Xiaofan Amy Li

This article examines the trope of the dark sun across key works by Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, and Okamoto Tarō, tracing comparative connections between French and Japanese Surrealisms. Rejecting stereotypical symbolisms of the sun as illumination, rationality, and life affirmation, Artaud, Bataille, and Okamoto focus instead on the sun’s negativity and violence. This is due, I argue, to their attempts to re-understand the position of humanity in relation to the sun’s explosive energy and its implications for planetary relations. Explicitly positing their works in an ecocritical framework and tracing their historical and conceptual affinities, I discuss Artaud’s articulations of the inhuman sun, Bataille’s theory of solar economy, and Okamoto’s visualisation of the sun in the post-atomic age. Their works affirm a global ecocritical Surrealism circulating in interwar Europe and postwar Japan, and posit how humans respond to solar energy as the foremost question for ecological thought and action.

This article examines the trope of the dark sun across key works by Antonin Artaud, Georges Bataille, and Okamoto Tarō, tracing comparative connections between French and Japanese Surrealisms. Rejecting stereotypical symbolisms of the sun as illumination, rationality, and life affirmation, Artaud, Bataille, and Okamoto focus instead on the sun’s negativity and violence. This is due, I argue, to their attempts to re-understand the position of humanity in relation to the sun’s explosive energy and its implications for planetary relations. Explicitly positing their works in an ecocritical framework and tracing their historical and conceptual affinities, I discuss Artaud’s articulations of the inhuman sun, Bataille’s theory of solar economy, and Okamoto’s visualisation of the sun in the post-atomic age. Their works affirm a global ecocritical Surrealism circulating in interwar Europe and postwar Japan, and posit how humans respond to solar energy as the foremost question for ecological thought and action.