How much can we take from nature? Can it always provide enough resources to satisfy the needs of humankind, or is it in danger of complete exhaustion — of being eaten up? Rather than a simple “yes” or “no” answer, these questions demand a complex vision: our relationship to nature contains a paradox, that is nicely introduced by Ovid in the book 8 of Metamorphoses. It recounts a legend of Baucis and Philemon that originates in Greek and Roman mythology. In order to test the humanity of mortals, two gods, Jupiter and Mercury, come down to Earth disguised as strangers. They go from one house to another and knock on a thousand doors, but each time are turned away: no one recognizes them in their beggarly look.1 Finally, an old, poor family couple, Philemon and Baucis, open to strangers the door of their small cottage. They do not have much to propose, but they welcome guests with all their sincere hospitality. They serve modest, poor food, like cabbage, radishes, milk, eggs, or fruits. They also serve some wine, and, suddenly, a miracle happens: they pour from the vase, but it fills itself up with wine again and again. That’s how a hospitable couple realizes that the guests are not mere mortals:

But while they served, the wine-bowl often drained, 

as often was replenished, though unfilled,

and Baucis and Philemon, full of fear,

as they observed the wine spontaneous well,

increasing when it should diminish, raised

their hands in supplication, and implored

indulgence for their simple home and fare.2

In The Parasite, Michel Serres cites this story, together with other ancient fables, where the entire system of the world economy is described in terms of parasitism. The parasite lives at the expense of the other, who is called the host; it attaches to the body of the host, or digs inside it, and eats it. Thus a host provides a parasite with both home and nourishment. A parasitic relation is not mutual — not the one of exchange — since a parasite never gives anything back to his host, but a parasite can itself become a host for another parasite. All living beings, including humans, are assembled into a complex parasitic chain. On Serres’ account, ultimate and universal host is nature, on whose body we dwell and board, and whose resources miraculously never end. Nature is the last (or the first) link of a chain; it does not parasite on anything, but can only host. Baucis and Philemon appear as generous hosts, ready to share gratuitously everything they have. But even if the host’s resources are limited, they are never entirely ruined and devastated, or, better, they are drawn, again and again, from the very devastation and exhaustion of the host – this is what Serres calls “a daily miracle of the parasite.” 3 Commenting on this, Serres evokes the image of Phoenix, a bird which cyclically burns itself and then reappears out of its own ashes:

It is the daily miracle of the parasite. It is always the table d’hôte and the phoenix of the hosts. Parasitism doesn’t stop. The host repeatedly is reborn from his ashes, from the ashes expelled through the stercoral door. Sit down at the table d’hôte; the host always makes the meal. He is there for that. The host is reborn from his consumption, from his consumption by fire, and the wine springs again from his destruction.4

Long before Serres, the figure of Phoenix was already introduced in a similar sense by Hegel, who, in the closing paragraphs of his Philosophy of Nature, presents the aim of nature as death, on its own accord, or self-annihilation for the sake of spirit: “The purpose of nature is to extinguish itself, and to break through its rind of immediate and sensuous being, to consume itself like a Phoenix in order to emerge from this externality rejuvenated as spirit.”5 Phoenix sacrifices itself, or, as Hegel puts it, consumes itself, but then always awakens anew. One might therefore assume that our spiritual universe knows nature as an undead body, whose miraculous hospitality has no limit. Today’s name for this hospitality is energy, and the phoenix that is constantly burned down is, almost literally, fossil fuels, a highly exploited, undead, non-human material agency.

As Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti argue in their preface to this special issue of Mediations, a theory of conservation of energy—according to which energy can neither be created, not destroyed, but only transformed—is immanent to capitalist modernity, and Nietzschean idea of the eternal return appears as its metaphysical double. An eternal return of energy creates a paradigm, whose function is to immunize the world against ecological and social catastrophe. As opposed to this paradigm, and roughly at the same time, Marxist theory emerges, that sees the materiality of energy not as an eternal return, but as a social relation.6 One can describe this relation as a parasitic one, where the main parasite is capital, attached to the host body of nature, which is considered as a material source, and, crucially, as a source of energy.

Capital is a twofold process. Its two sides are the so called basis, or economy, and infrastructure, or ideology. The link between capitalist economy and capitalist ideology is a value form (an exchange value and a surplus value are doubled with spiritual, cultural values). On the side of economy there is production, and on the side of ideology there is consumption. Production and consumption are linked by the commodity. The relation of production to the commodity can be characterized as alienation: not only does a product not belong to a producer, but a producer in the process of production does not belong to herself, as she only sells herself as a working force. The relation of consumption to the commodity takes the shape of commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is a flip side of alienation: we lose ourselves in production and try to find ourselves in consumption, but always in vain. Both vectors of this two-fold movement could not be possible without a certain energy supply. The process of production is driven by material energy that mainly presents a concatenation of fossil fuels and labor power, whereas consumption feeds on libidinal energy, whose investments are provided by desires and drives.

Thus fossil fuels, labor, and desire constitute a kind of heterogeneous, underground, and highly explosive realm upon which capitalist system is based. This is, so to say, an unconscious level of the world economy, which now collides with the world ecology, since capitalist technological developments bring catastrophic side effects. Fossil fuels and labor force are an industrial component of a post-industrial, digital society where they seem to be overcome, but in fact are rather repressed and preserve themselves in this repressed form somewhere beneath the ground: oil — between geological layers; and labor force — in underground sweatshops. In this sense, they are in fact a kind of unconscious, and one of the laws of the unconscious is applicable to them: the one of the return of the repressed. It is neither a mere conservation, nor an eternal return, but an eternal return of the repressed that governs the energy triangle of capital — labor, fuels, and desire.

What a worker and oil have in common is that they are not only the repressed, but also the oppressed; not only the unconscious layer of the society in which we exchange life for money, but the exploited and consumed, burned up as they are in the production of surplus. The worker is exploited as a living labor, burning out when transformed into dead capital, while oil is exploited as a natural resource, that burns for the sake of profit. The third side of this energetic triangle is desire, a source of libidinal energy that generously invests into commodified objects whose value is generated by fetishistic projections. This is the phoenix triangle of capitalism, its undead underground currents, its concrete materiality compelled by an abstract value form. Can its potential be different than the one indicated by a current techno-capitalist conjuncture? Marxist dialectics is a method that allows us to open up, through a materialist critique of energy, the horizon of its other possibilities.

1. Ovid, Metamorphosis: Philemon and Baucis. http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Classics/OvidPhilemonBaucis.htm
2. Ovid, Metamorphosis.
3. Michel Serres, The Parasite (Minneapolis: U Of Minnesota Press 2007) 99.
4. Serres, The Parasite 99.
5. The Parasite 444.
6. Brent Ryan Bellamy and Jeff Diamanti, “Materialism and the Critique of Energy” Mediations 31.2 (2018).