The brain is a blinding light: How neuroscience (re)plays a parody of The Solar Anus.

This essay turns to Georges Bataille's The Solar Anus to expose the brain of the contemporary neurosciences as a parody. The brain plays the light of consciousness illuminated in the penetrating glow of the brain scanner but cannot recognize itself in the brightly colored image. Bataille's critique of Western philosophy and its pursuit of totality amid helpless partiality and mindless materiality proves fitting to today's "neuro-everything." The essay ends with the suggestion, following Bataille, that scholars and artists can perform the parody to push neuroscience to pore over its repressions and re-gear its penetrative pistons on transformative action, pursuing a creative study of bodily generativity, the only visible alternative to the solar anus of blinding light. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]