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ENERGY DREAMS

Energy Dreams—the title came to me all of a sudden, as they say “out of the blue,” when I least expected it. It surprised me and, just as swiftly, energized my thought and swathed me in its opacities.

Who dreams, and about what, when energy dreams? Is energy the subject here? Or the desired object of a fantasy? Is dreams a noun in the plural? Or a verb in present tense, third-person singular? Or, perhaps, both at once? Does energy dream in us, as us, through us? Does it, by so sweeping us off our feet and into its vortex, promote its own increase, its insatiable growth? Is it horrified, if not paralyzed, by the sense of its dwindling? Is it forgetting that, regardless of its peregrinations, it will be conserved, in accordance with the first law of thermodynamics? Or is its reverie one of fullness, completion, and accomplishment outside the instrumental rationality of means-and-ends, which has mutated into the logic of means-as-ends?

These are not idle questions that personify a nonhuman concept, now replete with a strangely subjective figuration. Resonating in them is the crisis of energy (which is not the same thing as an energy crisis), more serious still than the energy worries that have been a part of our lexicon and daily life at least since the 1970s. A salient grammatical expression of the crisis is the equivocation between the verb and the noun we have witnessed in the title of this chapter and of the book as a whole. By force of habit, we think of energy as a resource—a thought not so outlandish considering that, as a word, it is a substantive. A noun, an object, a cause for wars and diplomatic alliances, something to divide, extract, lay claim to, possess. So irresistibly seductive is the grammatical and ontological substantivization of energy that it undercuts our appreciation of its meaning: we begin with different types of fuel or “power” (carbon and oil, solar and hydro) and generalize until we reach a poorly understood and reliably unquestioned umbrella term. The effects of energy, however, surpass a strife-ridden or consensual division of resources. Far from a mere object to be appropriated, it energizes us—our bodies, psyches, economies, technologies, political systems…Its sense, then, is evenly split between substantive and verbal significations. The will to energy is none other than the will to willing, where the object, the objective, is not some inert material but an active, activating event—that of the subject. The crisis of energy is that, though treated as a finite resource to be seized in a mad race with others who also desire it, it seizes both “us” and “them,” taking, first and foremost, our fantasies and our dreams hostage.

Let us isolate two precipitating factors behind this crisis: the relative and absolute ambiguities of energy. Relative ambiguity ensues when something is not only unthought but also obdurately resistant to the questioning drive. That is the historical predicament of energy today. Desired in a wholly unconscious manner, dreamed up, even if we keep discoursing and strategizing about it in waking life, it has become little more than a blank screen onto which to project our fantasies of planetary destruction or salvation, enrichment and security, shortages and excesses. Consequently, whatever we say about energy says more about us than about it. Absolute ambiguity, in turn, has to do with the meaning of the concept, incredibly resistant to a univocal determination, unclarified and—to a certain extent—unclarifiable.¹ Preceding the wedge modernity drives between activity and passivity, or subjects and objects, energy breaks out and through every frame we wish to impose upon it. So much so that it is, itself, a term in crisis, divided against itself between its current and ancient significations, its ontic clarity and ontological obscurity, its economic desirability and philosophical marginalization.

The absolute ambiguity of energy is an opportunity, rather than an obstacle, for thinking. The situation I have only started to outline reveals that before putting anything or anyone in motion, before releasing heat or the explosive potentialities of things, energy will effect a certain doubling. It will split the atom of meaning in a semantic sort of nuclear fission. This splitting is also happening at this very moment. As I am writing these lines, I am working “on” the thing itself and its concept, but I also cannot avoid paying attention, inadequate as it may be, to the work its chemical, kinetic, mental, and other types exert on me, activating me. After all, the human pleating of consciousness into consciousness and self-consciousness, our attention to ourselves-attending-to-the-world, the whole schizophrenia of humanization is but one of energy’s more sublime permutations. Such rifts in what is seemingly unitary (a hobbyhorse of deconstruction) are unavoidable. They fuel every energy dream, including the quenchless desire for its stringent definition and assured possession.

Of Greek provenance, the word energy is stamped by a double entendre. Composed of the prefix en- and the noun ergon, energeia can be literally translated as “enworkment,” putting-to-work, activation. Moreover, the work in its midst is nowhere near transparent; we have to work at it, at this work, if we are to appreciate its many nuances.

The range of what ergon signifies is quite broad: from task to function and from work to its product.² The word repels our ventures to hem it in within manageable confines. It does not keep the distance between the trajectory of a project (work as a process, a task to be fulfilled) and its destination (the function discharged, a product made). With regard to ergon, we are at a loss when it comes to deciding whether we are on our way or have already arrived. In English, we get a taste of this uncertainty when speaking of work: a work (say, of art) or to work, to produce, to bring to fulfillment. Our relation to energy is fraught and befuddled in part thanks to the plurivocity of ergon, which has in the meantime migrated to other languages, and as far as Japanese with its borrowing enerugi.³ How did what the Greeks launched or put to work in their idiom drift to other linguistic realities? In what shape has it been received? Has something launched from such a distant time and place really ever arrived? Has it reached us? Is work, still unqualified as to its status as a verb or a noun, a singular intimation of the Greek linguistic investment into “energy,” which everyone is eager to reap on a global scale?

Consider two alternatives. If the work of enworkment is a process, then energy refers to activation. It sets to work, presumably by interrupting a period of rest, and is itself at work. If it is an outcome, a product of work, then it evinces what happens in actuality, in existence. This second energy is synonymous with the state of affairs, with whatever is the case, the thing itself. We are conversant with the distinction when we classify energy as “stored” or “released.” A bomb contains its explosive potential while it is kept in a military warehouse or transported, and it releases its deadly force when detonated. An apple stores the solar energy it imbibed while ripening, but as you bite into it, energy is liberated from its molecules “at rest” (though they are never actually static), counting toward your caloric intake. To us, then, it appears that the divagation from one modality of energy to another is only a matter of time. That which is stored is not yet released, and that which is released is not stored but morphs into another state.

A strange conclusion ensues: energy absorbs time. It does not come about in time; rather, time is activated, or temporalized, in the transitions from one kind of energy into another. Physics corroborates our conclusion through the law of the conservation of energy, which, immune to destruction as much as to being-generated, is merely converted into other forms. Prior to time itself, energy thus veers toward a pantheon of classical metaphysical conceptions and partakes of the dream of indestructibility. In Martin Heidegger’s thought it finds its place in the illustrious line of misnomers for being, among the Platonic Ideas, “actus, perceptio, actuality, representation…gathered together in the will to willing.”⁴ Jacques Derrida, in his wake, tacks it onto the list of “names related to fundamentals, to principles, or to the center [that] have always designated an invariable presence—eidos, arché, telos, energeia, ousia (essence, existence, substance, subject), aletheia, transcendentality, consciousness, God, man, and so forth.”⁵ Seeing that energy enwraps the subject and the object, the copula invariably articulates it with itself and paves the way for a tautology at the basis of ontology: energy is energy; the work is at work. (One of Aristotle’s minimal definitions we will review here strongly resembles this formulation.) In an abbreviated form, the fundamental assertion will profess: energy is! Which is to say that nothing is but energy and its enigmatic play, work, or dance around the copula distended into a totalizing movement.

After deconstruction, our theme—wherein we ourselves are ensnared—is understood as a tainted, culpable concept, a dirty word of philosophy, too scientific, too metaphysical, or too economist for our sensibilities. Such stigmatization is inexcusable. The desistance from energy at the theoretical level silently sanctions the most ecologically detrimental methods of procuring it. At any rate, we can proscribe it in thought only by way of its simplification, at the price of its undecidability, its crises and doublings. It is too soon to determine the fate of energy because it is still moving us, we are moved and seized by it, all the while doing our best to seize it under the umbrella of “resources.” And it is also too late to determine its fate because the objectified depositories of energy have long become unmanageable and are now threatening if not to annihilate, then to deactivate, to put out of work, out of actuality, the world as such.

Much speaks against a harsh and sweeping judgment that energy, even in the original Aristotelian elocution of energeia, is metaphysical, and so rotten to the core. That is one more energy dream, the chimera of putting it out of action, deactivating it with the help of a relatively straightforward association, by relegating it to the bygone history of metaphysics, the defunct realm of “essential” being. In the text that follows I advance the thesis that the notion, experience, and—if I may put it so—self-experience of energy is infinitely more variegated and conflicted than Heidegger and Derrida concede. Instead of soaking in the stagnant waters of the same, energy is a matter of difference, of transit, transition and alteration, of alterity in being and becoming. A thoroughly homogeneous field would be that of entropy, of energy’s divestment, or at least of equalization, where there are no differences between quanta of force, no tension, no life.

In our frenzied activities, we are fleeing from the encroaching shadow of entropic homogeneity, which is why we cling to energy resources so desperately in our personal, national, and globalized existences. The fear of entropy is so intense as to blind us to the kinds of energy we crave, the environmental harm caused by their extraction and burning, the adverse health effects of consuming beverages laced with excessive sugar and caffeine (the so-called energy drinks). The dread of energy starvation, of the looming entropy of reality, pushes us toward what we dread. In response to these fears, which suffuse thought and everyday action alike, one cannot simply denounce the prevailing energy dreams for being the toxic by-products of Western metaphysics, aspiring to an eternal activity, life everlasting, a never-ending erection. Myths do not magically melt away immediately after they are spotted and named as what they are. As far as energy is concerned, we cannot stop dreaming of it, and it cannot cease dreaming us. All we can do is learn how to dream it up otherwise, with our eyes open, knowing ourselves dreaming.

More than anyone else, Aristotle is careful to avoid determining energy, the word he invented or dreamed up, through the apparatus of philosophical definitions. Neither sloppy nor evasive, this theoretical decision gives the thing itself its due, respecting its indeterminacy and singularity. At most, Aristotle offers examples and delineates the term negatively, by contrast to what it is not. In book 9 of Metaphysics he breaks his earlier promise to define energeia and suddenly concedes that “we must not seek a definition for everything [οὐ δεῖ παντὸς ὅρον ζητεῖν], but rather comprehend the analogy” (1048a, 35–36). The examples of building and seeing follow (and we will track them shortly). For now, Aristotle defines energy by declining to define it; he substitutes sundry analogies for it in the manner his teacher, Plato, talked of the Idea of the Good by analogy with the supreme and egalitarian dispensation of solar energy. Insofar as Aristotle refrains from defining energeia, in which Heidegger and Derrida recognize his word for being, he resists the urge to behave toward it as if it were an object, a philosophical resource, boundlessly fertile and ready to be tapped into. Doing so, definitively and categorically determining it, would be interrupting its activation, stopping its proper movement in its tracks. But his reticence does not prevent him from saying something (indeed, a great deal) about energy.

Energeia, Aristotle states, “means the presence of the thing, not in the sense which we mean by ‘potentially’ [ἔστι δὴ ἐνέργεια τὸ ὑπάρχειν τὸ πρᾶγμα μὴ οὕτως ὥσπερ λέγομεν δυνάμει]” (Met. 1048a, 31–32). Plainly, he leans toward qualifying energeia and ergon in terms of actuality, rather than activation, a qualification that pins the work and the at-workness of presence on what is not a potentiality, not dunamis. Immediately we see that our conception of energy, qua a potentiality waiting to be unleashed into a wide spectrum of activities, is the inverse of Aristotle’s. For us, energy is, precisely, not actuality, unless we are sufficiently sophisticated to detect in what presently exists the storehouses of a yet unreleased force. Is this a mere “inversion” of the Greeks? Is our world the Greek universe upside-down? Or, more intriguingly, is there not only a logical-semantic but also a historical, epochal break in the meaning of energy? Didn’t the premodern ethos correlate it largely with the accomplished work (the actual, the actualized), even as the modern attitude privileged the moment of a work-in-progress (activation)? If so, then energy’s double entendre is not a simultaneous enunciation of more than one meaning but something that takes millennia to work itself out in historical “actuality.” Only now, when the livable world is on the brink of collapse, is the concept coming back into its own (albeit not knowing it), in that it connotes the always incomplete activation overwriting the earlier signification of assuagement in the actualized.

Appealing to the values of philosophical rigor and consistency, we might accuse Aristotle of narrowing down the scope of energy in flagrant disregard of his own pledge not to define it (which, in turn, breaks the previous promise to provide a definition). If so, then his energeia is disappointingly one-sided, almost static, boringly present. But this assessment is hardly fair. Being is ceaselessly guided from potentialities to actualities, as “everything changes from what it is potentially to what it is actually [μεταβάλλει πᾶν ἐκ τοῦ δυνάμει ὄντος εἰς τὸ ἐνεργείᾳ ὄν]” (1069b, 15). What is the energy of this change from what is not to what is energeia (being)? How can something issue from nothing, specifically in ancient Greek thought? Taking care not to dispense prematurely with the disquietude of these queries, note that the other pole, against which Aristotle first negatively defined energy, is not nothing but another ontological condition—dunamis or “what is potentially.” (Is the state of this is itself potential or actual? That will be the gist of Plotinus’s inquiry in Ennead II.5.) Needless to say, when we mouth the words actuality and potentiality, we do so in Latin, not in Greek, though, in Latin they also say more than what we habitually glean from them. Potentiality derives from potestas, which, as one possibility for translating dunamis, signifies power and capacity. Strangely, then, the global movement from potentiality to actuality implies a diminution of the ontological power-capacity, its desaturation. Insofar as a being is actualized, or energized, it fulfills itself. Less and less does it require the enabling power of dunamis to attain the condition that corresponds to it according to what it is. τὸ ἐνεργείᾳ ὄν, what it is actually (say, a fully grown oak tree, rather than an acorn), is the outcome of the work performed by the essence of the being it is (here: oakness) in the world. It is and therefore it has no need of the power-capacity to become. Its past workings rejoin the ensuing work in energetic plenitude. Aristotle’s energy is thus markedly powerless and incapable, not in the sense of lacking these qualities, not by way of deprivation, but because it is beyond the vicissitudes of dunamis, which names an incompletion to be overcome. In its powerlessness it is possible to detect a nonmetaphysical trail through the proverbial thickets of metaphysics.⁶

We are still circling around the vagueness of energeia in Aristotle, who qualifies the makeshift contrast he has established by allowing for degrees of actuality and hence of being. If a fully grown oak tree still keeps on growing, that is due to the necessary incompleteness of its accomplishment, imperfect (atelos) in its very idea, a haunting absence persisting in its presence, calling for more power-capacity to be discharged. Although Aristotle thinks that vegetal life is exceptionally prone to this predicament, every actuality is partial and potential vis-à-vis the next actuality, “since no action which has a limit is an end but is only a means to an end [ἐπεὶ δὲ τῶν πράξεων ὧν ἔστι πέρας οὐδεμία τέλος ἀλλὰ τῶν περὶ τὸ τέλος]” (1048b, 18–19). Finitude is diffracted into a limit and an end, peras and telos, and it is in the caesura between the two that confusion between actuality and potentiality ensues. The absolutely actual is the end, whereas limits admit of nothing but deficient actuality mixed with potentiality. With this pretext, Aristotle will conjure up the most famed and influential energy dream in the history of Western thought, the dream of the unmoved mover.

What becomes of energy in our world of constantly surpassed limits devoid of ends? In this world of sheer means, the end is brutally imposed from the outside as the limit to all limits, a term, terminus, or termination that, in the withdrawal of energeia, breathes with destitution, nonfruition, the void, an arbitrary cut. For us, the end is singular, irreplaceable, final; it is the only unsurpassable limit, that of death. Heidegger’s Sein zum Tode, being-toward-death, occupies the vacant place of an end, the telos, shorn of an inner purpose and of a subject who would enjoy its actualization. It motivates, energizes our thoughts and actions, including those that attempt to evade it, and yet does not bring human existence to fruition in the fullness of energeia. An entire classification of ends, promising assorted energy streams, trickles, and dams, awaits us.⁷

On a macroscale, the end of the planetary world mirrors the end of the world that each of us is. The race to extract energy from everywhere and everything, whether by drilling for oil in the Arctic seas or by distilling biofuel out of living plants, is instigated by a growing sense of nonaccomplishment, which this race actually aggravates. So long as something still persists in actuality, it is taken as an invitation to a work yet to be carried out, the suicidal work of separating and releasing energy from matter and dissolving the temporarily stabilized structures of our phenomenological lifeworld into dynamic processes. The limit to all limits and the limitless quest for energy are locked in a virulent dialectic: irrespective of our efforts to defer the a-teleological end of the world—indeed, thanks to these very efforts—we hasten its approach. A thorough determination of what is is tantamount to the termination of existence through the final release of energy from matter, and an absurd release at that. Not actualizing anything whatsoever, the endless end, the activation of a diabolical metabolism digesting actuality into potency, reverses the river of being that (with the exception of the unmoved mover) flows from dunamis to energeia.

We are so enthralled with the possible that we’ve ceased caring about the actual and forfeited the energy of the latter. For us, actuality is but a way station on the highway of unlimited possibility. We draw energy from the assumption that potentiality is limitless and that this limitlessness makes it possible to begin with. What is behind such suppositions, however, is not only the neglect but also the destruction of actuality. We render finitude all the more precarious and finite the more we speak and act in the name of infinite possibilities. We procure energy from the destitution of energy suffusing and dissolving the fabric of what is. The greatest enemy of contemporary humanity, of our planet, and of material existence as such is thus unbridled possibility that more and more renders the world impossible.

Even so, there are activities that, their finitude notwithstanding, contain their ends within themselves. Vision, for one, is not a gradual shift from the potential to the actual; its energy is such that it is at every moment actualized in a mélange of tenses. “One has seen as soon as one sees [ὁρᾷ ἅμα καὶ ἑώρακε],” Aristotle observes, but one has not built as soon as one embarks on the project of building (1048b, 23). Vision shares this energy with understanding and thought (“one has understood as soon as one understands”; “one has thought as soon as one thinks”) and, more important, with a good life and with happiness. As soon as one lives well, one has lived well and as soon as one is happy one has been happy: “εὖ ζῇ καὶ εὖ ἔζηκεν ἅμα, καὶ εὐδαιμονεῖ καὶ εὐδαιμόνηκεν” (1048b, 25–26). The energies of vision, understanding, thought, a good life, and happiness absorb time, while remaining faithful to the temporal reality of “this world.” Energeia, Aristotle intimates to us in what will be taken as an untenable position, comes into its own in conditions that obviate bustling activity and vigorous pursuits. It resides in the quiet of visual or thoughtful contemplation, in the joy of understanding, in the radiance of happiness outside time in time.

We have been conditioned (in part by the history of metaphysics and theology, in part by the voguish dogma that prides itself on resisting the tradition it inverts) to visualize no more than two alternatives: either the ideal of completion, unattainable in finite existence, or the reality of incompletion, congruent with finitude: either the plenitude of energy that does not change or a chronic lack of energy (and of time) that diminishes along the course of our biological lives. Hidden from us is the third option of inexhaustible energy in every instant that fleets by solely according to the perspective of those who are, themselves, rushing without noticing its inimitable singularity. Letting go of this boundless source of wonder and inspiration, we bar ourselves from the shimmer of happiness, which may not be so different from the brilliant givenness and reciprocal exposure of the world and our senses, with all the energy transmissions that happen between them. Who still has the courage to be adrift in the virtuous circle of “one has seen as soon as one sees,” where the present is perfect and perfected, grammatically and experientially? Or, to abandon oneself—which is here the same as finding oneself—in the labyrinths of happiness, where one has been as soon as one is?

It is questionable, under these circumstances, whether we can still fathom the Aristotelian energy of contemplation and happiness where being fully at work, activated or actualized, sparks the experience of restfulness beyond the opposition of activity and passivity or beyond the metaphysical contrast between the temporal and the eternal. Movement and rest are comparable to two parallel lines that, in open vistas, appear to intersect at an infinitely removed point on the horizon. Conversely, in our humdrum reality, time slips away, passes; energy ebbs away; we unsuccessfully try to catch up with both and lose ourselves along the way. Work and rest are mutually exclusive, and the leisure of resting, connoting laziness and indolence, becomes more and more rare. We are chronically short of the time to see or to think, to be happy or to live a good life, for that matter. One has seen before one sees, has understood before one understands; the world comes to us preinterpreted in the shape of old news, anticipated, worn out, printed in a newspaper long after it was announced online or spread as a digital rumor. Hermeneutics has taken advantage of this predicament as its linchpin (“the ‘world’ which has already been understood comes to be interpreted”),⁸ while omitting that something of Aristotle’s energeia is indispensible to the progress from preunderstanding to interpretation. We feel the crisis of energy only very obscurely, through the prism of lack, a dearth of time and resources, for which we compensate with the acceleration of restless quests for more means bereft of an end and experienced, in a moment of involuntary “downtime,” as the depletion of ourselves. Perhaps we dream of rest, of deceleration, of abiding in and with plenitude, but it is just that—a dream. “And it’s an eternal struggle! Rest is only the stuff our dreams…,” my grandmother was fond of saying in what I later discovered to be a citation from a poem by Alexander Blok titled “On the Kulikovo Battlefield.”

Throwing the entire weight of his thought against the lurid spectacle that is our actuality emptied of the actual, Aristotle dreams up pure energy dreaming itself. And in such a way that it would not be a fantasy but the most palpable and secure reality! Aristotle thus dreams of energeia in the name of the most real, least dreamy state, conjuring up, along the way, the neologism energeia that is his singular invention.

As a safeguard against the infinite regress of a merely potential actuality, he asserts that “there must be a principle of this kind whose essence is actuality [ἄρα εἶναι ἀρχὴν τοιαύτην ἧς ἡ οὐσία ἐνέργεια]” (1071b, 20). In the beginning, in principle (arché), there will have been pure energeia that did not require further actualization and did not spring from a preexistent potentiality. Yet Aristotle is also cautious. He keeps vigil over his reverie so that it would not degenerate into a pipe dream. The Greek thinker identifies an aporia (καίτοι ἀπορία: translated as “difficulty”) in this postulate, which contravenes our empirical common sense: “for it seems that everything that actually functions has a potentiality, whereas not everything that has a potentiality actually functions; so that potentiality is prior [δοκεῖ γὰρ τὸ μὲν ἐνεργοῦν πᾶν δύνασθαι τὸ δὲ δυνάμενον οὐ πᾶν ἐνεργεῖν, ὥστε πρότερον εἶναι τὴν δύναμιν]” (1071b, 22–25). There is always an admixture of dunamis in everything actually in existence, and, vice versa, dunamis can perfectly subsist as it is (or, better, as it is and is not) without being transmogrified into energeia. How to tackle this aporia? How to pass through it while preserving the primacy of actuality over potentiality, the primacy that, inspired by the philosophy of F. W. J. Schelling, Heidegger will invert or subvert in the opening paragraphs of Being and Time?

Aristotle’s ratiocination in book 12 of Metaphysics deserves careful study and attention. His solution, the “unmoved mover,” is not a theoretical trick, a magician’s “rabbit-out-of-a-hat,” meant to hide the aporia behind a philosophical smokescreen. It commences with a deduction from the empirical observation that potentiality did not stay locked in its impoverished mode of being but advanced toward actualization, if only partially and sporadically. Aristotle makes the actual, the work, ἔργον, testify to this premise. Since it has come out of itself, “there is also something that moves it. And since that which is moved while it moves is intermediate, there is something which moves without being moved; something eternal which is both substance and actuality [ἔστι τι ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ, ἀΐδιον καὶ οὐσία καὶ ἐνέργεια οὖσα]” (1072a, 20–25). Forget the chicken and the egg! The rabbit appears from the hat as much as the hat from the rabbit, while the difference between the two qua actualities fades away. More than that, Aristotle would have been prepared to accept the tenet of infinite regress, if existence were comprised of abstract nonactualizable potentialities. However, given the evidence of works-facts, erga, and beautiful phenomena-shinings, instances of phenomenon kalon (1072a, 28) that surround us, he has no other choice but to conclude that being is not dunamis all the way down. The energy of the whole must have originated in actuality fully present to itself that, overfull with itself, spilled over into other kinds of life, mixed with potentiality, and swung closer to limits than to ends.

At this point, readers’ patience is likely to run out. How can one vindicate such obviously metaphysical constructs? Are they really preferable to our topsy-turvy conception of energy as dunamis? Do we need to go as far as to resurrect the phantom of an end without (prior or intermediate) means to resist the ruinous force of means devoid of an end?

The unmoved mover is, admittedly, nowhere to be found among phenomena and facts. But this conspicuous absence is not a good reason to attach to it the label otherworldly or metaphysical. I take the unmoved mover to be a point where energy splits from itself and, in this explosive splitting, relates to itself anew. (Empirical inaccessibility does not automatically spell out metaphysical abstraction. Who has ever seen, touched, tasted, or smelled a relation, let alone a self-relation?) The unmoved mover is the self-relation of energy, or of energies, just as the soul is the body’s relation to itself, as Hegel correctly intuited from the Greeks. In this regard, I find it instructive to consult the interpretation of Aristotle by Russian philosopher Alexey Losev, who casts the unmoved mover in terms of being’s self-relation.

Schematically, Losev’s exposition may be divided into five stages:

 

1.   The world is in perpetual motion, which is its expression and which stands for the energy of meaning.

2.   Since there is nothing except this energetic meaning, it relates to itself by thinking itself. Hence the energy of the world is also self-thinking, the energy of the Mind, thought thinking itself.

3.   This mindful energy can give itself varying degrees of material expression, with the highest expression of essence in a singular fact being beauty or perfection.

4.   Yet, more often than not, the journey of energy into limitless materiality is a transition from abundance to lack, from happiness to unhappiness, from self-satisfaction to suffering and self-abandon.

5.   Although the energy of the Mind forgets itself in its wanderings, it remains gathered into itself in a single point. The Aristotelian doctrine (of the unmoved mover) is the memory it keeps of this self-gathering.⁹

 

The articulation of energy with itself in (1) and (2) is coterminous with its splitting. In relating to itself, energeia must first become other to and differ from itself. Metaphysically inclined, we are prone to divide the energy of meaning and the energy of the Mind into two separate realms, two worlds shaping the landscapes of physical reality and metaphysics, respectively. And yet it is the same divided against itself and—at times uneasily—reconciled with itself. In those exceptional instances when reconciliation succeeds, beauty and perfection flash before us (3). More frequently, the faulty sutures between the disjointed fragments of energy botch its self-relation, culminating in a tragedy that marks the human condition (4). To make things worse, our work on this tear is futile: on behalf of metaphysical energy dreams—that is to say, of a seamless and extratemporal perfection—we further isolate material meaning from the knowing mind, thereby deepening the cut.

Upon finishing his monumental study of ancient thought in 1928, Losev could not have anticipated the pitch the tragedy has attained today. Un- or disarticulated, the sundered hemispheres of energy are also out of touch each with itself. The energy of meaning mutates into dense meaninglessness, which is how matter presents itself before the scientifically determinist consciousness. Nor is the energy of the mind spared in its current form. With thinking reduced to the bare bones of calculation, there is no longer a question of its self-relation, save for the narrow channel of “criticism” or, rather, “self-critique.” As the tension between and within the energies of meaning and the mind slackens, nihilism emerges as the destiny of the world. It could well be that Aristotle is ahead of us, insofar as the energy of plenitude, life, and rest are concerned (5). He is waiting for us to catch up with him. But it could also be that the self-forgetting of energy, as if in a dream, is a more effective recipe for anamnesis than the actual memory of actuality present in Aristotle’s texts. After all, the multiple fissures and rifts that traverse energy (the concept and the thing itself) call for something a little more complex: a forgetting that remembers, a dream that is more actual than our dunamis-obsessed virtual reality, a suture that displays the cut, a wounded spirit whose flesh is covered with unhealing scars.

Dunamis is dynamite. That is the unconscious image of energy nestled in our psyches. To obtain it, we must extract it, wrest it from others—human or not, animate or inanimate—at the price of their wholeness. Energy extraction tears actual beings, the placeholders of the Aristotelian energeia, apart, obscenely exposing their entrails, enucleating them. Energy production is a fury of destruction, which Hegel incidentally associated with “universal freedom,”¹⁰ reinforced by the implacable conception of energy itself as something indestructible. It does not relent until the atom is split, until it reaches the nucleus and divides the ostensibly indivisible. Nuclear power and the atomic energy it unbridles is the apotheosis of the contemporary dogma of energy, the fulfillment of a process forbidding any fulfillment, anathema to everything actual. So is hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, that cracks the earth (particularly shale rocks) open by exerting high water pressure on them from below. Environmentally destructive and shockingly shortsighted as these methods of energy production are, they are to be expected given the dominant conception of energy that requires breaching and laying bare the bedrock of things (of the atom, of the earth) so as to draw power from this violent exposure.

The crisis of energy is at its direst here. Enucleating the world, we ourselves are enucleated. Be it labor or truth, we extract value from the universe outside us and from the human, destroying the material “shells,” the unacknowledged substantive expressions of energy that enclose its active “kernel.” On the spreadsheets of capitalism, we are accounted for as human resources, from which work can be extracted, burying Marx’s dream of human self-actualization through labor. Our epistemologies, too, acquiesce with the ambition to disclose the marrow of reality, usually by shattering and discarding the outward “mere” appearances that occlude it. Thinking has assumed the shape of mental fracking. Unless we subscribe to a phenomenological methodology, we are quite dissatisfied with the surface of things, with how they present themselves to us in everyday life: with their imperfections, incompletions, shadowy spots, and badges of finitude, be they limits or ends. Our readiness to pump oil from the ground or from the ocean floor belongs with the rest of this epistemological apparatus, which is why it is so difficult to give it up. For us, superficial actuality, the actuality of the superficies, is never actual enough. As we strive to know what things really are, we break them down to atomic and subatomic, chemical and molecular components. Why would the style of energy production and extraction be at variance with that of the production and extraction of knowledge? The two would have to change in tandem, if human impact on the world, as well as on ourselves, is to be mitigated. We are yet to register the (energetic) repercussions of Hegel’s dictum concerning the rationality of the actual and the actuality of the rational. “What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.”¹¹

On the one hand, most approaches to energy presuppose a substantial divergence between the inner and the outer, depth and surface. The very language of storage and release indicates that the energy of everything from galaxies to microbes, from economic systems to psychic life is contained, held within, withheld, and prevented from achieving its full actuality, before it is liberated with more or less force but without end and to no end. The encompassing whole (i.e., the physicists’ “closed system”) is likewise seen as a great container from which no energy ever escapes; that is what, at bottom, the law of energy’s conservation, the first law of thermodynamics, intends. Absent the dimension of interiority, one would no longer be able to explain how things work, how they are put to work, activated, or withheld in potentiality. Energy differentials depend, above all, on the difference between the inside and the outside, on the speed and force with which these boundaries are, or may be, traversed.

Plants, on the other hand, need not devastate the interiority of another being to procure their energy. They set to work the elements they do not control, do not dominate, do not appropriate. Besides water and the minerals they draw from the soil, they receive what they need from the sun, collecting solar sustenance on their maximally exposed surfaces, the leaves. (Plants can, to be sure, deplete the soil, but this results from human interference—the introduction of intensive agriculture and the spread of monocultures. By and large, through decomposition, vegetation returns to the earth much of what it has taken from there.) Human reliance on solar energy would signal our willingness to learn from plants and to accept, mutatis mutandis, an essentially superficial existence or, at the very least, to integrate it with the dimension of depth. Although current technical capabilities could sustain a nearly total reliance on renewable energy (solar, wind, hydro…: I prefer to designate these not as “renewables” but as “elementals”; the former category makes little sense, in that it lumps together plants grown to be burned as biodiesels and our cooperation or cohabitation with the elements of water, air, and solar fire), although these capabilities exist, they are extraneous to the prevalent mindset surrounding the essence of energy, to be encountered in the deepest depths, to be accessed through destructive-extractive means, and to be snatched from the interiority of things. The focus of attention may actually shift to “clean energy,” and that is, in and of itself, laudable. But “cleanness” relates primarily to the effects of utilization, not to the question of what energy is. That is why oil, coal, and, most of all, natural gas companies can profess that they are making the transition to clean energy, without radically modifying the sources of fuel themselves, let alone how they are procured.

The most vital energy dreams, then, are the dreams of another energy, nonviolent and enacted otherwise. Long ago, a form of life was dreamed by energy itself that approximated this desideratum. That form was vegetal. Its vital exposure, the essentially superficial attraction to solar energy, is a polar opposite to the mode of thinking and living that values depth. After the technical and theoretical network of energy and knowledge production has permeated and analyzed the core of things, an additional kind of depth and interiority—spiritual or metaphysical—is constructed. Not by chance, plants have been excluded from the province of metaphysical spirit and consigned to its margins. Their life looks alien when memory, consciousness, and the psyche are imagined in the shape of invisible inner drawers for storing experience and for the release of mental energy into specific behaviors. To vegetate and vegetative have come to denote torpor and a dearth of energy, in short, what human beings ought to avoid in order to lead a vibrant life.

In its “commonsense” permutation, energy is highly seductive. The ultimate prize, it beckons with movement and dynamism. As such, it offers the possibility of possibility, a magic wand for fulfilling any desire. To maximize energy is not so much to hoard more of its resources as to liberate more of it, ceaselessly traversing the boundary between the inside and the outside. The ideal of this activity would be to altogether eliminate the time interval between storage and release. Scarcely pleased with stability, modernity is inebriated with perpetual change or, less charitably, with the illusion thereof. If physicists and chemists speak or dream about the liberation of energy, what they leave unspoken is the assumption that matter is its prison, a cipher for containment, curtailing dynamism.

We might recall that the work of energy—its ergon—is ambiguous to the nth degree. It embraces the process and the product, activity and actuality. In physical reality, in political systems, as much as in the psychological sphere, inertia, stagnation, and the status quo are energy factors under the substantive aspect of ergon, and revolutionary, innovative, groundbreaking actions unfold under ergon’s verbal aspect. That energetic systems are heading toward entropy is an assertion disregarding this basic equivocality. (The Greek stasis is similarly amphibological in its meaning: it pertains as much to immobility, or stagnation, as to the intense strife of a civil war.) Now, since in our collective unconscious energy is untethered to the logic of ends, reverses direction from actuality to potentiality, and operates within the stricture of destructive extraction, it sows death not as a result of grinding to a halt but by virtue of an exorbitant movement that discards every temporarily stabilized form. Our energy unfurls the force of negativity, actualized not in being but in the decimation of being.

Is Hegel complicit in this dreadful scenario? You might get the impression that you have made out the contours of his thought on the horizon of energy as I have sketched it out thus far. It is true that dialectics is a machine of energy production-extraction from rational principles, with negativity (more precisely: self-negation) for an internal combustion engine. And yet Hegel kept too near to Aristotle to endorse the “bad infinity” of unalloyed potentiality. What he extracts from the deep and essentially hidden rational kernel are the actual structures of physical, social, and political reality. “What is rational is actual [wirklich]; and what is actual is rational” is his manner of underwriting the Aristotelian energeia, translated into the Latin actus or actualitas and, through it, into the German word for actuality, Wirklichkeit. The extraction of the actual from the rational is not a lethal operation. In self-negation and the negation of the negation (inspired or energized by Christian resurrection) death is incorporated, overcome, and put in the service of actuality. The derivation of dialectical energy is the work of history, as the history of Spirit, the self-relationality of the world’s self-relation.

Nor does Hegel lose sight of the powerlessness distinguishing the Aristotelian energeia. The preface to Philosophy of Right, where he pithily articulates the actual and the rational, holds another well-known statement comparing dialectical philosophy to the Owl of Minerva that “spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”¹² The time of dusk is when the rational is almost actual, when it is too late to change anything, when one can but observe and recapitulate in thought that which has been consummated in the world. When nocturnal dreams, oddly in sync with total alertness, are encroaching upon us in the twilight of an immediately living actuality that marks the transition to Spirit’s absolute Wirklichkeit. “The restlessness of the negative” aside, dialectics is the energetic rest of fulfillment, in the absolute achievement of the absolute, hastily dismissed or feted as “the end of history.” It is thought thinking itself in the form of rational actuality, revisiting what is as it is (ergon as a work) and going over the past process of its coming-to-be (ergon as working-out or setting-to-work) replayed on the record of the absolute.

In the end, after the end of immediate actuality, dialectical energy bears the self-relational, self-mediated traits of the unmoved mover. Restlessness in absolute repose, where does it fit on the subject-object continuum? While, in Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel equates the Aristotelian energeia to “the principle of subjectivity,” and dunamis (which he calls possibility) to the objective moment,¹³ in The Science of Logic he implicitly links energeia to the final subject-object synthesis. In the latter work, when “the Idea posits itself as the absolute unity of the pure Notion and its Reality, and thus gathers itself into the immediacy of Being,” it experiences “an absolute liberation [Befreiung], having no further immediate determination which is not equally posited and equally Notion.”¹⁴ As a result, “the Idea freely releases itself in absolute self-security and self-repose [die Idee sich selbst frei entläßt, ihrer absolut sicher und in sich ruhend].”¹⁵ The most crucial liberation of dialectical energy, which frustrates the expectations of a chemist or a physicist, occurs in this release of the Idea into actuality, a discharge that, rather than devastate what is, affirms it. It will be objected that the utopian harmony of “pure Notion and its Reality” is only celebrated in the end, when it is too late to salvage “the real world” from the negations and detonations it suffered through. But the dialectical end is, by the same token, the beginning: dialectics commences with or after the realization of the absolute such that “absolute self-security and self-repose” underlie its every torsion and turbulence. Hence, the liaison between the unmoved mover and free energy, released into the completed work of negativity.

The surface/depth scheme stays intact only on the condition that we ignore the absolute beginning of dialectics from the absolute. Seen absolutely, actuality is the external existence of the rational in which the previously buried essence manifests itself.¹⁶ That said, according to The Encyclopedia Logic, Aristotle’s most significant advance over Plato was to spare the Idea the fate of being dunamis and to confer on it the advantages of energeia, “the inwardness that is totally to the fore [heraus], so that it is the unity of inward and outward.” (I hope that you are starting to discern the silhouette of a growing plant here.) “In other words,” Hegel continues, “the Idea should be regarded as Actuality [Wirklichkeit] in the emphatic sense that we have given to it here.”¹⁷ Energeia is actuality as the synthesis of the inner and the outer, of essential depth and phenomenal surface. It is the essence (or the heart) worn on the sleeve, totally “to the fore,” heraus. This explains why the liberation of this energy is free of residual violence. A self-actualized self-actualizing, it works on itself, no longer infringing upon the boundaries between interiority and exteriority. Hegel resolves the crisis of energy by determining the term, dismissing its undecidability (not on a whim, but through meticulous mediations), and extinguishing the tension between the two senses of ergon. Awork and to work meld together. Dialectics supplants the immediate doubling of actualization and the actual with the mediated repetition of work after it is done, the inwardness of en-ergeia articulated—spatially and symbolically—in the outside world.

To return to my initial questions: Who dreams of energy? What does energy dream of? Who or what dreams when energy dreams? Hegel gives a univocal response: Spirit, both as subject and as substance. And yet energeia has shown more affinity to “the principle of subjectivity” than to “objective possibility.” In what sense, then, does it envelop substance? Proceeding dialectically, we must conclude that the inwardness of subjectivity is modeled on that of energeia whose interiority turns inside out in the course of accomplishing itself. Whoever or whatever is at work or in the work is thereby outside itself in itself, engendering an excess over itself. That is to say: all work is the work of love, as this very engendering. Contemplated from the side of “objective possibility,” the subject is the supplement of actuality who does not add anything new to the real. But the absolute has no sides, which is why it makes both possible and actual the concretion of substance from the energetic excess of the subject over itself. Energy dreams (are) about the identity of subject and substance.

The drawback of the Hegelian solution is that it cannot precipitate sorely needed paradigm shifts in knowledge and energy production. True, the Owl of Minerva will take its flight over a devastated earth from which every drop of oil and every cubic meter of natural gas have been extracted. But, rather than fault the theory of energeia and philosophy itself for their enthralling, if irresponsible, powerlessness, we ought to attend to a figuration they are seldom aware of. In the exposure of their essence, “the inwardness totally to the fore,” energeia and dialectics remarkably assume vegetal outlines. Hegel must have had a premonition of this metamorphosis when, in the preface to his Phenomenology, he likened stages in the life of Spirit to phases in vegetal growth and reproduction, or when, in Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, he wrote: “Spirit is essentially the result of its own activity; its activity is the transcending of immediate, simple, unreflected existence,—the negation of that existence, and the returning into itself. We may compare it with the seed; for with this the plant begins, yet it is also the result of the plant’s entire life [Wir können ihn mit dem Samen vergleichen; denn mit diesem fängt die Pflanze an, aber er ist auch Resultat des ganzen Lebens derselben].”¹⁸ Activity and its result, the working and the work (on oneself)—the principal moments of energy condense and converge in a seed. Giving itself a determinate energetic form, dialectics elects a vegetal figuration. It dreams of setting itself to work by flourishing, blossoming, coming to fruition, and germinating again in and as Spirit. That is, by endorsing the plant’s essential superficiality, derided in Philosophy of Nature.

Unjustly, inexcusably, I have let slip the first two letters of energy in the midst of my concentration on the polysemy of ergon. Unless I have been dealing—obliquely, not yet thematically—with nothing other than these letters of the prefix en- meaning in. Of course, the most obvious sense of “in” is that of spatial inclusion, which goes some way toward explaining the language of containment in the treatment of “unreleased” energy. When liberated, however, energy is not released outside some given spatial parameters. It transgresses the boundaries of things that temporarily stabilize and detain it, but, in this transgression, it is imparted to another object, the recipient of its impetus, or, if that is not the case, is diffused into space, however vast or narrow.

It follows that “inhood” cannot be reduced to the sense of spatiality; the ideal involvement in the work supersedes the physical interiority of the object. The en- of energy in enworkment signifies, among other things, being in a process, under way, unfolding. The actual is what is in actuality, which also means now, at present, in the present moment, itself as elusive as energy, since every now swiftly turns into a then. In contrast to spatial stability, the temporality of energy can be fitful and erratic. At work in this moment, it may be deactivated the next. Because we associate time with perpetual movement and change, and because time depends on the tempo or rate of energy conversions, a break between containment and release can connote a disruption in energy’s work, its being out of work, decommissioned. That is what we are afraid of—an abeyance of energetic conversions, their work no longer at play. The real exteriority to what is in or at work in energy is temporal rather than spatial.

If we press a little further, we will run aground on the question of time’s exteriority. Isn’t it as ludicrous as that of the spatial variety? Is a rupture with finite existence (temporal through and through) conceivable in the cessation of the changes it undergoes, a cessation, at any rate, illusory, to the extent that energy keeps fluctuating above and below the thresholds of human perception aided by the latest microscopes and telescopes at our disposal?

These doubts evaporate upon taking the phenomenological experience of time into account. To us, the inheritors of modernity, rest, the withholding of energy, a sense of stability, and a perceived absence of stimulation feel like slowdown and death. A deceleration tending to zero speed might be only an imagined possibility. All the same, it makes us cringe, mobilize all the energy resources we can muster, and engage in a tenacious self-activation intended to defer the final pause of mortality. Being-out-of-work in economic and ontological domains signifies quitting the time of activation, which metonymically stands for time. (In Spanish, unemployment can be said in two ways: desempleo, a word that has the same Latin-derived root as its English equivalent, and paro, “stoppage.”) For the ancients, inversely, a suspension of time in time signified happiness, the fullness of consummation, the most intense energetic state imaginable. Their temporality of enworkment overflowed the metaphor of time-as-a-flow.

Both temporal and spatial, the twofold inwardness of work in energy reflects the verbal and substantive aspects of ergon. Besides instigating the unfinished process of activation (as the verb), energy is operative in the physical thing that “contains” it (as the noun). It goes on working in the course of bringing something or someone into existence and in the resultant work itself. Its containment is never simple, having to contend with pressures, resistances, entropy, and so forth. The spatiality of things is home to the temporality of work that is unabated in them after they have been “produced.”¹⁹ We should get accustomed to hearing in the spatial overtones of the word in energetic transactions astir alongside the more receptive inclusion and envelopment.

My discussion of the preposition in is indebted to the theme of “existential spatiality” Heidegger developed in Being and Time. There he insisted that human being-in-the-world is not of the same nature as the “insidedness” of water in a glass (the example is Heidegger’s). Apropos Being-in [In-sein], “we must set forth the ontological constitution of inhood [Inheit] itself,”²⁰ he submited. Human ontology demands existential inhood, and the ontology of things requires categorial inhood. Energy, for its part, is capacious enough to encompass this Heideggerian distinction. The polysemy of ergon backfires on the meaning of en: a work and to work, it muddles the contrast between the categorial nature of a product and the existentiality of an activity, as well as between two types of “the ontological constitution of inhood.” The energy of water in a glass or of a wave hitting a rock reflects and is reflected in the energy of human beings moving about in, organizing, and despoiling their world. Between the two—a speculative identity in difference, an infinite reflection of the reflection of the reflection…

Heidegger himself must have been nebulously aware of this problem, particularly as he composed his influential essay “The Origin of the Work of Art.” He emphasized there that artworks are both works and things; they “universally display a thingly character,” but nothing can be said about this character “so long as the pure self-subsistence of the work has not distinctly displayed itself” in them.²¹ The very being of an artwork, which is a work and a thing, deconstructs the difference between the existential and categorial analytics jealously guarded in Being and Time. While appearing to be an object among others, a work of art (e.g., a Greek temple—again, following Heidegger’s own example) is in the world in such a manner that it first opens the world, articulates the elements, gathers them into a coherent whole: “The temple-work, standing there, opens up a world and at the same time sets this world back on earth, which itself only thus emerges as native ground.”²² The work of an artwork is, precisely, this disclosure of the world, spanning the specialized realm of aesthetics and the vast fields of aesthesis, of sensitivity, perception, feeling.

And energy? Qua actuality, Wirklichkeit, it presides over the demolition of barriers between existence and categories: “Art is actual in the artwork. Hence we first seek the actuality of the work. [Wirklich ist die Kunst im Kunstwerk. Deshalb suchen wir zuvor die Wirklichkeit des Werkes.] In what does it consist? Artworks universally display a thingly character.”²³ Art does not spawn a dreamworld. It boasts a reality (thinghood) and an activity (work) in which its actuality-energy inheres. The work works on and takes place in the thing; the thing works by articulating the world by which it is itself articulated. An artwork is in the work and at work, connecting the categorial and the existential takes on being-in. I am not fond of philosophies that indulge in generalizations from aesthetic practices. But, for all that, it would be warranted to extend Heidegger’s handling of the energy of art to other “ontic” realities. This gesture would go a long way toward dissociating being-in from pliant inclusion in an empty, undifferentiated, and infinitely stretched-out spatial milieu.

Whether a process or an outcome, work is tinged with economic hues. Energy, by implication, clothes itself in the trappings of a congenitally economic concept. More than that, an economic mentality compresses its work and its workings into the sphere of production. Erga are productive activities or products, means or ends within the same overarching order of quantifiable outcomes. There is no qualitative disparity between the means and the ends within the productivist account of energy, expended to achieve a tangible (or, at least, measurable) result and objectified in that which has come out. Energy here is the power of actualization, the power temporarily kept at bay, productively employed, or preserved in the actuality of its products. Its default conception is incongruous with powerlessness, except for the negative modality of energy: deprivation, shortage, crisis. In the shadow of production, potentiality is only a prospect not yet productively realized, and actuality—a trace of previously activated productivity. Substantively the same, the past and the future of production contribute to the vanishing of the present incommensurate with a product and with its fabrication. Along with the positive powerlessness of energy, time disappears.

The double entendre of the Greek ergon is still with us, albeit stripped of its patent ambiguity. Task and function, work and product, a work and to work—these significations blend into a one-dimensional whole in the age of productivism. The ensemble of ends and means finds its temporal analogue in the coupling of already and not yet that denotes the degree to which available energy has been “actualized” in production. Ideally, a transitory discord between these markers of time would be resolved, and the result would be concretized immediately, that is, without delay and without undue mediations. The function is the product; the task is the accomplished work. That is another manner of time’s disappearance in energy, not absorbed into happiness but frittered in the unfathomably fast rotations of potential potentiality and potential actuality, as requisitioned by the logistics of capitalist virtualization.

In the wake of the Aristotelian unmoved mover or of the Hegelian Spirit, production regulates the commerce of energy with itself. Both as subject and as substance, verb and noun: producer, product, to produce, produced. Hiding under the sheepskin of pragmatic concerns, the latest formalization of energy is a wolf, more intensely metaphysical than its forerunners, given the effectiveness with which it devours time, difference, and possibilities that disagree with its flat vision of the world. Today’s extreme and highly destructive energy dream presents itself as the sole possible reality (better: as the possibility of producing the one necessary and sufficient reality) that excludes other alternatives as unrealistic, utopian, unproductive. It claims for itself both the actual and the potential, censoring our reveries, fantasies, and previously unforeseeable imaginings or forms of seeing. Produced in vast “dream factories” (besides Hollywood, these include the entire ideological machinery of productivism into which everyone and everything is plugged without exception), they are harnessed for the sake of an ever more efficient and sweeping extraction-destruction-production of the future, which has no future. Yes, energy still dreams, though within strict repressive limits and under harsh conditions. The poverty of its dreams depends on the prohibition—its self-prohibition, more precisely—to maintain in being anything that is not and will never be productively at work. This for-nothing “is,” for it, just that: nothing, nonbeing. Ontology is all the poorer when, having mobilized, actualized, or prepared for actualization everything that is and could ever be, it excludes unproductive possibilities from its ambit. Dreams, above all.

It is easy to surmise why energy production is so vital to the ideological constellation we are a part of. Not so much because, should it decline, the rest of the world economy would grind to a halt but because it is symbolic of how we live, be it as individuals, corporations, or states. Energy production is the production of actuality in our actuality, the activation of actuality, a hyperproduction, folded onto itself and consequently magnifying the effects of the prevailing destructive-extractive zeitgeist. This fold sweeps both reality and the dream into its midst and dictates the rules of the game: “it’s my way or the (unusable) highway,” the way of activation on the terms of production and the production of production or the highway of total deactivation, rest as death, the peace of the cemeteries.

Heidegger should receive credit for drawing our attention to the ontological overreach of production in ancient and modern forms of metaphysics alike. The “determinations adduced for Sachheit [thingness, reality],” he holds, and “essentia—forma, natura, quod quid erat esse, definitio—are obtained with regards to the producing of something.” From Plato and Aristotle through medieval Scholasticism to Kant, “production stands in the guiding horizon of this interpretation of whatness.”²⁴ The who (Dasein) does not willfully foist productive parameters on the what; the who is, rather, under the sway of the what: “The apparently objective interpretation of being as actualitas also at bottom refers back to the subject…in the sense of a relation to our Dasein as an acting Dasein or, to speak more precisely, as a creative, productive Dasein.”²⁵ As in the case of the artwork, we are privy here to a flattening of the categorial-existential divide. But, instead of endowing things with the characteristics of the who, as art does, the productive comportment defines who we are through the thingly what. Assuming that to act, to be an agent, to behave energetically is to produce, the actualizing action and, with it, the actor are contingent upon the demands of (and for) the intended product. And, contrary to what we might expect, the Greeks do not escape from Heidegger’s accusing finger in this regard. The Platonic eidos, for instance, is the “anticipated look of the thing,” “the anticipated look of what is to be produced by shaping, forming.”²⁶ Themselves unproduced, the Ideas undergird the productivist ontology of the world here below. Their energy spins the world as the panoply of unsuspecting (dreamlike and sleepwalking) replicas of eidetic realities.

The metaphysical intensity of production that determines every who as a what surges in comparison to the unmoved mover or Spirit, where who and what still coexisted with more or less tension to be sublated and resolved, reminiscent of the fissures at the heart of ergon itself (ergo, energy). Medieval thought credited God with the identity of existentia and essentia in the plenitude of creative energy, as much thought as action, which will be one of my focal points in the next chapter. Lest I be misunderstood, I am not positing a return to these milestones of metaphysics as a sine qua non for resisting the productivism that assigns to us the function of producers (the function, which, to repeat, includes consumption) “objectively determined” by the correlative product. Equally futile will be the negation of productivism on its home turf, by dropping out of the system and becoming unproductive, an Aussteiger, as the Germans refer to it. The point is not to aspire to a higher-than-productive subjectivity, sometimes glorified in metaphysics, nor to be fully compliant with the political-economic program for which we are tiny fragments of an algorithm.

Writing that we have to work at the sense of work, I propose to unmoor it from production and to work through (in the psychoanalytic sense) our compulsion to fabricate the world and ourselves, without sparing the “progressive” performative, discursive, narrative, and other methods of generating what is. With the environmental crisis upon us, it is necessary to dream up another energy, another enworkment where humility and taking charge, accepting the given and elaborating it, belong together. How to put this dream to work outside the exigencies of producing and reproducing a reality that, day by day, appears to be more and more virtual? The chapters on theology, economy, psychology, politics, and science that follow contain hints of an answer. Yet it would be also wrongheaded to predicate the thinking of energy on a search for solutions, seeing that a question resolved and pacified in the response willy-nilly capitulates before the machinery of production, with its “positive” outcomes. What we can do (and this modal verb can, promising potency, as much as the active do, should not be taken for granted) is let another energy work and dream, as it gushes forth from the fault lines of the productivist worldview.