Bataille's Peak by Allan Stoekl

Bataille's Peak by Allan Stoekl

As the price of oil climbs toward $100 a barrel, our impending post-fossil fuel future appears to offer two alternatives: a bleak existence defined by scarcity and sacrifice or one in which humanity places its faith in technological solutions with unforeseen consequences. Are there other ways to imagine life in an era that will be characterized by resource depletion?   The French intellectual Georges Bataille saw energy as the basis of all human activity-the essence of the human-and he envisioned a society that, instead of renouncing profligate spending, would embrace a more radical type of energy expenditure: la dÉpense, or “spending without return.” In Bataille’s Peak, Allan Stoekl demonstrates how a close reading of Bataille-in the wake of Giordano Bruno and the Marquis de Sade- can help us rethink not only energy and consumption, but also such related topics as the city, the body, eroticism, and religion. Through these cases, Stoekl identifies the differences between waste, which Bataille condemned, and expenditure, which he celebrated.   The challenge of living in the twenty-first century, Stoekl argues, will be to comprehend-without recourse to austerity and self-denial-the inevitable and necessary shift from a civilization founded on waste to one based on Bataillean expenditure.   Allan Stoekl is professor of French and comparative literature at Penn State University. He is the author of Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition and translator of Bataille’s Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927–1939 (Minnesota, 1985).

Penn State University's Allan Stoekl is a professor of French and Comparative Literature. Visions of Excess: Collected Works of Georges Bataille, 1927-1939, was also published by Minnesota, and he edited and translated it.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780816648191
ISBN 10	0816648190
Title	Bataille's Peak
Author	Allan Stoekl
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	University of Minnesota Press
Year published	2007-10-08
Number of pages	280
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.