Rosi Braidotti - Necropolitics and Ways of Dying

SONIC ACTS FESTIVAL 2019 - HEREAFTER
Rosi Braidotti - Necropolitics and Ways of Dying
22 February 2019 - De Brakke Grond, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
What does it mean to die within the posthuman convergence, which positions us - humans and non-humans - between the Fourth Industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction? This contemporary convergence results in the shifting of boundaries between bio-power and necro-politics, life and death, the government of the living and the practices of dying. I will refer to a neo-materialist philosophy of non-human life as 'Zoe' and argue that both the concept of life and that of death need to be approached with more complexity and more attention to power differences.
Rosi Braidotti is Distinguished University Professor and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University. Her publications include: Patterns of Dissonance (1991), Metamorphoses (2002), Transpositions (2006), La philosophie, lá où on né l’attend pas (2009), Nomadic Subjects (1994; 2011), Nomadic Theory (2011), The Posthuman (2013). She recently co-edited Conflicting Humanities (2016) with Paul Gilroy and The Posthuman Glossary (2018) with Maria Hlavajova.

[@CElliottSmith]

That was breathtaking ... I need to listen to all of her lectures now.

[@Nylon-xj9ml]

The camera is agreeing with everything she says

[@alchemicalembrace]

Phenomenal lecture. Thank you Rosi for the illumination.

[@costantinocarugno1035]

full transcript of the lecture: pastebin.com/TTRj9uhD

[@danilasad]

Oh my God! This woman is amazing!

[@fabianafalduto4821]

Fantastica!

[@vauchomarx6733]

Rosi Braidotti never fails to amaze me!

[@jaimevargasalvarado579]

Jaja que señora más adorable, la amo, tiene mucha gracia al hablar. Y luego es una genio. Gracias por subir!!

[@YoussefEIdrissi]

Thank you for this synthetic analysis!

[@davidmacaart953]

Absolutely brilliant!

[@la.tuttologa]

Incredible presentation. I would have liked to hear if anyone from the public took offense (especially Anthropocene-ists, if any was present...) Thank you Prof. Braidotti - you gave me food for thoughts for th erest of the week :)

[@JX-jk9qn]

Fucking brilliant, currently writing a paper on Baroque art in metamodernism, little to do with this but it did so much more, I think my current discourse was precisely the lament of the Anthropocene, but this just made me question it completely. I'll continue to watch all her lectures now...

[@bubblefemme1937]

thanks for posting!

[@ThePragart]

Fearless. Refreshing. Thank you!

[@hyacinth1320]

That was awesome!

[@sickletrap]

excellent lecture. though maddeningly the close-up camera doesn't stop shaking the entire time, which is unfair to the content

[@tglwickske]

Wow, she is fantastic!

[@monikawinkelmann4823]

I so love everything about her..

[@EidolonSpecus]

In the end, a proposed fundamental change in society still boils down to either convincing people or coercing people; and unfortunately the world does not have the luxury of time and resources to convince all; nor should we have the lack of empathy for those suffering while society takes the scenic route to change. Theory needs to not just "speak truth to power", but also encourage coercive tools of concrete force against power; otherwise it might not be any helpul in the time we have.

[@indonesiamenggugat8795]

Great woman, brilliant idea. Warn hug from indonesia

[@laurenklein9643]

Bradotti daily gestures of transformation which are the ways in which we live

[@josedemelo2146]

Rosi Braidotti is bright. Although Zizek supported trump out of cynicism. His analysis of Trump's "America first" is good.

[@kimcarsons7036]

Zizek never supported Trump, but he was against Clnton and saw her as pure stasis - continuing the staid same-same Liberal/Capital normativity. Its the macho causal mass event synopsis - quasi causes buried under the rubric of the Event - Clinton was bad and Trump has proven to be the abomination accelerating the U.S inevitable decline

[@diprasarkhel1490]

Mindblowing! Is there a transcript of this lecture?

[@costantinocarugno1035]

I transcribed it, enjoy! pastebin.com/TTRj9uhD

[@alexandralimagoncalvespint5847]

@@costantinocarugno1035 Thank you!

[@colonelcyma]

I would also like to know if there is a transcript, please.

[@loro.h9612]

me too!

[@Jikan21]

Braidotti speaks of the importance of being grounded in the material and accuses the marxist leninist left of impotence. Yet the last 30 to 40 years - a period where the foucauldian, post modern or post structuralist academia or however you what to describe them as, have been on the ascent and have come to be seen as "the left". They have been front and centre. It is this group that has hegemonised the anticapitalist struggle, and conducted that struggle on its own terms, predominantly on a fragmented cultural basis that has in reality help Capital facilitated the notion that "there is no alternative". The outcome? They may have decolonized the university syllabus but they have left us an era of rampant neoliberal capitalist triumph and now disaster, characterised by much liberal hubris but greater economic impoverishment and insecurity (aside from China and India). Not content with overseeing 40 years of political paralysis and a dismantling of a left that was both universal and grounded in the material, Braidotti (or more precisely her political ilk) now views the barren wasteland this necropolitics has left us and further chides a miniscule and feeble marxist leninist left, as if they are to blame. "for doing absolutely nothing", while at same time being too white, too gendered, too colonial, not transactional enough and too focused on systematically opposing Capitalism as opposed to just not buying an iphone or using google. Strip away the philosophical babble and what we have is a re-hashed and rebranded progressive liberalism. Nothing more. Necropolitics and ways of dying indeed.

[@loro.h9612]

interesting critique. Have u elaborate it somewhere further?

[@loro.h9612]

her conclusion left me a bit lost. So what is it what she proposes? who has the agency to change the current system?

[@FlyOppy]

What is she study? Is she a philosopher? (Sorry muy English)

[@graysonjd5624]

Yes, she is a philosopher, theoretician, writer, and professor.

[@adamfilmmaker]

Pain and exhilaration. Let’s do it.

[@apanhadordearrepios]

She's wonderful!

[@sarab.3010]

superlativa.

[@ROBERTORRRR1]

Concordo. Io l’ho scoperta per caso su KZbin perchè cercavo dei video su Deleuze. Assurdo che in Italia sia sconosciuta rispetto ad altre grandi menti come Renzi, Di Maio, Salvini, Luca Laurenti, Tina Cipollari e Fabio Fazio

[@mariapazconcha]

[@ezzerdamoose]

Critical theory existed before ww1?

[@_ata_3]

At the end the "we" she talks about are still the people from the rich countries. So what are they going to do? Stop using Iphones?

[@LimeyRedneck]

😶

[@reginaldmolehurst459]

"Pope Francis, extraordinary creature" ha ha ha

[@boymiyagi]

I understand, hehehe

[@engagedfig7144]

Still so Eurocentric lol - as if corpses were not ubiquitous before WWII?

[@pienaarrossouw955]

All I hear is a lament.

[@fahim-ev8qq]

All her critiques of other philosophers from latour to zizek seemed very weak and even delusional. It’s kind of just ignoring all the problems they are responding to and then critiquing some already receding sense of “white male patriarchy” which has already given out to the new multiplicity and open expression of identity. Butler already articulated this position as radical, and even in the 80’s this was already the disposition of the ruling ideology itself. The Marxist Leninist reversion then is pathetic and ineffectual, but responding to the even more pathetic and ineffectual post human/liquid identity turn that braidotti is positing here.

[@HeavenBull91]

you look like zizek

[@elfboi523]

The Industrial Age will be over within one to three centuries from now. One or two decades from now, the world economy will become entirely unable to grow any further, go into stagnation for a while, and then switch from the anabolic to the catabolic mode, generating wealth for a rapidly shrinking number of people while destroying everything else. Eventually, the people will rise up against capitalism as it grows weaker, but nothing will bring back a growing economy. The reason for this is the simple fact that the decoupling of economic growth from energy and resource use doesn't work, it is just a fairytale for people who think crapitalism is the best thing ever, and the capitalist industrial mode of production has exceeded and overshot the ecological limits of the biosphere and wasted enormous amounts of non-renewable energy and raw materials on pointless overproduction and overconsumption. Meanwhile, the Industrial Age has caused so much cumulative damage to the biosphere and the other planetary systems like the atmosphere (greenhouse gases are just one of our immense and monstrous problems) that we are at the beginning of the Sixth Extinction event. I don't think human extinction will happen any time soon, but I'd estimate our chances of making it through the coming 10 000 years at not much better than 50%, and that is only if the additional cumulative ecological damage in the remaining time of the dying Industrial Age is not too massive. If it keeps going the way it does now, about 50-70% of all species alive today will vanish, and humans, being highly intelligent omnivores, are quite likely to continue to live on and evolve. However, if we push it to the point where it becomes the kind of extinction event which kills 80-95% of all species, large terrestrial vertebrates just vanish, and we are large terrestrial vertebrates, unfortunately. If we were the size of a mouse, we'd still have a good chance. Dreams of spreading humanity across the Solar System in the next centuries and across the Galaxy in the next millennia will just pop like soap bubbles. I think our technological abilities as a species in terms of technolgical complexity and industrial capacity will peak within this century and then go into decline. But it will all happen rather slowly, with short and sudden catastrophes making things a lot worse every now and then, followed by periods where things improve for a while, never reaching the level before the last catastrophe again though. And just when people think everything will eventually go back to the way things were, the next catastrophe comes. Famines, pamdemics, wars, extreme weather events like droughts, floodings, heatwaves, breaks in the supply chains of all kinds of industries. The human population on this planet will shrink, life expectancy will go down, humans will adapt. And those who have never lost their old ways of living as a part of the living planet Earth will look at the stupid Whites and say, "We told you so, we have been telling you for hundreds of years." And that's OK. Civilisations come and go, and ours is getting old and sick, but it has been suffering from cancer of the economy (aka capitalism) for centuries. If we somehow manage to succeed with an eco-socialist world revolution not too far into the future and put capitalism out of its misery, we might still be able to build a new, different civilisation in the coming centuries.

[@ReiP95]

Verbal descriptional wordism XD. A wery accademical approch: put simple plain and vague concepts behind a wall of A LOT of big words. Femminism ad educadional system gotta understand that all social things, from law to language to etic can only do so much and are SUBORDINATE to reality of things. For exsample female emancipation is NOT due to social changes but is due to automation of phisical labour and advaces in medicine. A cave woman CANNOT pretend to be a cave man even if the 2 agree no matter your arguiments your words or laws xd. A modern woman can pretend to be a man even if the 2 dont agree. (Viceversa is also true). So not eweriting is abaut asking and convincig (that also a very stereotipical way of see things where adult males/mother provide and woman/child demand) Sorry for my bad english i am here mostly for practice ;)

[@la.tuttologa]

so, your English is admittedly terrible, yet you come here to comment, under the lecture of a world-class scholar to make grand claims? Imagine how much your opinion over "Femminism", the educational system and the history of gender dynamics must be worth. 100% you are a man

[@ReiP95]

@@la.tuttologa hey there, thx for your feedback ;). The fact that you understood and replied to my comment mean that (amittedly) my english cant be THAT terrible XD. But I would like to poit out that nore accademic titles nore one's ability in a foreing leanguage should mesure the validity of the concept he propose. Se così fosse dovrei usare solo italiano e francese :) Logic and concepts themself should. I actually am a man... you got that 100% right, but you probably mistanken on the fact that you think I am somehow anti-feminist and stuff... Well I am not, I was just making consideration on theory and accademy (self referring accademy) vs reality and method. Feminism is also too often more teorical than realistic and that make it less effective than it could be. Hey capisco che quello che dico può essere difficile da accettare ma sono cose che capisci nel momento in cui ti stacchi dal mondo accademico e inizi a reggerti con le tue gambe nel mondo ("""reale""") del lavoro. (certo anche il mondo accademico è reale ma è anche più "materno" chiuso, rasssicurante e protetto) Any way I am here only practicing languages not to change people's opinion and worldviews... that would be far beyond the scope of my intents XD Have a nice one :)

[@la.tuttologa]

@@ReiP95 I said terrible, not incomprehensible. I won't comment on the delusions and assumptions of a rando on the internet, just a suggestion: learning (incluiding languages) either comes from a place of humility or it results in failure or, worse, mediocrity.

[@ReiP95]

​@@la.tuttologa actually... agreed on all the line... but it seems that there is plenty of worck to do on the humility side over there... don't you think? XD (tuttavia tu t' atteggi tuttologa XD)

[@la.tuttologa]

@@ReiP95 I mean, I was not the one that came to mansplain the history of gender and feminism under a video that obviously I haven't watched since the topic is so-called anthropocene and apocalyptic narratives. (As an exercise, please Lord in my next life give me the confidence of an average white man) 👋

[@stockfeeder666]

gibberish

[@toxels]

Imagine her saying the same things about black community. She would be cancelled by "the woke".

[@heartache5742]

what