Geopower: Materialisms before Biopolitics Available to Purchase

Chapter 7 discusses the geologic context of the emergence of biopolitics through Elizabeth Grosz’s concept of “geopower,” Elizabeth Povinelli’s articulation of social (re)production through “geontopower,” and the Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter’s critique of the raciality of biopolitics. Disrupting the dominant tenets of the colonial matrix of materiality (as geos) that secured imaginaries of Life (bios) through racial violence and inhuman extraction, the chapter presents the theory of geologic life to speak to the antagonisms between inhuman (geos) and Life (partial bios) as it is historically and conceptually arranged through the spatial division of race. Geologic Life proposes a theory of strata-fication and geologic-fication as a confrontation with the spatial arrangements of the social divisions of materiality; an arrangement of power that is both exceeded and complicated by geologic elements; and an organization of inhuman power that aggregates bodies across scales.