Reviews for Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability

The average rating for Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2016-04-14 00:00:00 Sheena Terrell This is on many accounts a wonderful book. Not perfect, but an extreme lot of thought and work has been placed into it, so I can't value it otherwise. The great thing is it provides a very complex way of thinking together religion, economy and energy, and explores these links by a greatly enjoyable reading of the work of Georges Bataille, trying to extend it. It should be of interest just because it already presents a number of links that enable grasping the complexity of Bataille's system. It is also great, because it links it with a number of additional material, bringing about a truly powerful frame through which to think about sustainability and postsustainability, urbanism, architecture and environmental ethics. And still, I think there is a certain problem. There is - very deep in Stoekl's thought a zone, beyond which he is unwilling to go. In a footnote to Method on Meditation, Bataille explains his difference with Heidegger: "it is a professorial work, in which the subordinate method remains glued to its results: what matters to me, on the contrary, is the moment of detachment, what I teach (if it is true that...) is a drunkenness, this is not a philosophy: I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman." I essentially think that Stoekl's approach itself tends to be more this type of professorial work. And I also remain unconvinced that we ought to give away the economical stress on labor in favor of energy, and I hardly see this as a zero-sum game. Moreover, while in his economic explorations, Bataille ceaselessly persists in asking a few questions, such as why people need religion, at a certain moment, Stoekl points to limitations to Bataille's assumption about energy, but at the same moment, seems to rather cease asking why does Bataille make these claims. The end result then seems to me rather limited on certain accounts, resting rather comfortably with a certain presupposition of human innocence (and its passive-nihilist implications), as compared to the stress Bataille places on the paradoxical ethical virtue of guilt. That, however, seems to me a consideration, that would not, nor should not spare interested people from the (guilty) pleasures of reading Stoekl's book.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-03-01 00:00:00 Shane Sanders the appeal of the ever-elusive realization of bataille's theories is met only by its ineffability if anyone has any good feminist readings of bataille, lmk it's easy to read bataille as an edgelord but i think a lot of it holds: my existence, first and foremost, should probably be considered as a (glorious) excess, an outflow of energy, a burn-off this includes the moment of birth but also writing this article here, and yeah all art i think Stoekl makes you think hard about actions which are by definiton 'productive' and those that are not, since one always wants to blur the lines between them. I.e. as @fucktheory said, art is a measure of a society's health, not . . . something-something about effecting that state of health Anyways, there's always this motivation to 'think beyond' the problem we find ourselves in, and my inclination after reading this profound book is that uhm maybe no, we all just need to reduce our caloric intake (the pursuit of bodily aesthetics, yet again, are a form of excessive burn-off) and overall expenditures I imagine this book being interesting for urban planners because uh there's a chapter on the city at the very least it got me thinking in a religious or spiritual way about energy, the kind of stoner philosophy you feel on acid but probably don't speak about casually in public less your sanity be questioned so it's nice that we can have that kind of imagination in (academic) writing I'll probably return to this book