Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Picador, 2009, 1.
Robert Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre: And Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York: Basic Books, 2009).
See, for example, Joseph Masco, The Theater of Operations: National Security Affect from the Cold War to the War on Terror (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014).
Hannah Arendt, On the Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958).
See Jacques Derrida, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, trans. Geoffrey Benjamin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009); and Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Determinations of Self in Immune System Discourse,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (1989): 3–43.
Giorgia Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998).
See Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minneapolis Press, 2008); and Timothy Campbell, Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011).
See, for comparative purposes, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).
Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture, vol. 15, no. 1 (2003): 14. See also Rosi Braidotti, “Bio-Power and Necro-Politics: Reflections on an Ethics of Sustainability,” Springerin, vol. 2, no. 7 (2007).
David Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century 1919–1963 (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), especially 394–96.
Braidotti, “Bio-Power and Necro-Politics.”
I understand “concept” in the broad sense in which Deleuze and William James approached the work of conceptualization, namely to actualize a series of quasi-events into a threshold. See James, Pragmatism (New York: Dover, 1995); Deleuze and Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996); and Isabelle Stengers, “Gilles Deleuze’s Last Message” →.
Thus the concepts of geontology (Nonlife being) and geontopower (the power of and over Nonlife beings) are meant to indicate the current phase of thought and practice that define late liberalism—a phase that is simultaneously reconsolidating this distinction and witnessing its unraveling.
I will argue that a crucial part of what is forming this cramped space is a homology between natural life and critical life as techniques, vocabularies, and affective means for creating forms of existence—a scarred homology between the drama of natural life of birth, growth, and reproduction, and the death and drama of the critical life events conatus and affectus and finitude. is cramping is not happening in the abstract but through late liberal ways of governance of difference and markets.
Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (London: Picador, 2003), 35.
See Esposito, Bios, 57.
See Franco Berardi, Precarious Rhapsody: Semiocapitalism and the Pathologies of the Post-Alpha Generation (New York: Automedia, 2009). See also Andre de Macedo Duarte, “Hannah Arendt, Biopolitics and the Problem of Violence: From Animal Laborans to Homo Sacer,” in Hannah Arendt and the Uses of History: Imperialism, Nation, Race and Genocide, eds. Dan Stone and Richard King (London: Berghahn, 2007), 191–204; and Claire Blencowe, “Foucault’s and Arendt’s ‘Insider View’ of Biopolitics: A Critique of Agamben,” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 23, no. 5 (2010): 113–30.
Henry Giroux, Youth in a Suspect Society: Democracy or Disposability (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 83; Angela Davis, Abolition Democracy: Beyond Prisons, Torture, and Empire (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2005). See also Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007); and Masco, Theater of Operations.
Alain Badiou, The Adventure of French Philosophy (London: Verso, 2012), 87, 93, 97.
See, e.g., Scott Lauria Morgenson, “The Biopolitics of Settler Colonialism: Right Here, Right Now,” Settler Colonial Studies, vol. 1, no. 1 (2011): 52–76; and Sandro Mezzadra, Julian Reid, and Ranabir Samaddar, The Biopolitics of Development: Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present (New York: Springer, 2013).
This text is excerpted from the first chapter of Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism by Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Copyright Duke University Press, 2016.