Bataille’s Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability (review)

In this book, Alan Stoekl argues that Georges Bataille’s theories of energy and religion can help us to think the possibilities of existence in a future after the eventual yet certain depletion of current sources of energy. In that sense, the “postsustainability” of the title is less a reference to the aftermath of sustainable energy sources than to a theory of energy that no longer posits or depends on finite resources and their depletion. This theory, extracted from Bataille’s writings on religion and eroticism, concerns an energy prior to and more fundamental than such finite resources: namely, “expenditure” as the universal tendency of existence toward excessive production of energy.

Stoekl’s book contains an introduction, seven chapters organized into two sections, and an index, bibliography, and notes. The first section, titled “Rereading Bataille,” contains a chapter on the roots of Bataille’s theories of energy and religion in the work of Giordano Bruno and the Marquis de Sade, followed by a chapter each on the importance of energy, religion, and the city in Bataille’s work. The second section, “Expenditure and Depletion,” repeats this triad of chapters, this time focusing on the application of these notions to current attempts to engage with problems of energy and sustainability.

The key to Stoekl’s argument regards the relation he gleans in Bataille’s writing between energy and religion. As he writes in his introduction, Bataille’s

approach both sees energy at the basis of all human activity, of the human, and puts into question the dominion of quantifiable, usable energy. That is precisely where religion comes in, since God, or religious “experience,” entails not purposive activity—the kind that would involve energy supplies quantified and then used with a goal in mind—but rather activity of the instant that leads nowhere, has no use, and unconditioned by the demands of anyone or anything else: sovereign, in Bataille’s sense.

(xiii)

According to Stoekl, current models of energy are limited to two opposed camps: an “energetico-theological” model according to which salvation is the outcome of consumption and an “ecoreligion” imposing a “religiously inspired cult of austerity, simplicity, and personal vitue” (xv). The author proposes Bataille’s notion of expenditure as a way out of this deadlock, not insofar as it represents a more fundamental model than these current ones, but rather because it is an idea of energy that has always existed, “from the first effort of the human,” and that is now asserting itself “precisely at the moment in which the finitude of the human manifests itself through the recognition of the limits of fossil fuel energy itself” (xv–xvi).

In identifying Bataille’s precursors, Stoekl picks out Bruno and de Sade because

they attempted to rethink the role of matter in creation, formulated as a conception of God (Bruno) and ultimately of energy (Sade) that animates this matter, arrived at a dualist theory of creation through their emphasis on atomistic materialism, implied a notion of the death of God through their emphasis on an immanent (Bruno) or fictional (Sade) God, and made possible a theory of radical generosity (Bataille) out of a seemingly limitless monism (Bruno) and selfishness (Sade).

(3–4)

This notion of “violent generosity,” which Bataille builds out of his engagement with Bruno and de Sade, is in turn crucial for the models of energy, religion, and urban space that Stoekl outlines in the next three chapters. In these chapters, Stoekl shows how Bataille’s theory of energy informs his notion of religion. For Bataille,

the universe, which is nothing other than the production of excess energy (solar brilliance), is doubled by man, who alone is aware of the sun’s larger tendency and therefore squanders consciously in order to be in accord with the overall tendency of the universe. This for Bataille is religion: not the individualistic concern with deliverance and personal salvation, but rather the collective and ritual identification with the cosmic tendency to lose.

(37)

The universalized tendency to...