ABSTRACT
The energy humanities comprise a relatively new field of scholarship that makes a radical claim: there is a deep and relatively unexplored link between the energy on which a society depends and the character of its cultural, social, and political forms. This chapter explores how foregrounding energy opens up analytic paths for history and critical theory, particularly within the history of modernity. It first considers how using energy as a fundamental category of historical analysis could change understandings of the materiality and contingency of modernity, from the emergence of crisis politics and nationalism to contemporary political ideologies, such as Keynesianism and neoliberalism, and even concepts of energy. This chapter next investigates some of the implications of energy for understandings of critical theory in two broad areas: (1) politics and society and (2) subjectivity. This chapter argues that energy must play a role in accounts of power and political struggle, as well as in theories of subjectivity. Responding to today’s most urgent issues, from climate change to deepening inequality, requires a fuller grasp of the complex ways in which we are all creatures of petromodernity.
