Allan Stoekl

I take for granted that petroleum is going to get scarce, that energy in general is going to get scarce. But what does that mean? Driving across Wyoming on Interstate 80, one sees vast empty sun-lit landscapes. Is all that sun light going to waste? Well, it lights up the landscape so I can see it! How many millions of watts am I using right then to see all that barren scrub?

I'd gotten that far, but Stoekl tells me how Bataille went much further. Look up at the night sky! How many stars are pouring out radiation... it's a cosmic light show, incalculable power burned in thermonuclear fusion, enabling me to admire the constellations! All that star power is not wasted!

Maybe energy scarcity will drive us all to some dreary soviet planned economy with precise weights of shoe leather boiled into our eternal depression soup. But look at Kurosawa's film Dreams, the dream of the village of water wheels. Dancing for death!

I have never made much progress in understanding Bataille. Stoekl really opened up a door for me. But then Stoekl takes it further - we really have gone further! That classical world before WW1, that was still a visible absence in Bataille's time. Not in ours. Stoekl has a great description of the role of the automobile in our culture. I would have loved a discussion of J. G. Ballard's Crash. Maybe Ballard picked up his direction from Bataille?!

I would love to see his discussion taken from automobiles to cell phones. These days the little metal box we live within seems to have shrunk to pocket-size. Sakaiya's Knowledge-Value Revolution predicted this. Somehow I think we will be brought back into our flesh, though, as the situation unfolds.

This book stretched my thinking. It addresses the core issue of our time, at a profound level that I have not seen discussed elsewhere. It's not an easy read - one is confronted with Kojeve and Blanchot and all those difficult writers. But the confrontation seems structured so that the issues are faced rather than avoided. The struggle is well worth the while.… (altro)