The Anthropocene and geographies of geopower

Bibliographic Data

ID20050971
AuthorsKathryn Yusoff (corresponding author)
Year2018
Publication date2018-07-27
Open AccessNo
TypeCHAPTER
VenueHandbook on the Geographies of Power (SOURCE_BOOK)
PublisherEdward Elgar Publishing (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.4337/9781785365645.00020
OpenAlexW2904959185
ISBN9781785365645
LanguageEN
Citations received12

The Anthropocene identifies geologic force as a new regime of power within and beyond social formations. This chapter investigates how geologic relations of power subtend the social field. Through a reading of Elizabeth Grosz’s ‘Geopower’ and Elizabeth Povinelli’s ‘Geontopower’, I suggest ‘Geologic Life’ for understanding how biopolitical relations are deformed and excited in a larger field of geologic force that gives rise to the possibility of life forms. It is argued that geologic forces introduce contradictory spatial relations into the mix, problematizing the foundation of long-held spatial propositions about social relations and the organization of power. Geologic Life is offered as an analytic that substantiates the inhuman in political terms as constitutive of biopower, but in excess of it. Rather, it is nonlife and its modes of inhuman subjectification that elaborate on the possibilities and forms of geopolitical relations in ways that are not reducible to those geopolitics, and so must be considered in a fuller relation to the earth

Anthropocene · Biopower · Environmental ethics · Epistemology · Geopolitics · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Law · Philosophy

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