Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology

If there is reason to believe that material circumstances such as the ownership of the means of production, geography, or levels of technological development shape society, culture and experience, then there is reason to believe that the continually increasing input of energy in the form of fossil fuels has had a similar, if not greater, impact on human history. Antti Salminen and Tere Vadén’s Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology is the first book of philosophy to directly address the theoretical and conceptual configurations of our oil modernity. Long-imagined as the outcome of human intellectual growth and maturity, without surplus energy — the non-renewable, non-human energy of coal, oil and gas — modernity would be completely other than it has come it be. Salminen and Vadén argue that modernity constitutes a historical state of exception — one that cannot be sustained. An “automatic system of machinery” (Marx), “total mobilization” of resources (Jünger) and a “technological understanding of Being” (Heidegger) are possible only on the basis of more work performed decade by decade, and the era of continued growth is coming to and end. Energy and Experience unearths the blind spot that energy has occupied in the social thought of a modernity that has too long been self-deluded by its own intellectual capacities to render human beings independent from nature. It is time to understand the how and why the airy philosophy of modernity is saturated by ancient materiality of oil—and to grapple with what might happens once it’s all burned away.