GEOPOWER ARTICLE SERIES (CO-WRITTEN WITH INGRID DIRAN)

In a series of articles introducing the concept of "geopower," we argue that, pressed by current ecological crises, Foucault's notion of biopower ought to be supplemented by a study of governmentality at the geological level. Geopower, we propose, subsumes the relation of organic and inorganic matter into the explicit calculus of power. It supplements the politics of man as living being with the question of man as a collective actor upon the nonliving. Thus a critique of biopolitical modernity necessitates a critique of governmentality at the geological scale, especially insofar as the latter makes the metabolism between life and nonlife (expressed in concepts like “earth,” “ecology,” and “climate”) internal to political practice. Approaching the age of biopower as also that of geopower, we argue that the “subject of interest,” or homo economicus, first enshrined in eighteenth-century liberalism and reinvented under twentieth-century neoliberalism, must today be supplemented with the notion of a geosubject, or homo ecologicus. 

"The Birth of Geopower," diacritics, forthcoming, Summer 2020.

"The Poetics of Geopower: Climate Change and the Politics of Representation," Climate Realism: The Aesthetics of Weather, Climate, and Atmosphere, eds. Lynn Badia, Marija Cetinić, and Jeff Diamanti (forthcoming, Routledge, 2020).