Geontologies, as theorized by Elizabeth Povinelli in Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism (2016), names the governance of the distinction between Life and Nonlife — the ontological division that undergirds late liberal power. Where biopolitics governs through the management of living populations, geontopower governs through the maintenance of the boundary between what is alive and what is inert, what counts as a living being with interests and what counts as mere matter available for use.
Povinelli argues that the Life/Nonlife distinction is the foundational ontological commitment of late liberalism — more fundamental than the divisions between human and animal, civilized and savage, or normal and pathological that structure earlier forms of governance. Late liberalism governs by sorting everything into Life (which can suffer, which has interests, which demands ethical consideration) and Nonlife (which cannot suffer, which has no interests, which is available for extraction). The classification of a river, a forest, or a geological formation as Nonlife — as resource rather than relation — is a geontological act that enables extractivism.
This framework connects directly to Indigenous ontologies that do not draw the Life/Nonlife distinction where Western metaphysics draws it. When Vine Deloria Jr. insists on place-based knowledge, or when Indigenous legal traditions recognize the personhood of rivers and mountains, they challenge not merely Western property law but the geontological framework that makes property law possible. The geontological critique reveals that relational ontology — the position that relations are ontologically prior to the entities they relate — is not merely a philosophical alternative but a political challenge to the form of power that governs through the Life/Nonlife distinction.
Related terms
- Elizabeth Povinelli — who develops the concept
- Biopolitics — the Foucauldian framework geontologies extends
- Quasi-event — Povinelli’s concept of managed disturbance within the geontological order
- Extractivism — the practice the Life/Nonlife distinction enables
- Animism — the relational stance that challenges the Life/Nonlife boundary
- Relational ontology — the philosophical alternative to geontological governance
- Vine Deloria Jr. — place-based knowledge as a challenge to geontologies