Dominic Pettman is University Professor of Media and New Humanities at The New School, New York City.
Peak Libido is a brilliant and even entertaining book on a very serious topic: the worldwide decline of libido, the loss of the human sex drive and even of fertility, which closely tracks the destruction of environments worldwide. What has been called the Anthropocene leads, paradoxically, to human extinction. Thus the project of imagining an erotic Green New Deal. This is utopian thinking (in the positive sense of the term) at its most audacious. Allan Stoekl, author of Bataille's Peak: Energy, Religion, and Postsustainability Peak Libido does more than take the metaphor of Peak Oil to think about the sexual economies of the twenty-first century; bodily erotics are inextricably intertwined with our consumption, extraction, transformation and destruction of what we have belated come to call ecology. Dovetailing a nuanced theory of waning desire with cultural analyses of sexual commodities, Pettman s account of the states of desire of twenty-first-century life is lucid, readable, entertaining, original and thought-provoking. Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University