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Anal Apocalypse On the W/Hole of Asia and the Christian West Anal Apocalypse / 3 1 The solar annulus is the intact anus of her body at eighteen years to which nothing sufficiently blinding can be compared except the sun, even though the anus is the night. —Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus The Rear End Of the human body, the anus is the part most shunned. By contrast, the face is the most privileged and public body part. The two are intimately entwined, of course, as the mouth is the entry point to the digestive system and the anus the exit point.1 If either hole malfunctions, not only the other suffers but the whole body. With regard to Nature’s digestive system, the anus may well be its entry point and the mouth its exit. Far from existing alone, the human digestive system complements the ecosystem. The mouth appears more presentable as it serves multiple functions other than food consumption, whereas the anus serves primarily one—defecation. As orifices, both the mouth and the anus are potentially transgressive in erasing the boundaries between the outside and the inside, acquiring, as a result, a sexual, erotic tenor, since sexuality has always been the trope for two bodies to merge into one, be it two lovers, mother and fetus, or the Immaculate Conception between Virgin Mary and the Holy Spirit. As bodily counterpoints, the anus and the surrounding buttocks resemble the mouth and surrounding face; the buttocks are the hidden face, its center so secreted away in the gluteal cleft that Adam and Eve forgot to cover it with fig leaves. Shame applies to frontal nudity in Christian iconography , not to the backside, which has been stricken from consciousness except in Christian revulsion against the Devil. Norman O. Brown writes: “The climax of the ritual of the Witches Sabbath was to kiss the Devil’s posteriors or a facial mask attached to the Devil’s posteriors” (Life Against Death 4 / Intercut on Asian Anus 1959, p. 207). Takeshi Kitano’s Dolls (2002) highlights this hidden face when a mad woman imagines a satyr-like male wearing a mask on his buttocks . A rare moment in contemporary visual and performing arts,2 in which the least expressive, most veiled body part is showcased in a tracking close-up, Kitano unwittingly evokes Christian excommunication. After all, shunning decrees that a Christian community turn its back, often literally, to the sinner . But is it the community members’ backs or is it their buttocks that are turned? The cheeks (in slang) below the back wink at the sinner, communal refuse expelled from the members’ anuses. Theholeinthefaceissuesetherealcommandsthatescapethebodyandthe earth to commence the light of Genesis, the star of the Nativity, Christ’s magic healing, and John’s Book of Revelation. God’s mouth that commands light turns into the alien magi’s mouths that herald Christ and then into Christ’s mouth that heals lepers and finally into John’s mouth that prophesizes the endgame. These incorporeal ascensions are tied, corporeally, to the hole in the ass that is a mute, except when passing gas, and is empty and worthless, except for passing body waste. Although one hole baldfacedly proclaims a future that devours all differences and the other shamefacedly vacates all that is left of the differences, they are the two ends of human bowels or Nature’s bowels. Contrary to conventional wisdom, however, the upper hole often mouths more garbage than wisdom, while the lower hole, to scramble Freud with Jack and the Beanstalk, lays golden eggs.3 In view of the brevity of an individual’s being and the eternity of her non-being, humans resemble more what we have laid than what we have said, with one exception. Obscenities relocate lower-body functions to the upper body, to the mouth and the middle finger specifically. The quarternal prophetic revelations mentioned above—the four bangs inaugurating the Old and the New Testament, the miracles performed by the Messiah, and the coming of the end—veil their unseemly opposites. To the Christian West, the construct of Asia is a recurring trope for alienness, repressed like the body part associated with anality, against which Christian apocalypse comes to pass. The half-knowledge or zero knowledge of the East frees the Christian West from rational constraints to proclaim its single, totalizing vision. The anal hole that is Asia is made to discharge, repeatedly, messianic revelations of a transcendent whole. By calling attention to the anus as an...

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