"The gaze, as psychoanalytical and feminist theory has long documented, is objectifying, and in certain circumstances pitiless. Anyone who remains under an unbroken gaze is reduced to an object of consciousness, something to be scrutinized as carelessly as if it were inanimate. It’s rude to stare. For the powerful, this is unacceptable: Power tends to position itself as a kind of universal subject. Tribes and states and corporations are the ones that think and do things, and while they engineer various spectacles, they’re not zoo animals to be passively observed...
When you look into the sun, it changes you; you carry a piece of it with you now; you have become a solar being, capable of conjuring up an 864,000 mile-wide burning star at will. No wonder the practice is so popular with cranks...
In the Platonist system, the sun is a metaphor for the Good, a principle of reason, justice, and understanding, the center of an ordered universe. In the same way that the light of the sun allows us to see the world of everyday physical objects, the light of the Good allows for (in Plato’s phrase) “the intelligibility of the objects of knowledge.” Bataille’s parodic sun is a direct challenge to that world; it’s what happens when solar reason is turned against itself, when instead of allowing its illumination to reveal a serene, peaceful world, we stare directly at its mad and burning source. It’s the sun Van Gogh painted, one of “radiation, explosion, flame, and himself, lost in ecstasy.”...
What Bataille advocates isn’t necessarily a collapse into pure unreason but an attempt to subject the highest powers to their own standards, to stare in the face of kings and monsters, and ask “why must you rule?”"
It was weird how compelling this was, how succesfully the abstraction wrapped up in the end (I wanted to quote the last line, but I also really want you to get there by yourself...) and it's freaking me out to stare at anything bright right now.
FB: An unreasonably compelling essay on staring at the sun. Like, click if only for the perfect merging of the site design with the tone of the writing
"Since we can’t eat the sun, Breatharians are content with looking at it. Over a terrifying array of websites, they detail the practice: For the first few months, you should only look at the sun for 10 seconds at a time, but as your eyes adjust, you can go for longer and longer periods. “If you can watch TV for three hours,” one author notes, “surely you can see the sun for that long.” The first effects are psychological: You will be cured of your depression, for instance. “You will become a compassionate person. This is a great contribution to world peace.” You will no longer fear death. After extended sungazing, all bodily illnesses will vanish. Finally, once you’ve learned to spend hours at a time disobeying your parents, you will be able to live without food, see across time and space, and fly under your own power, including into outer space. You will become a god."
(or)
" Reason comes from the sun, and so does the king, and if there’s only one sun, neither can disagree with the other. Kant’s reason allows for only one right answer, and it happens to agree with political power. As he puts it: “Argue as much as you like, and about what you like — but obey!”
What Bataille advocates isn’t necessarily a collapse into pure unreason but an attempt to subject the highest powers to their own standards, to stare in the face of kings and monsters, and ask “why must you rule?” If you use reason to interrogate reason itself, it’s revealed as being utterly arbitrary."
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