Reviews

摘要

Bataille's peak: energy, religion, and postsustainability by A Stoekl; University of Minesota Press, Minneapolis, MN, 2007, 247 pages, $60.00 cloth, $20.00 paper, ISBN 9780816648182, 9780816648191rnBataille's Peak is a stimulating, if in places inconsistent, book that attempts something seemingly impossible: putting the texts of Georges Bataille (1897- 1962) to work for an environmental ecological, ethical, and political agenda. In so doing, Bataille arises as more of a sociological, ecological, and, indeed, geographical thinker than is sometimes thought.rnThe text situates itself within the context of the facticity of the depletion of fossil fuel sources. Faithful to Bataille's philosophical genealogy, Allan Stoekl interrogates this natural lack within the analytical framework of a Kojevian history. If, for Alexandre Kojeve, the dialectical motor of history is labour, unfolding autonomously and shaping itself by negating natural "given-being", then an "end of History" arises as a fully anthropological narrative of human (self)realization in which nature is premised as a servile matter (pages x-xiii). Stoekl wants to have done with this narrative of 'humanist idealism' that works unproblematically upon a useful nature. Thus, for Stoekl, the contemporary context of the imminent depletion of fossil fuels forces a recognition of the worldly dependence of labour upon natural relations. Hence, whilst "depletion" as such offers a definitive and incontestable "critique of modernity" (page 189), it also opens labour, and thereby History, beyond any logic of "the end" (page xi).