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As a part of the Carolina Postdoctoral Program for Faculty Diversity, I am updating my doctoral thesis into a book in the Department of Romance Studies. As indicated in its abstract, my thesis 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. My thesis 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. My thesis defends the assertion that the energy aesthetics in French, francophone, and anglophone apocalyptic literature contributes to the decolonization of petroculture by impelling us to speculatively think absolutes, which gift us energy in excess of petroculture. In updating it into a book, I am presently thinking through the historical development of the term “energy” in natural philosophy; specifically, I am returning to Plato’s Timaeus alongside T. K. Johansen’s study of it and taking a deep dive into German Naturphilosophie, both of which have had profound effects on contemporary French, francophone, and anglophone philosophy and its engagements with antiracist, anticolonial, and climate struggle. I am also thinking about how all of this relates to the questions of nature, culture, and, of course, translation, the last of which has led me to Gottlob Frege’s philosophy of language. On the literature front, I am working my way through François Dominique’s recently translated Aseroë, a kind of surreal ode to Aseroe rubra, the anemone stinkhorn, which was first observed in Tasmania and South Africa, before appearing in France in the early twentieth century.