#ecocriticism

the twelve winds

illustration from an astrological-astronomical miscellany, alemmanic german, c. 1500

Dark Sun: Ecocritical Surrealism from Artaud to Bataille and Okamoto Tarō, by Xiaofan Amy Li, Angelaki 6 (2), 2025.

This text develops an ecocritical reading of the “dark sun” through the intertwined theories and artworks of Georges Bataille, Antonin Artaud, and Japanese avant-garde artist Tarō Okamoto, arguing that solar imagery offers a powerful way to rethink economy, ecology, art, and human existence in the nuclear age.

Drawing on Bataille’s “solar economy,” the essay explains how surplus solar energy produces excess that must be expended rather than accumulated. For Bataille, life is driven by waste, sacrifice, and non-productive expenditure (dépense), making endless capitalist growth both impossible and suicidal. This vision links economy and ecology at a planetary scale and rejects utilitarian views of nature as resource. Art, in this framework, must be non-instrumental, mirroring the sun’s useless excess rather than serving profit or productivity.

The Myth of Tomorrow by Tarō Okamoto. i daresay it's even more impressive as a life-size mural, more than twice the viewer's height.

The figure of Icarus exemplifies this logic: rather than resisting earthliness, he embraces degradation, immanence, and burning excess, revealing a form of anti-anthropocentrism that exposes human fragility rather than mastery. This “burning human” motif recurs in Okamoto’s postwar art and reflects his exchanges with Bataille in 1930s Paris.

The essay contrasts Bataille’s terrestrial, centrifugal solar thinking with Artaud’s heliocentric, centripeta

l vision, showing how Okamoto synthesizes and transforms both through his concept of “Polarism,” the refusal to reconcile opposites such as life/death, creation/destruction, beauty/ugliness. Nature, in Okamoto’s view, is inherently conflictual and dialectical, and humans are inseparable from its violence.

Focusing on Okamoto’s monumental mural Myth of Tomorrow (1968–69), the text interprets the work as a post-atomic “dark sun”: a burning, skeletal Icarus that embodies both nuclear annihilation and explosive life energy. While acknowledging Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and later nuclear disasters, the mural also expresses ecological optimism, imagining creative human agency and controlled energy as counterweights to extinction. The sun here is both destructive and generative, a symbol of planetary interconnectedness and shared responsibility. ‘Given Okamoto’s views, I argue that Myth is not all about nuclear destruction but also articulates its polar opposite: ebullient life energy and creativity that counters planetary extinction, together with an ecological optimism about the potential of nuclear energy to contribute to life’s flourishment.’

The essay situates Okamoto within postwar Japanese debates on nuclear power, national identity, and environmental awareness, and traces a lineage from Surrealism to contemporary East Asian art responding to ecological crisis. It concludes that Surrealist solar thinking anticipates planetary and interplanetary ecology, rejecting melancholic “dark ecology” in favour of a transformative, even “mad,” reorientation of human thought.

Ultimately, the text argues that the dark sun compels a radical rethinking of art, economy, and ecology, urging humanity to confront excess, sacrifice, and creativity in a world shaped by solar energy, nuclear power, and planetary fragility.

What it means for radicals: Beyond the reading of a particular artwork, the significance of the text is in foregrounding the idea of creative energy as the stuff of the universe. We are in broadly the same field as Mauss’s theory of the gift, and of Stirner, Deleuze/Guattari, and Nietzsche. We are also in similar terrain to anti-civ anarchy and eco-extremism. For example, in Stirner’s view, life is a kind of burning-up of mana through the exertion of energy towards desires, or in immediate enjoyment. The focus on energetic construction is distinct from the common focus on language, norms or culture – usually conceived as binarizing systems. It tends towards a neo-animist position rather than cybernetic control. Also of interest here is the critique of human exceptionalism. Implicit humanisarō OkamotoLm is all too often concealed behind a focus on language or on economics, which need to be situated as local aspects of wider energy flows.

Whether this energetic ontology entails an “everything is violent” axiom is contestable, as one would have to expand the concept of violence to encompass such processes as photosynthesis, foraging, and carrion-eating. While not ruling out the possibility that antagonism might be unavoidable, I’m a little suspicious of the ways sadomasochistic root-metaphors feed into the existing system, legitimizing Schmittian side-taking and authoritarian power-play. However, violence takes on a different significance if it is used as expenditure and not for power, or if its power-effects are balanced, as in Clastres.

I'd add a few reservations. I’m surprised to find the common phantasm of universal responsibility popping up in this context, as it is clearly disjunctive with both energetic ontology and universal violence. I think the ethical-existential implications of an energetic ontology are rather more along the lines of living intensely in the present, for enjoyment, and using one’s life up doing things one values and enjoys. Also, to date nuclear power is an authoritarian technology because it can only be harnessed by large-scale, technocratic organizations and because it brings in its train a demand for security. This is in addition to its ecological dangers, highlighted recently by the bombings of nuclear facilities in Ukraine and during the bombings of Iran. It seems to me rather more a matter of human (or technocratic) hubris trying to substitute for solar productivity and for our own creative mana using a top-down techno-fix, than a case of creative energy itself.

S2.9 is now available on YouTube!

In this episode, Ariel discusses the topic of ecocriticism with Dr Jenny Kerber, Associate Professor of English at Wilfrid Laurier University.

What is ecocriticism? Why is it important, especially for environmental activists and solarpunks, as a narrative reframing device? Solarpunks work very closely with speculation and imagination and as architects of the narratives by which we live our lives, it helps to have tools like ecocriticism at our disposal.

Join Ariel and Dr. Kerber to think through terms like “wilderness” and “nature” and “the Anthropocene”. How do we hold on to hope, despite critical engagement with the dark side of our environmental narratives?