UC Riverside

This study is about speculative aesthetics and philosophy. To speculate is to think an absolute, which is a nonrelative property of something. Not all absolutes are necessary, but all absolutes are possible. This study is also about language, structure, apocalyptic literature, and the energy humanities. Responding to the Anthropocenic energy crisis and the need to transition to alternative energy sources, energy humanists ask us to contemplate how the study of language and literature may contribute to a transformation of petroculture, which limits our linguistic imagination of energy to oil. Language and literature shape our values, practices, habits, beliefs, and feelings, and are therefore essential to a transformation of petroculture and its complicity with the capitalist economy of use and exchange, whose shared possibility condition is the colonial-racial reality. This study argues that the energy aesthetics in apocalyptic literature contributes to the decolonization of petroculture by impelling us to speculatively think absolutes, which gift us energy in excess of petroculture.