Cold Sun • Hot Planet

This article considers how Georges Bataille’s account of solarity informs a planetary perspective. Bataille is credited with formulating a critical analysis of “solar societies” whose economies are shaped by the exchange of solar energy. However, a sometimes understated facet of Bataille’s reading of solarity is the way he positions living beings at the axis of the sun and the earth, and in the midst of elemental forces such as cold, heat, light, and darkness. Bataille deploys these elemental forces in his writing in order to disfigure the restricted economy of capitalism and its bourgeois subjects. Rather than considering it as a social or subjective predilection, this article emphasizes solarity as a critical form and disorganizing force. This article addresses Bataille’s elemental aesthetics and his positioning of the subject as both a capitalist predator that accumulates solar energy, and a speculative subject, a being who is preyed upon by its own accumulation of energy and that is ultimately disfigured and expended by it. I argue that solarity arises in Bataille’s writing as an aesthetic operation per se. He invokes a mythological language to dismantle the scientific and philosophical tradition of the Enlightenment. Solarity is therefore the antithesis of Enlightenment thinking and values: it entails the invocation of mythic force in order to dramatize earthly elements and their anarchical energy exchange. I connect Bataille’s mythic language to recent theorizations of planetarity and political ecology, from Gayatri Spivak, to Isabel Stengers, Bruno Latour, and Donna Haraway. I emphasize how his aesthetic maneuvers disfigure the restricted economy of concepts that accompanies the resourcing of the earth.

Automutilation and Metonymy: The Economy of the Pulse

Exploring an economy of the pulse in an analysis of two films, George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Lucio Fulci’s L’aldilà/The Beyond (1981), this chapter shows how ‘splatter’ images have the force of ‘felt’ intensities insofar as the pulse is a flexible and momentary intensity that suggests the flow and flexibility of a ‘felt’, but unseen, operation. Georges Bataille’s concepts of automutilation and metonymy are operations indebted to the consumption, expenditure, and the ‘loss’ in general economy that communicate through affective energies. This chapter argues that the pulse entails a different kind of spectatorship than that seen in subject positions by which meaning is returned in value in a restricted economy. The pulse entails a spectatorship of expenditure in which the spectator is ‘put at stake’ and ‘loses’ oneself to the experience.

Rancière and Vallès: Musings on the Time In-Between

It is surprising that despite its impassioned lobbying against the debilitating capital-driven purposefulness of time, Marx's work remains singularly resistant to the concept of pure leisure, to the idea of recreation for its own sake. When leisure does surface in Marx's discussion of alienated labour, it is frequently as a detail in a far grander plan, telling us little about the personal impact it had on its practitioners. Prevailing upon the radical forms and practices of leisure advocated, archived, and theorized by Paul Lafargue and Jacques Rancière, this essay proposes a reading of Jules Vallès's novel L'Enfant (1878) that sees in it a prolegomenon for a politics of idleness that both outstrips the restricted economy this notion takes on in Marx and offers a powerful, indisciplinary indictment of a world without ‘free time’. As with Lafargue and Rancière, Vallès leaves us scrutinizing the root radicality of those intermittent moments where things cease to happen, where idleness becomes, for the eponymous child of the novel's title, a transformative, emancipatory practice of the self in which time, space, and relations to others (and to the self) are reappropriated as sensuous, sociable ends-unto-themselves.

Aesthetic Metamorphosis Oral Rhetoric in the Poetry of Tanure Ojaide

The writer's imaginative craft is usually inspired and shaped by the environment s/he hails from. This in turn gives room for constant communication between the creative mind and the immediate physical social world; the environment becomes a determinant of the writer's experiences. The influence of the Urhobo oral tradition on the poetic corpus of Tanure Ojaide is remarkable. The poet's cultural background occupies a looming space in his choices of generic style. Close examination of Ojaide's poetry reveals the exploration and appropriation of the orature of the Urhobo people, which ranges from myth, folksongs, proverbs, riddles, indigenous rhythms to folktales. Ojaide deploys orature to criticize contemporary ills as well as to locate solutions for Nigeria's socio-economic problems. The aim of this essay is essentially to demonstrate that orality accounts for the distinctiveness of Ojaide's writing. Also interrogate is the mingling of the oral and written in Ojaide's art. This approach will, it is hoped, open up what has been a restricted economy, through the inscribing of orature as a cardinal and integral constituent of the poet's art.