The Aesthetics of Necropolitics
- Submitting institution
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University of Dundee
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- 32977388
- Type
- B - Edited book
- DOI
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- Publisher
- Rowman & Littlefield International
- ISBN
- 9781786606853
- Open access status
- -
- Month of publication
- December
- Year of publication
- 2018
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- Yes
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- The Aesthetics of Necropolitics is a book edited by Natasha Lushetich as part of Rowman and Littlefield’s Experiments / On the Political Series (2018), a platform for cross-disciplinary thinking about politics and the political.
This book came into being as a result of Lushetich’s long-standing research into hegemony, micro-violence and their essential condition: invisibility. It suggests that every politics is an aesthetic, embedded in a regime of visibility. Lushetich’s approach was to formulate a hypothesis and commission contributions that address the hypothesis’s pertaining questions: necropolitics no longer designates overt, organised killing/devastation; it is the covert politics of the contemporary ‘apolitical age’ operating through a host of pre-perceptual processes. What are the temporalities, intensities and tipping points of these processes? What are the theoretical tools needed to analyse assignments of energy, inter-personal synchronisation, perlocutionary denigration and the micro-tactics of abandonment? How can we move beyond reconstructionist approaches, and articulate a future-oriented understanding of necropolitics as an emergent phenomenon?
Through a skilful orchestration of key thinkers’ analyses of cultural fetishes, scientific memes, posthuman actants and relational processes, Lushetich creates a space to think necropolitics otherwise. Part I ‘Sedimentations: Sex and Gender’ examines the conditions that create the acceptability of abuse and denigration while engaging critically with their normalisation. Part II, ‘Abstraction: Technological, Cultural and Scientific’ analyses emergent directions sprouting from the various abstracting mechanisms and the reorganisation of epistemic practices. Part III, ‘Tactics: Detourning the Limit, Overbidding, and Mourning’ formulates resistive tactics at the limit of the digital unconscious, indeterminacy and loss.
This book has influenced Critical Art Ensemble’s Aesthetics, Necropolitics and Environmenal Struggle (Auronomedia, 2018); led to the ‘Aesthetics of Death’ workshop at Nederlands Institute for Cultural Analysis (May 2019), and to invitations (to Lushetich 2019-present) to assess innovative writing on necropolitics by John Hopkins UP, MIT, and Taylor and Francis.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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