Energy and Change : A New Materialist Cosmotheology

As humanity continues to consume planetary resources at an unsustainable rate, we require not only new and renewable forms of energy but also new ways of understanding energy itself. Clayton Crockett offers an innovative philosophy of energy that cuts across a number of leading-edge disciplines. Drawing from contemporary philosophies of New Materialism, non-Western traditions, and the sciences, he develops a comprehensive vision of energy as a material process spanning physics, biology, politics, ecology, and religion. Crockett argues that change is foundational to material reality, which is ceaselessly self-organizing. We can observe energy's effects in the operations of natural selection as well as those at work in human societies. Matter and energy are not an oppositional binary; rather, they are expressions of how change functions in the universe. Ultimately, Crockett argues, we can conceive of God neither as a deity nor as a being but as the principle of change. Informed by cutting-edge theoretical discourses in thermodynamics, science studies, energy humanities, systems theory, continental philosophy, and radical theology, Energy and Change draws on theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Karen Barad, Bruno Latour, and Kojin Karatani as well as ideas about spirituality, society, and nature from Amerindian, Vodou, and Neo-Confucian traditions. A foundational work in New Materialist philosophy of religion, this book offers compelling new insights into the structure of the cosmos and our place in it. "Contemporary western philosophy of religion--at least of the continental sort--has turned sharply away from its roots in Christian theology and embraced New Materialism, non-Western and indigenous spiritual traditions, the Anthropocene, and the insights of epigenetics, quantum theory, and astrophysics. This materialist turn is also deeply political--in this, our only aleatory and contingent world, confronted by a perfect storm of crises and a collective paralysis in the face of change--in the words of another kind of materialist, Vladimir Lenin, what is to be done? In this new formulation, informed by Whitehead, Merleau-Ponty, Althusser, and Deleuze and in contrast to others grounded in the human, matter, with its self-organizing properties interacting with nonlinear causes, capable of unexpected novelty, is foundational. Put differently, nothing more is needed to get change than the chance workings of material reality; difference is integral to identity. Relating this perspective to the intractable global conditions we face, Clayton Crockett suggests that we begin with energy as a material process. We may not know how to define it, but we can describe its effects. Beyond our planet, in the form of dark energy--three-quarters of of the known universe--it becomes expansive rather than entropic; singularities are produced that transform systems. We see this process in the operations of natural selection, and it is also present in human social, economic, and political operations. Everything is at stake, including the affective, ethical, and spiritual forces that can motivate energetic transformation. Many indigenous cultures do not see the world in material and spiritual binaries; matter and energy, as Latour and Barad have argued, have agential power. In our future we may not survive, but energy, in its multiplicity, will endure"-- Provided by publisher