Solar Ethics: Bataille’s Copernican Ethical Revolution and Solar Economics as (Meta-)Ethics
05/12/2021
Georges Bataille wanted a complete (and literal) Copernican revolution and overturning of conventional ethics. It is a literal Copernican revolution in ethics in that we are moving from the subject as the center or locus of ethics to the Sun as the center or locus of ethics, just as the Copernican Revolution (proper) was the shift from the Earth as the center of the universe to the Sun as the center of the Solar System.
“For Bataille, there is no ethical act proper” because there are no ethical actions which the subject can do.[1] Bataille dispenses with the subject in that he no longer sees the subject as the locus of ethical activity, therefore the subject cannot do ethical action as I said before. This constitutes Bataille’s ethics as a meta-ethic in that he is no longer looking at what ethical actions the subject can do, which is what normative ethics looks at (Chris Gemerchak agrees with my assertion that Bataille doesn’t have a traditional or conventional normative ethics in his essay “Of Goods and Things: Reflections on an Ethics of Community” found within the book The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication). This also makes Bataille’s ethics a useless ethics as it has nothing to do with the subject or ethical action, in which one might ask “why even have ethics if they can’t be used or applied to teleological action?” to which Bataille would probably say something like “why do ethics have to be useful?”. The reason the subject is no longer the “place from which to gauge appropriate human activity” is twofold. 1. The subject “is ceaselessly subordinate to general state power”.[2] 2. The subject “does not exist” (and this second point also further substantiates Duane Rousselle and I’s characterization of Bataille as meta-ethicist par excellence as he is questioning the meta-ethical presupposition that ethics starts with the subject). Let’s first break down these two reasons separately.
When I say that the subject is subordinated by the general state and its power, what do I mean? The general state I would say, in this context, is essentially the Sun*[3] and its power is the Sun’s expenditure, its radiance upon this world which shines upon and warms my skin. I believe the general state in this context to be the Sun because Rousselle says it almost explicitly when he says that “[t]he subject is subservient only to the general state-form… [the subject] serves the authority of the solar non-place” [emphasis on the word ‘authority’ is mine].[4] Now the reason I believe general state power to be the expenditure of the sun is because of Rousselle’s usage of the word ‘authority’. Expenditure is its own authority which beheads itself (negates its authority) as it is sovereign. The solar non-place, which is the general state, is meta-ethics proper and therefore “it includes the authority and place from whence ethics originate and the knowledge and process through which this authority speaks”.[5] The subject in this way is nothing more than an effect of the sun, just a discontinuous body which is slowly entering back into the solar flow (of energy) that is continuity. Because the subject is discontinuous, it cannot be the locus of ethical activity, and it is discontinuous when it follows the logic of the restricted state. But how does general state power affect the subject? Well, it is quite simple. Rousselle says that “the general state destabilizes the subject as an ontological category and in doing so exposes the object of ethics proper — an ethics of the outside that is mythologically associated with the [S]un” or a ‘solar ethics’.[6] It is the violent shock of the Sun’s expenditure that destabilizes the subject. Now this perfectly leads to our second reason.
When I say that the subject “doesn’t exist” what do I mean? I said in the latter paragraph that discontinuous subjects follow the logic of the restricted state, so what follows the logic of the general state? It is the sovereign subject that follows the logic of the general state! The sovereign subject is NOTHING! To get more insight on how we contextualize the concept of sovereignty within Rousselle and I’s interpretation of Bataille’s meta-ethics, we must look at Bataille’s concept of inner experience. Inner experience is when experience reaches its endpoint in the fusion of the subject and object. Inner experience thus also has to do with Bataille’s concept of communication which is when one has an experience of being beyond oneself in relation to the other.[7] This is important because when Rousselle speaks of ‘an ethics of the outside’ or what I am to call ‘solar ethics’ or the ‘ethic of solar economics’ (solar economics as ethics? I’ll figure it out by the end of this essay), Rousselle is latently referring to Bataille’s concepts of sovereignty, inner experience, and communication. Now, when Rousselle speaks of the subject as being destabilized as an ontological category by the general state, we can now realize that he is speaking of the subject dissolving into sovereignty which again is NOTHING. Thus, the subject cannot be the locus of ethical activity because, subordinated to general state power, it has dissolved and fused with the object (in communication, in inner experience) entering into the state of sovereignty. Now the reason why the subject is always subordinate to general state power is because it is always involved in the play of energy across the globe which is the general movement of the economy; the subject is always subordinate to general state power because the Sun shines (expends upon the Earth). In other words, the subject is always subordinate to general state power because it is in reality always sovereign, as it is nothing more than a temporary pause in movement of solar energy. Just as the general economy is the truth of the restricted economy, the general state is the truth of the restricted state.
Now Rousselle and I’s characterization of Bataille’s meta-ethics also falls in[8] line with Nick Land’s characterization of Bataille’s ethics as a virulent nihilism. This latter fact is apparent when we hear Land say that libidinal materialism (which is to be a radicalized form of Bataille’s base materialism though it fails to be more radical than the latter (and Benjamin Noys agrees that it fails to be more radical than Bataille’s base materialism in his essay Georges Bataille’s base materialism) is “[r]uthless fatalism. No space for decisions, responsibilities, actions, intentions”.[8] Land too endorses the idea that Bataille rejects the subject as the locus of ethics.
There is one more implication that I am to go over and this implication relates to sacrifice, expenditure, sovereignty, and their related concepts. May we say that sacrifice, expenditure, sovereignty, and their related concepts are moments of the ethical as they are the moments in which we return to the solar flow? In other words, is expenditure, for example, a moment of the ethical because the subject is surrendering themselves to the Sun, dissolving into the state of sovereignty? I ask this only because the Sun, which is the general state, is meta-ethics proper and the ethical shines from it in this way.
Bibliography
Gemerchak, Chris. “Of Goods and Things: Reflections on an Ethics of Community.” Essay. In The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication, 63–81. SUNY Press, 2009.
Land, Nick. The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (an Essay in Atheistic Religion). London, UK: Routledge, 1992.
Rousselle, Duane. After Post-Anarchism. Berkeley, CA: Little Black Cart, 2012.
References
[1–2]: Duane Rousselle, After Post-Anarchism (Berkeley, CA: Little Black Cart, 2012), 237.
[3]: *(for more information on what the general state is, see my essay General State, Restricted State above.)
[4]: Duane Rousselle, After Post-Anarchism (Berkeley, CA: Little Black Cart, 2012), 242.
[5]: Ibid., 243.
[6]: Ibid., 244.
[7]: Chris Gemerchak, “Of Goods and Things: Reflections on an Ethics of Community,” in The Obsessions of Georges Bataille: Community and Communication (SUNY Press, 2009), pp. 63–81, 68.
[8]: Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation: Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (an Essay in Atheistic Religion) (London, UK: Routledge, 1992), xx.
