Tuesday March 13th – 18h–20h
Reid Hall – Columbia Global Center in Paris - Grande salle
“The Collapse of Political Concepts”
The second lecture begins with four axioms that emerge when politics enters the interstitial spacing among the whole earth, gaia, and autonomous worlds. The four axioms are: the extimacy of existence; the collapse of western distinctions and hierarchies of existence, most significantly that between Life and Nonlife, the biological and geological; the distribution of the effects of power and the power to affect a given terrain of existence; and the multiplicity and collapse of forms of the event. How does the straining of quasi-spaces and fuzzy things and of the efforts and forces of embankment of existence demand an accounting from western political concepts for their refusal to register their historical and current effects on the toxic earth?
Reid Hall – Columbia Global Center in Paris
4 Rue de Chevreuse, 75006 Paris
Elizabeth A. Povinelli is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University where she has also been the Director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender and the Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Law and Culture. She received her Ph.D. in Anthropology from Yale University in 1991. She is the author of numerous books and essays as well as a former editor of the academic journal Public Culture.
