Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology

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Energy and Experience: An Essay in Nafthology offers a most unexpected
materialism in an age seemingly replete with “new” ones. For while the
physical connotations of energy hint at a conjunction dealing with matter
and our experience of it (both energy and experience would name the
subject and object of matter over time), energy proves in this book to be
the name for something completely different than matter stripped bare.
This at least is the problem with which this book begins, for “like the
notions of force, will, work, and the sacred, energy seems to name at the
same time something internal, immaterial, and spiritual and something
material, concrete, and physical” (9). Thus we are dealing not with matter
and the life it leads, but rather the social, epistemological, political, and
philosophical determinations of an energy system responsible for not just
our capitalist modernity, but most of our thoughts about it, too. What’s
most unexpected about the materialism of Nafthology is therefore that
energy, once redefined not as metaphysical but as time in matter, releases
materialism from the shackles of vulgar matter and the speculations we
might derive from it. Meanwhile, it lets us see a family resemblance
between energy and that other historical force over matter, which this
book unhesitatingly calls capital.