Talk

The power of Life scrutinized part 2

In this ongoing lecture series, Jan Verwoert looks at motifs historically coined by the arts to show that they matter, existentially, cosmically, politically… 

In the previous talks, the power to express and transform life itself emerged as a key motif, as a power that many artists sought to grasp and shape, enjoy and embody, through different forms of modernism. The dominant principle against which maverick attempts at expressing and transforming life are formulated, however, is the new systemic power to brutally penetrate every aspect of existence, and industrialize life and death. To throw this historical background into relief, this document will take the form of a philosophical interlude and seek to illustrate how the systemic power to industrialize life and death has been described in terms of biopolitics and necropolitics, by writers like Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Saidiya Hartman and Sayak Valencia.