Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

In Geontologies Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance, Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus. Geontologies examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages—anthropogenic climate change, plasticity, new materialism, antinormativity—often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river, a snakelike entity who spawns the fog, plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.

• Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Experimental Futures)
• Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins
• How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human
• The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (ANIMA: Critical Race Studies Otherwise)
• In the Wake: On Blackness and Being
• Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (a John Hope Franklin Center Book)
• Facing Gaia: Eight Lectures on the New Climatic Regime
• Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (The Lewis Henry Morgan Lectures)
• The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins