M/C Reviews - Cultural Studies: Bataille's Peak by Allan Stoekl

Reviewed by Kim Shaw

In 1956, petroleum geologist M. King Hubbert correctly predicted that U.S. oil production would peak in the early 1970s. Hubbert further forecast a peak in the global production of oil for the latter decades of the twentieth century. At a time when it has become necessary to confront the future of life on the other side of the bell curve – that is, the inevitable decline that follows what has come to be known as “Hubbert’s peak”, the decline of peak oil – Allan Stoekl’s Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability offers an intriguing perspective. Developed around Georges Bataille’s notion of expenditure, this book takes account of the relationship between energy and religion in the light of declining fossil fuel reserves. This focus on expenditure and excess, is poised to challenge, or perhaps more accurately, complement, an age unavoidably concerned with conservation and sustainability.

The first half of this work is given to establishing Bataille’s inheritance on the subjects of matter, energy, and religion, passed down, most notably, by Giordano Bruno, the Marquis de Sade, and Alexandre Kojève’s reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Stoekl demonstrates how Bataille absorbs these texts and ideas only to rewrite them in the creation of what is referred to as a counter-Book; a “non-knowledge” that answers the immutable Book be it the Bible or, after God, “the ultimately cold, cruel Sadean Book and the definitive Book of Hegelian-Kojèvian absolute knowledge” (64).

In the social model that Bataille develops, religion and human experience are inseparable and the science of energy is key to its unfolding. While Bataille sees energy at the basis of all human activity, he is less concerned with the tallying of quantifiable and usable energy than he is with the “science” of heterology, “the science of the force, the energy, that cannot be appropriated by science” (19). For Bataille, this energy emanating from essentially formless matter is sacred and charged. It opens the way to religious experience precisely because it resists the demands of a call to be put to practical use, sovereign in its defiance, it is, as God, without purpose. This experience initiates communication with what Bataille refers to as the “intimate world”, in Stoekl’s words, “the larger energy flows of the death-bound, erotic subject, of society in the grip of collective frenzy or revolt, and of the universe in the unrecoverable energy of a myriad of stars” (51). This experience is less an experience than a being devoured by an unknowable night. As Bataille, cited by Stoekl, declares in Inner Experience – “Let non-knowledge be once again knowledge. I will explore the night! But no, it’s the night that explores me” (84). Bataille’s religion is one of unending loss and expenditure, where God is continually revealed as the absence of God.

The second half of this work is Stoekl’s own rewriting of Bataille, by way of Heidegger, to present an alternative to the predominant positions currently circulating in the energy-religion debate. Agnès Varda’s documentary, The Gleaners and I (2000), is presented as an exemplary illustration of the notion of “orgiastic recycling” developed by Stoekl. Beyond the “practical reuse of a salvaged standing reserve” orgiastic recycling demands “more profoundly, a kind of erotic reinvestment and disinvestment, in which the object takes on a meaning that defeats our demand that it be a simple tool, a simple means to the end of status, individuality, comfort” (148). Thus, following Bataille, Stoekl pursues the excess energy of unassimilable matter to an intimate world, where it is to be expended as opposed to wasted: “orgiastic recycling will tear us from our projects and project us into communication with others, with the void” (148).

The crucial distinction between expenditure and waste that Stoekl draws attention to is most important, as it makes possible the reconsideration of the current forces behind the generation of waste in the contemporary world. The “ever more frantic rhythm of production-consumption-destruction” of modern capitalist economies produces vast quantities of waste, but this waste should not, in any way, be confused with Bataille’s “affirmation of expenditure” (138). What Bataille offers and what Varda’s film illustrates is an alternative to this waste. Given the necessity of the need to spend or expend, waste, it seems, is inevitable. As Stoekl explains, “people ‘waste’ because this society has turned its back on expenditure”: “It is their only option, their only way of spending – and for this reason they would hardly refuse this waste if their only other course of action was a radical conservation from which all expenditure, waste or burn-off, consommation or consummation, was eliminated” (139). To summarise, we “just need to understand fully what energy expenditure means” and then we might better choose to realign our need to waste with a less destructive (for the planet at least) “squandering of time, of effort, of focus” (145).

Stoekl’s study is particularly valuable for the clarification it brings to the use of terms such as “sustainability”, a word that will inevitably and increasingly become the focus of a society confronting fossil fuel depletion. As Stoekl points out, believing “in a completely sustainable (unchanging) world” is “akin to believing in a coherent God” (140). While in theory people may embrace and express enthusiasm for the idea of a sustainable future, the reality is that “as long as refined fossil fuels are cheap and no one has to think too much about the future, the suburbs will always win out over, say, sustainable cohousing” (140). While a few may derive a “grim satisfaction from renouncing things and contentment” the majority will not (140). Obviously, it makes sense to explore these issues now. Sustainability without expenditure, Stoekl argues, is hardly viable. If it is to eventuate at all it will only be an after-effect of a necessary excess and expenditure; what Stoekl calls postsustainability.

Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability
(2007)

by Allan Stoekl
University of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 978-0-8166-4819-1
280pp AUD$20.00