Description: Energy Dreams interrogates the ontology of energy from the first coinage of the word energeia by Aristotle to the current practice of fracking and the popularity of "energy drinks."
Brief description: Michael Marder (PhD, Philosophy, the New School) is IKERBASQUE Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of the Basque Country. He is the author of, among other books, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (Columbia, 2013), The Philosopher's Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (Columbia, 2014), Energy Dreams (Columbia, 2017), Political Categories (Columbia, 2019), and, with Luce Irigaray, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (Columbia, 2016).
Review Quotes: Energy is something that pervades all our concerns from ecological to libidinal: we dream about clean renewable energy, condemn fracking, gain strength through energy drinks. Michael Marder's Energy Dreams moves beyond these topics and asks a more fundamental hermeneutic question: what understanding of energy is presupposed in our mundane concerns? He demonstrates brilliantly that we need a new philosophical paradigm and that only in this way will we be able to properly confront all the practical problems in our dealings with energy. Marder's book makes it clear that only a deeper theoretical reflection will enable us to solve our most "practical" problems--a lesson needed like daily bread in today's world, which more and more abhors authentic thinking.--Slavoj Zizek, author of Less Than Nothing and Absolute Recoil