all. It is not a concept… it is more that which threatens all concepts… And what capitalism is he talking?

Furthering his arguments, Negarestani argues, “Like all modes of slavery, heliocentrism has its own market strategy; it is called base-capitalism … modes of life as ever more convoluting circuitous paths towards death must not only be embraced but also emphatically affirmed”.[30] “The seemingly paradoxical proclivity of capitalism … amounts to the very simple fact that for the Sun the phenomenon of life on the planet is but a modal range of energy dissipation prescribed by the solar economy and afforded by organic systems”.[31] “This does not merely suggest that death … is inevitable but that such death or vector of exteriorization is exclusively restricted to modes of energetic dissipation (modes of life) that the Sun imposes on the planet”.[32] Capitalism is never base. I have proven this again and again. It necessarily excludes the erotic. Capitalism doesn’t affirm death and this is what Reza doesn’t seem to understand. Restricted economics is literally predicated on the running away from death by way of production, accumulation, and growth. Where is this market strategy present? I have never seen it… Again… Reza… there is a continued fundamental misunderstanding of the fact that the solar economy doesn’t do things like allocate… it doesn’t ‘prescribe’ a modal range of solar energy… it just expends, without prescription… the solar economy doesn’t exist in the sense Reza is using it in that the solar economy is the Sun. What is this usage of ‘affordable’ once more? Again, these arguments operate off of a false conception of Bataille’s Sun, Bataille’s conception of death, etc. The Sun doesn’t do anything. Because it is necessarily immanent, it is not doing teleological action…

Reza then says, “Yet these modes of energetic dissipation which exteriorize Earth are themselves part of the economy of the Sun which also mark its economic restrictions and limits of affordability against its abyssal and exterior cosmic backdrop. Capitalism, in this sense, conceals its restricted economy in regard to the cosmic exteriority (or death) by overproducing modes or styles of life which are in fact different rates of energetic dissipation or circuitous paths of expenditure. To put it differently, capitalism which terrestrially envelops the restricted economy of the Sun in regard to death and exteriority masquerades as the so-called general and free economy in regard to life and the problem of consumption”.[33] Again, Reza’s first point operates off his previous misinterpretations of Bataille’s conception of the Sun. When Reza continues to bring up the universe (cosmic backdrop) “[t]he error [here] is obvious: What is before me is never anything less than the universe; the universe is not a thing and I am not all mistaken when I see its brilliance in the sun”[34] The universe is solar economic. The universe is the solar economy. Reza is here trying to argue that capitalism proliferates death by proliferating life, and that this is it trying to hide the fact that it has a relation to the Sun. This has no basis. Capitalism is a restricted economy if it has to do with production, even the production of death, or the production of death by way of the production of life. Capitalism is not trying to conceal anything… Does capitalism try to hide the fact that the protestant work ethic still permeates the United States of America because of Red Scare propaganda? No, of course not. So, this is the issue with Negarestani’s theory of capitalism here: it presupposes that the Sun is a restricted economy which we have thoroughly dispoven.

Lastly, Negarestani argues, “The interiority of life on Earth rests on the thermo-nuclear interiority of the Sun which itself is contingent upon its exterior cosmic backdrop. Solar capitalism is only a market for representing the Sun as both an inevitable and unfathomably rich exteriority for the planet and terrestrial life, marketing the energetic model of the Sun as the only way to the great outdoors of the abyss. Yet it is precisely the Sun that circumscribes the image of such outdoors and narrows the speculative opportunities ensued by thought’s binding of radical exteriority. In line with the vitalstically pluralist and thanatropically monist regime of solar economy, Earth can be reinvented and recomposed only as a new plant or slave of the Sun whose life and death are emphatically determined by its star or exorbitant source of energy. On such a planet, ventures of thought and art are burdened by a narrow scope in regard to cosmic exteriority imposed by the Sun as well as the axiomatic submission of terrestrial life to the empire of the Sun”.[35] Well, we can cross apply our critique of Spinoza here in that Negarestani obviously rejected chance at the level of the universe. What I mean by this is that of course the Sun is “subject to chance” in that it is chance and it is its own authority just as inner experience is. But the conception that this cosmic backdrop isn’t chance is laughable in that it is chance too! It is the totality. Now, this solar capitalism argument seems quite interesting. Reza seems to be arguing here that there is a form of solar capitalist realism present within the solar market which propagates the ideology that the Sun is inevitable. That there is no alternative (to the Sun)! Reza seems to be arguing that these solar capitalist markets are arguing that expending like the Sun is the only way to reach the great cosmic backdrop. Now, this is incredibly similar to Land in the sense that one necessarily joins the solar flow when they are completely annihilated in expenditure. So, one could potentially characterize the cosmic backdrop as the solar flow, therefore meaning it is in fact the cosmic backdrop which is contingent on the Sun. But ultimately, the idea that there is a solar market, solar capitalism, etc. is all operating off the misunderstanding that Bataille’s Sun can be viewed in the manner of time, which it cannot in the sense that the Sun is of TIME not time… inevitability is never an issue, because that presupposes some sort of temporality proper. The next issue is that the only reason this would be bad for Reza was if it propagated those restricted modes of death, which it does not. So, nothing is necessarily the problem here even assuming that Reza is correct about these things existing. This is again presupposing that the solar economy has the monogamous relationship of the Earth to the Sun, but I would question this. Bataille sees the Sun as a place of death, and the Earth as the place of living matter, correct? Well… not necessarily… Obviously Bataile was a very different materialist but he has said multiple times that we are solar energy, that we are effects of the sun, that we are solar rays, etc. If you look at it from this perspective, the Sun is the place of death, and Reza agreed it was dead too, and therefore so is the Earth. Death! Death! Death! The final issue for Reza is repeating this restricted view of death, ironically. This is to say that death is seen by Reza as finiitude that is to say death is the end which is inevitable. But death isn’t finitude, it isn’t finality, and even Baudrillard agrees with this view (see the essay on Baudrillard below).

The rest of Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss rests on all of the previous premises addressed multiple times. This counter-critique so far has been one of mainly repetition. So, there is a Negarestanian critique of Bataille derived from what we have just gone over in Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss. Its title is De-limitiations. Of Other Earths and it is written by Giovanbattista Tusa. So, let’s see what is in store for us.

Giovanbattista Tusa argues that “the model proposed by Bataille seems to imply a vital need for every organism to receive, process, and accumulate energy from the outside. It assumes economic structures as much as natural givens in a state of equilibrium or imbalance, which discharge at a certain point a radically heterogeneous energy against said economic structures in the assimilable form of destructive events. Hence, it somehow naturalized the creation of surplus value, assimilating it to a cosmic phenomenon rather than to a product of specific forms of exploitation”.[36] Necessarily, if solar energy comes from an external object, then it will have to be externally received in terms of a direct relation. But, one could even forward the argument I have many times before: we are solar energy in the sense of a formless decomposition; it is only the transcendence that is God that turns that formless decomposition into a formed composition. Now, onto their argument of economic structure. Looking at Bataille’s subject formation, we can say a priori that discontinuous subjects are going to create structures which produce objects and accumulate objects, and these structures can necessarily be characterized as economic structures. Now, what Tusa means by “natural givens,” I do not know, but I’m going to assume that they mean the Sun, which I don’t know what else Tusa would mean. The Sun is not proven by the rigid march of logos but rather through the nice walk outside with the moon in the dark sky that is mythos. Now, I have no idea where Tusa has gotten surplus value from, but let’s look at this very unique, yet not necessarily strong argument. One can still say that the exploitation of surplus value happens during the production process even if the Sun necessarily is the root of our cosmological existence. General economics doesn’t raise surplus value to a cosmic level in the sense that nowhere to my knowledge does Bataille hold that profit necessarily doesn’t come from the worker. In The Psychological Structure of Fascism, for example, he brings up the exploitation of workers in relation to the production process. I see no foundation for Tusa’s argument here.

I want to really quickly go over one last thing before I conclude this essay.

In The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille, Denis Hollier says, “earthly bodies (such as scientists), even if they ignore the general movement of the expenditure of energy, are not independent of it, for they consume and accumulate its energy. While resisting expenditure, they remain no less integrated into the cosmic movement of energy, saving what is spent, absorbing what is produced, internalizing what is externalized. The Earth is thus a cosmic hole in which the truth of the universe (expenditure, communication, glorious manifestation) gets drained, sucked in, sacrificed”.[37] Firstly, this conception of the Sun and Earth’s relationship completely escapes what Negarestani critiques as the monogamous model of the Earth and the Sun. Secondly, what if the Earth is the blind spot barring the cosmic abyss from the view of the Sun? Is the Sun not under a regime of geocentric slavery? It (its energies) is constantly being exploited by the Earth, but it’s in a worse condition than the slave because it gets absolutely nothing in return. Are we not under the regime of geocentric slavery in that our conservative bodies are bodies. This is to say, are we not forming ourselves after the Earth, that is, are we not modeling ourselves after the very first thing we become fixated on? Does Negarestani’s almost anthropocentric viewpoint not just reinstitute the slavery he is attempting to critique? Is the cosmic abyss not the Earth? Is the “cosmic abyss” not filled with light, filled with stars? Where is the abyss if not the blackhole of production that is the Earth? Would it be wrong to have this conclusion: Negarestani falsely sees the Sun as the problem when it is really the Earth?

I have waited to the end of the essay to say this but obviously Negarestani presupposes a cosmology which he never seems to warrant in this essay. I want to say that I hope to write an essay titled Georges Bataille’s Cosmology in the future. Just counterpose that cosmology to Negarestani’s cosmology in the future, assuming that essay gets written.

References

[1–11]: Reza Negarestani, “Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss,” 12830-solar_inferno_and_the.pdf, accessed July 2, 2021, http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/77498/12830-solar_inferno_and_the.pdf?1360838343., 3.

[12–14]: Ibid., 4.

[15]: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (New York, NY: Penguin Group Inc., 2009), 9.

[16–23]: Reza Negarestani, “Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss,” 12830-solar_inferno_and_the.pdf, accessed July 2, 2021, http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/77498/12830-solar_inferno_and_the.pdf?1360838343., 4.

[24]: Ibid., 4–5.

[25]: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (an Essay in Atheistic Religion) (London, UK: Routledge, 1992), 182.

[26–31]: Reza Negarestani, “Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss,” 12830-solar_inferno_and_the.pdf, accessed July 2, 2021, http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/77498/12830-solar_inferno_and_the.pdf?1360838343., 5.

[32]: Ibid., 5–6.

[33]: Ibid., 6.

[34]: Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991), 57.

[35]: Reza Negarestani, “Solar Inferno and the Earthbound Abyss,” 12830-solar_inferno_and_the.pdf, accessed July 2, 2021, http://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/77498/12830-solar_inferno_and_the.pdf?1360838343., 6.

[36]: Giovanbattista Tusa, “De-Limitations. Of Other Earths,” Stasis 9, no. 1 (2020): pp. 166–183, https://doi.org/10.33280/2310-3817-2020-9-1-166-183, 177.

[37]: Denis Hollier, “The Dualist Materialism of Georges Bataille,” Bataille: A Critical Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 1998), 68.

Bibliography

Bataille, Georges. The Accursed Share: An Essay on General Economy, Volume I: Consumption. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York, NY: Zone Books, 1991.

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane. New York, NY: Penguin Group Inc., 2009.

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