HICO LECTURE: Nonmetabolizable Sun

Michael Marder (University of the Basque Country)

Lecture by Michael Marder (University of the Basque Country): Nonmetabolizable Sun

Tuesday 3 November, 8 pm

Faculty Room, Blandijn 

Abstract

In Bataille’s general economy, the sun stands in an exemplary (both singular and universal) relation to excess, the absolute luxury that both instigates and disrupts the restricted logic of exchange, a reciprocity mediated by equivalence. In a tacit development of Platonism, the Bataillean sun is a figure of giving without receiving, uncontainable in symmetrical, measured, cyclical, or even elliptical schemes. I argue that the Platonic heritage of this line of thinking has a further reach than might seem at first glance. What inThe Accursed ShareBataille calls “the sun’s consumption [la consumation du soleil]” is ultimately unconsumable; presupposed by every kind of metabolism, it is nonmetabolizable. The solar anus is replete with its own phallic shaft burning through the cosmos, while the world that feeds on its outbursts is a mouth without an anus. If so, then accumulation proceeding to no end and an excess squandered for nothing are one and the same. The nonmetabolizable sun is still or already (time has no role to play here) that of metaphysics in its pre-Greek, Egyptian version. Despite the dualities it triggers, flirting with rottenness, decline, decay, formlessness or ugliness on the hither side of exuberant growth, ascendance, and beauty, the sun that singes the pages of Bataille’s oeuvre is the blind and blinding image of eternity and of capital, the most recent instantiation of the nonmetabolizable on a planetary and cosmic scales.   

Michael Marder is IKERBASQUE Research Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country (EHU), Vitoria-Gasteiz. His writings span the fields of ecological theory, phenomenology, and political thought. His most recent books include The Phoenix Complex(2023),Time Is a Plant(2023), with Edward S. Casey, Plants in Place(2024),Eco-Freud(2025),Metamorphoses Reimagined(2025), with Anais Tondeur,Fiori di fuoco(2025), andOf Joints and Other Articulations(2026). More information atmichaelmarder.org.

This lecture is organized by the Centre for the History of Philosophy and Continental Philosophy (HICO) at Ghent University, Belgium. 

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