Necropower is an extension of Achille Mbembe and Sayak Valencia’s notion of “necropolitics.” It encompasses biopolitics and involves the management of remaindered lives trapped in loops of illness, slavery, debt, forced displacement, disappearance, and death. Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2016); Sayak Valencia, Gore Capitalism (Semiotext(e), 2019).
Arturo Escobar, Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World (Princeton University Press, 2012).
Saloni Dattani et al., “Causes of Death,” Our World in Data, 2023 →.
Raj Patel and Rupa Marya, Inflammed: Deep Medicine and the Anatomy of Injustice (Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2021).
Alyshia Gálvez, Eating NAFTA: Trade, Food Policies and the Destruction of Mexico (University of California Press, 2018), 18.
Gálvez, Eating NAFTA, 18.
Jo Ann Callis, “Unknown Pleasures,” interview by Colleen Kelsey, Interview, June 26, 2014 →.
Adrienne Mattei, “Thread Carefully: Your Gym Clothes Could be Leaching Toxic Chemicals,” The Guardian, November 2, 2023 →.
David Oks, “The Modern Diet Is a Biosecurity Threat,” Palladium Magazine, June 4, 2022 →.
“‘Inflamed’: Dr. Rupa Marya & Raj Patel on Deep Medicine & How Capitalism Primes Us for Sickness,” Democracy Now, August 2, 2021 →.
“‘Inflamed,’” Democracy Now.
The technosphere comprises machines, humans, and the social systems we use to interact with technology: factories, schools, banks, the internet. It also includes domestic animals, agricultural soil, infrastructure, engineered rivers, and dams. It is toxic because it has generated extraordinary amounts of waste in a globally interconnected system that is estimated to weigh thirty trillion tons—i.e., the weight of the materials we use or have discarded on the planet. See →.
“More Evidence That Autism Is Linked to Gut Bacteria,” The Economist, May 30, 2019.
Maria Puig de la Bellacasa, “Making Time for Soil: Technoscientific Futurity and the Pace of Care,” Social Studies of Science 45, no. 5 (2015).
Puig de la Bellacasa, “Making Time for Soil.”
“Video: Sunaura Taylor on ‘Disabled Ecologies: Living with Impaired Landscapes,’” Othering & Belonging Institute, UC Berkeley, March 5, 2019 →.
Mark Fisher, Postcapitalist Desire: The Final Lectures, ed. Matt Colquhoun (Repeater, 2021).
Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (Indiana University Press, 1993), 111.
Pierre Klossoski, Living Currency, ed. Vernon W. Cisney, Nicolae Morar, and Daniel W. Smith (Bloomsbury, 2017), 176 →.
See my Toxic Loves, Impossible Futures: Feminist Living as Resistance (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022).
Félix Guattari, Las tres ecologías (Pre-Textos, 1996), 3.
Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Hyper-Semiotization and De-Sexualization of Desire: on Félix Guattari,” e-flux journal, no. 133 (February 2023) →.
Baruch Spinoza, The Ethics and On the Improvement of Understanding, ed. James Gutmann (Hafner Publishing Company, 1954), 206.
“Phantasm” for Klossowski comes from the Greek “phantasia” (appearance, imagination). Klossowski uses it to refer to “an obsessional image” produced within us by the forces of our impulsive life. Lyotard elaborates on this term, defining it as “something that grips the wild turbulence of the libido, something that it invents as an incandescent object.” Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 72, quoted by Daniel W. Smith, “Introduction: Pierre Klossowski: From Theatrical Theology to Counter-Utopia,” in Klossowski, Living Currency, 7.
Klossowski, Living Currency, 60.
Amaia Pérez Orozco, Subversión Feminista de la Economía: Sobre el conflicto capital-vida (Traficantes de sueños, 2004), 106.
This passage from Varos’s unpublished diaries was posted on her “official” Facebook page in 2013 →.
Émile Zola, chap. 3 in The Ladies’ Paradise, available online →.
Nina Power, One-Dimensional Woman (Zero Books, 2009), 7.
Michel Houellebecq, Les particules élémentaires (J’ai lu, 2010), 28, my translation.
Daniela Barragán, “Los casos de Debanhi y Ari exhiben falta de profesionalización de fiscalías en México,” Sin embargo, January 3, 2023 →.
See Janine Louludi et al., “Femicides: The War Against Women in Europe,” Voxeurop English, March 8, 2023 →; María Antonia Sánchez-Vallejo, “Feminicidios en Europa,” El País, May 17, 2019 →; and Kimberly A. Hamlin, “Femicide Is Up. American History Says That’s Not Surprising,” Washington Post, February 3, 2023.
Emanuela Borzacchiello, “Una carta de amor en medio de la violencia,” in Ya no somos las mismas y aquí sigue la guerra, ed. Daniela Rea Gómez (Grijalbo, 2020), 115.
See Silvia Federici’s key book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation (Autonomedia, 2004), about femicide in the Middle Ages, which was linked to the emergence of private property and the colonization of the “New World.”
She has described her performances as being grounded in the principle of “carrying her own body, her own essence into (colonized) spaces.” Quoted in Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, “I Am the Artist Amongst My People,” canadianart, July 11, 2018 →.
See →.
Simpson, “I Am the Artist Amongst My People.”
Simpson, “I Am the Artist Amongst My People.”
See →.
Paul B. Preciado, Dysphoria Mundi (Anagrama, 2022), 45.
Dipesh Chakrabarty, “World-Making, ‘Mass’ Poverty, and the Problem of Scale,” e-flux journal, no. 114 (December 2020) →.
Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Remaindered Life (Duke University Press, 2022), 17.
Tadiar, Remaindered Life, 17.
Ventura’s “Indian house” is a parody of Mexican institutions that have been created since the 1940s to cater to the needs of Indigenous populations (as imagined by the state).
Achille Mbembe, Critique of Black Reason (Duke University Press, 2017).
Stefanie R. Fishel, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).
This text is adapted from the 35th Norma U. Lifton Annual Lecture in Art History that I delivered at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago on October 2, 2023. I hadn’t been to Chicago in years and I was surprised to see posters for the Save (Nalox) One Life campaign across the city. This research will lead to a book. It began in the context of a two-part exhibition cocurated with Christine Shaw at the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga, September–November 2023 and January–March 2024.