Summary:
Necropolitics is our Way of Life
This evening we will screen the stormy rhetoric of a slashing intellectual tornado named Rosi Braidotti. She is an academically highly influential social philosopher and critical theorist, who sometimes refers to herself as a posthumanist feminist, a nomadic subjectivity, and a war machine in total combat against the hypocrisy, cowardice, and incoherence of other celebrated thinkers alive today who have been duped or bought by some faction of the political elite.
In this oration from 2019, Rosi’s topic is necropolitics—the fascist agenda of massive depopulation. Although she does not get specific about such events and their planners, and mostly demonizes the white man, rather than the ego writ large, her recognition of the intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the artistic, political, and intellectual leaders today is sublimely on target.
Rosi studied with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, the two philosophic giants of our time, who stripped naked the capitalist system, its sweatshop victims and war industry cannon fodder, as well as its psychoanalytic henchmen and amoral mind control experts. With that powerful paradigm of rhizomatic thought as her overcoding perspective, she deploys her transversal logic of interconnectivity to reconfigure the zeitgeist in order to produce an energizing line of flight toward a redemptive future. We can only follow her if we have let go of all attachment to conventional concepts and become authentically nomadic subjects. Onward into the Rosy cyclone of symbolic transmutation—may the swirling signifiers take us to Emerald City!
Namaste
sm
Youtube Description:
Rosi Braidotti – Necropolitics and Ways of Dying
22 February 2019 – De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
What does it mean to die within the posthuman convergence, which positions us – humans and non-humans – between the Fourth Industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction? This contemporary convergence results in the shifting of boundaries between bio-power and necro-politics, life and death, the government of the living and the practices of dying. I will refer to a neo-materialist philosophy of non-human life as ‘Zoe’ and argue that both the concept of life and that of death need to be approached with more complexity and more attention to power differences.
Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her publications include: Patterns of Dissonance (1991), Metamorphoses (2002), Transpositions (2006), La philosophie, lá où on né l’attend pas (2009), Nomadic Subjects (1994; 2011), Nomadic Theory (2011), The Posthuman (2013). She recently co-edited Conflicting Humanities (2016) with Paul Gilroy and The Posthuman Glossary (2018) with Maria Hlavajova.
