The book is the outcome of research on sex, sexuality, and performativity conducted between summer 2019 and autumn 2021.

Beginning from a curatorial perspective within contemporary Italian visual and performing arts, the investigation expands across disciplines including philosophy, literature, history, and pornography. It is grounded in the conviction—here adopted as a method—that critical theory capable of crossing disciplinary boundaries is a practical tool for confronting the political challenges of the present.

The title, L’Ano Solare (The Solar Anus), is borrowed from Georges Bataille’s text of the same name. In Bataille’s reflections on unproductive expenditure lie the seeds of the concept of anality central to this book. The anus—described by ideadestroyingmuros in the introduction to the Italian edition of Paul B. Preciado’s Anal Terror as the “protagonist of a political strategy to terrorise and challenge totalitarian heteronormativity”—becomes the sun around which the book’s system of thought revolves.

Our utopia is ideology. Revising the Marxist framework, Antonio Gramsci argued that ideologies form the ground on which we move and therefore precede our choices and actions. A utopian ideology circulates through the collective body like blood: it mobilises, animates, and opens a horizon of polymorphous possibilities. In the crowd we encountered the Pervert—violent, disorganised, and disidentified—who revealed a counter-attack grounded in pleasure, desire, and perversion. In the opening of The Solar Anus, Bataille writes, “I am the sun,” compressing in this statement an eruption that destabilises the subject. And so, we are the sun.

In the city we imagine ourselves as a collective body. Squares become open theatres and the street common ground. We are not authors but gestures, freed from fixed positions. Red marks an ending that gives meaning to everything. Poppies and tulips surround the city in memory of those no longer with us. There, where humidity gathers in the realm of the sensible, we meet again—in chants and tears, in contact and touch—sharing a world in which you remain the core of my spine.