Environmental Philosophy

Volume 15, Issue 2, Fall 2018

Grids of Power
Toward a Phenomenology of Fuel

The word “power” tends toward divergent formations, and this paper is prompted by the intersection of two of them. The first form taken up here is power as control, while the second form is material power as fuel. The typical modern configuration of the first form implies an understanding of the second form as subordinate. But what I argue here is that insofar as fuel is a condition of the possibility of being human, the identity of the human being has always been embedded in an assemblage consisting of fuel-subject/intersubject.