The Aesthetics of Necropolitics

Description

Every politics is an aesthetic. If necropolitics is the (accelerated) politics of what is usually referred to as the 'apolitical age', what are its manoeuvres, temporalities, intensities, textures, and tipping points? Bypassing revelatory and reconstructionist approaches - the tendency of which is to show that a particular site or practice is necropolitical by bringing its genealogy into evidence - this collection of essays by artist-philosophers and theorist curators articulates the pre-perceptual working of necropolitics through a focus on the senses, assignments of energy, attitudes, cognitive processes, and discursive frameworks. Drawing on different yet complementary methodologies (visual, performance, affect, and network analysis; historiography and ethnography), the contributors analyse cultural fetishes, taboos, sensorial and relational processes anchored in everyday practices, or cued by specific artworks. By mapping the necropolitics' affective cartography, they expand the concept beyond its teleological, anthropocentric, and reductive horizon of 'making and letting die' to include posthuman and posthumous actants, effectively arguing for the necropolitics' transformatory, political potential. Contents Acknowledgements Prologue • Natasha Lushetich PART I: SEDIMENTATIONS: RACE AND GENDER 1 What Is the Aesthetics of Necropolitics? • Marina Gržinić 2 Get Out: From Atlantic Slavery to Black Lives Matter • Sarah Juliet Lauro 3 Aesthetic Autonomy at the Border: Notes on Necro-Art • Verónica Tello PART II: ABSTRACTIONS: TECHNOLOGICAL, FINANCIAL, CULTURAL, SCIENTIFIC 4 Inside the Corpse of Abstraction (An Apotropaic Text) • Franco Berardi 5 Greenness: Sketching the Limits of a Normative Fetish • Jens Hauser 6 Desire, DNA, and Transgenetic Technology: Life after Necropolitics • Mi You PART III: TACTICS: DETOURNING THE LIMIT, OVERBIDDING, MOURNING 7 Necropolitics and the Dark Comedy of the Posthuman • Critical Art Ensemble 8 Dirty Your Media: Artists’ Experiments in Bio-Sovereignty • Tiffany Funk 9 Intimacy, Ignorance and Mourning in Iowa Hog Confinement • Malin Palani Epilogue: Archipelagoes of the Unseen • May Joseph Index About the Contributors