Humanities on emsenn.net

Economies of Abandonment and Endurance

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the geontologies lesson.

Learning goal: describe how late liberal governance operates through abandonment and how endurance functions as a political practice.

Povinelli argues that late liberalism governs not primarily through direct oppression but through withdrawal. Economies of abandonment names the process by which the state assesses populations and places, classifies them as viable or unviable, and withdraws resources from those it deems unviable — while maintaining the procedural appearance of care.

Geontologies and Geontopower

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the overview.

Learning goal: explain how geontologies and geontopower operate through three figures and how they extend biopolitics.

Povinelli argues that late liberal governance manages the Life/Nonlife boundary through three figures:

The Desert: Nonlife threatening to overwhelm Life. This is the figure of ecological catastrophe, resource exhaustion, and extinction — the fear that the inert world will reclaim the living one. Climate discourse often operates through this figure.
The Animist: the figure that refuses the Life/Nonlife distinction altogether. Indigenous ontologies that recognize rivers, rocks, and ancestors as alive and agentive represent the Animist — not as a “belief” to be tolerated but as an ontological challenge to the framework that makes extractivism possible.
The Virus: the figure that crosses the boundary, neither fully alive nor fully inert. The Virus disrupts classification from within — it is the uncanny entity that the Life/Nonlife distinction cannot accommodate.

Geontopower is the form of power that manages these threats to the boundary. It operates not through dramatic acts of sovereignty but through the quiet maintenance of ontological categories — the classifications embedded in property law, environmental regulation, and scientific taxonomy.

Late Liberalism and Quasi-Events

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers who have completed the economies of abandonment lesson.

Learning goal: describe late liberalism as a political formation and explain why quasi-events are its characteristic political form.

Late liberalism is the phase of liberal governance that follows its own recognition of colonial, racial, and environmental violence. It does not abandon liberal commitments — it intensifies them as management techniques. Recognition, inclusion, and procedural reform become the mechanisms through which structural conditions are maintained while the appearance of self-correction is produced.

Povinelli Overview

Thu, 05 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Audience: readers familiar with Foucault’s biopolitics and basic critical theory.

Learning goal: describe Povinelli’s central question and how her framework extends Foucauldian analysis.

Povinelli asks: what happens when we look beneath biopolitics — beneath the governance of living populations — and examine the prior operation that determines what counts as living at all? Her answer is geontologies: the governance of the distinction between Life and Nonlife. This distinction is not natural but governed — maintained through law, science, property regimes, and environmental regulation — and it is the ontological infrastructure on which biopolitical governance depends.

Rigid Designation

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Kripke argues that some terms refer to the same object in every possible world where that object exists. Such terms are rigid designators.

Rigid designation separates a term’s reference from descriptive content that may vary across worlds.

Sense and Reference

Wed, 31 Dec 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Frege distinguishes between sense (mode of presentation) and reference (the thing referred to). Sense provides the cognitive route by which a term picks out its referent.

This distinction helps explain how two expressions can refer to the same object while conveying different information.