Bataille and Contagion, or Towards a Space of Sound and Art

Combining ethnology and anthropology with ancient sun worship, Bataille tries to explain human activity with the idea of the ‘solar anus,’ a metonymical association of the sun and anus in the flow of energy that circulates and nourishes the activities of all living beings. For Bataille, the source of heat from the sun to the earth is an inexhaustible energy, supplying living beings with the energy for procreative activity. After all this, it is still always abundant, ending up as an excremental excess, which is for the earth, the activity of a volcano; for humans, perhaps it is the activity of excremental excretion. In the manifestation of excessive energy, sun and anus are associated.