Necropolitics Covered

Covering abstracts and excerpts of academic pieces on necropolitics from all over the world.

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S1 · E80
August 5 · 1 min
“A Microscopic Insurgent”: Militarization, Health, and Critical Geographies of Violence
Loyd, J. M. (2009) ‘“A Microscopic Insurgent”: Militarization, Health, and Critical Geographies of Violence’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 99(5), pp. 863–873. doi: 10.1080/00045600903253478. Abstract: Wars do not maim with bullets and bombs alone but cause economic and environmental destruction that leave enduring bodily harms. Preparations for war-making also cause negative health effects, from toxic waste to the redirection of social wealth from investment in social needs. The commonsense juxtaposition of exceptional war to normal peace makes it difficult to recognize processes of militarization, the violent continuities between war and peace, and geographic ties binding spaces of relative health with spaces of harms. This article advances a critical geographic analysis of violence to analyze the ways in which militarization and structural violence reinforce one another. A 2007 cholera epidemic in Iraq was militarized through material and discursive geographies of cholera and violence. Humanitarian claims to cure cholera rested on this dualistic geopolitical imagination, distorting the agents of violence and erasing the grave effects of peacetime and wartime structural violence. By situating cholera within a broader historical and geographic context that shows links between “wartime” and “peacetime” places also suffering premature deaths from the destruction or abandonment of necessary infrastructures, a critical human geography can contribute to struggles for peace and justice. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E79
August 3 · 1 min
Coloniality and perspectivism in psychology: from damnation to ecosophical care relations
Souza Prado, G. A. (2020) ‘Coloniality and perspectivism in psychology: from damnation to ecosophical care relations’, International Review of Psychiatry, 32(4), pp. 320–326. doi: 10.1080/09540261.2020.1765747. Abstract: Inspired by Amerindian peoples’ philosophy, this article aims to problematise the modern philosophical anthropology that underlies psychology as a social practice, and to use the Amerindian perspectivist philosophy proposed by Viveiros de Castro as a critique of Western values. Thus, we approach some of coloniality’s epistemological implications in the institution of subject-object and nature-culture separations that grounds psychology. On the one hand, there is a totalising unification, which operates alongside a transcendental subject that subjugates its object. Beginning from nature’s homogeneity, the differentiation and hierarchy of each being depends on its representations or its soul, expressed as a people’s culture or as an individual psychology. This spiritual-representational aspect is the very foundation of the colonialism and racism of damnation, and their purpose in perpetuating the miserable ways of life of those considered to be scum. On the other hand, in Amerindian cosmogony, humanity is a pronominal mode, a non-exclusive perspectivist position of mankind, built in each context of relations. It is based on this idea that we posit other bases and a new agenda for psychology as a social practice which can enable us to broaden our ways of living towards ecosophical care, as a way of resistance to coloniality. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E78
August 1 · 1 min
The Biopoliticization of Humanitarianism: From Saving Bare Life to Securing the Biohuman in Post-Interventionary Societies
Reid, J. (2010) ‘The Biopoliticization of Humanitarianism: From Saving Bare Life to Securing the Biohuman in Post-Interventionary Societies’, Journal of Intervention and Statebuilding, 4(4), pp. 391–411. doi: 10.1080/17502971003700985. Abstract: This article develops an analysis of a partial, albeit I argue very powerful, strand of contemporary humanitarianism. In analyzing an interdisciplinary literature combining theoretical and practice-based perspectives on humanitarianism, I trace the development of a shift in interest from classical humanitarian concerns for the saving of bare life of humanity to the securing of the biohuman. In the development of humanitarianism post-1989, concepts and theories of adaptation, deriving heavily from innovations in the life sciences, are being applied to determine why some societies are supposedly more prone to humanitarian disasters than others in the form of ‘adaptive failures’: how such societies can avert disasters from occurring in the forms of ‘adaptive responses’, as well as how they can recover from them when they do occur by learning ‘adaptive behaviors’. Theories of adaptation and other concepts relating to the evolutionary powers of the biohuman such as ‘information exchange’ and ‘resilience’ are also being applied to conceive the frameworks in which responses to disasters can best be organized. Within the domains and practices of humanitarianism a biologized conception of the human conceived in terms of evolutionary capacities and properties, and the idea of being able to deliver humanity from its various forms of insecurity through its promotion, has taken hold. The humanitarian emergency, as this article details, is today conceived as the primary locale for the transformation of ungovernable peoples into governable populations. Emergencies represent sites of global danger and disorder vested with renewed political significance because they occur where life is said not only to have failed to perform its adaptive functions in securing itself, but where the very failure of life to adapt is construed as a threat to the security of world order. Thus the failure of maladapted populations is said to threaten not only themselves, but the biopolitical foundations of global governance since their suffering produces economic dislocation as well potentially of political violence. Thus they become subject to the strategies of intervention through which global governance seeks to make populations more fit for liberal rule. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E77
July 30 · 1 min
Racism, white supremacy and Roberto Esposito’s biopolitics through the lens of Black affect studies: Implications for an affirmative educational biopolitics
Zembylas, M. (2024) ‘Racism, white supremacy and Roberto Esposito’s biopolitics through the lens of Black affect studies: Implications for an affirmative educational biopolitics’, Educational Philosophy and Theory, 56(4), pp. 358–370. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2023.2229552. Abstract: The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito’s biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito’s framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment—is essential for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E76
July 28 · 1 min
The Reckoning of Possibles: Asylum Seekers, Justice and the Indigenisation of the Levinasian Third
Pugliese, J. (2011) ‘The Reckoning of Possibles: Asylum Seekers, Justice and the Indigenisation of the Levinasian Third’, Australian Feminist Law Journal, 34(1), pp. 23–42. doi: 10.1080/13200968.2011.10854451. Abstract: In this essay, I focus on the death of an asylum seeker, Josefa Rauluni, at Villawood immigration detention centre, in order to address a series of critical questions concerning ethics, justice and non-negotiable responsibility. I contextualise this constellation of questions within a Levinasian framework of ethics as a first philosophy in order to suggest what needs to be done. I conclude the essay by transposing Levinas’ concept of the third, as the arbiter of justice that transcends the limitations of the self-other relation, to an Australian context preoccupied with the topics of refugees, hospitality, justice, ongoing colonial relations of power and Aboriginal sovereignty This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E75
July 26 · 1 min
Grief Activism and Solidarity with Migrants Along the EU’s Eastern Migratory Route
Kekstaite, J. and Vukotić, V. (2025) ‘Grief Activism and Solidarity with Migrants Along the EU’s Eastern Migratory Route’, Geopolitics, pp. 1–25. doi: 10.1080/14650045.2025.2562293. Abstract: The EU’s external border restricts the movement of unwanted individuals and subjects them to necropolitical governance. Such governance is sustained by epistemic and affective borders, determining whose lives and deaths are deemed meaningful. Maurice Stierl has proposed the concept of ‘grief activism’ as a form of transformative politics that can subvert such borders. In this paper, we further develop this framework in the specific context of Eastern EUrope, using Lithuania as a case in point. This research explores how the Lithuanian grassroots initiative Sienos Grupė (English: Border Group) engages with the lives and deaths of illegalised migrants and their relatives, invisibilised by the border regime. While research on grief activism has tended to focus on commemorations of migrant deaths, we argue that its scope should be expanded to engage with the entire ‘live-death continuum’ – including the ongoing erosion of conditions for a liveable life in an unequal world. This broader framing provides tools to situate violence against migrants historically and relationally, while seeking to foster alternative directions of affect and political engagement. Drawing on engaged ethnographic fieldwork (2022–2024), semi-structured interviews with members of Sienos Grupė, and an analysis of the group’s public communication, we examine how activists seek recognition for those excluded from dominant regimes of grievability. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E74
July 24 · 1 min
Producing Elite Indigenous Masculinities
Hokowhitu, B. (2012) ‘Producing Elite Indigenous Masculinities’, Settler Colonial Studies, 2(2), pp. 23–48. doi: 10.1080/2201473X.2012.10648840. Excerpt: This article asserts that elite indigenous tribal masculinity is a particular type of masculinity that has developed since colonisation, in part at least, mimicking dominant forms of invader/settler masculinity. While most commentators have outlined that the dominant forms of invader/settler masculinities were held to be inversely related to the mind of indigenous men, the productive nature of power imposed a different set of rules that challenged this dialectic so that aspects of invader/settler masculinity were necessarily imbibed into burgeoning post-contact indigenous masculine leaders. This masculinity has since been allocated disciplinary and authoritative power through notions of tradition and authenticity. Further, indigenous masculinity was often asserted as reflecting the collective will for liberation; in reality, elite indigenous masculinities have habitually served to exclude alternative forms of indigenous masculinity and indigenous women from leadership roles. Via a post-hegemonic analysis of indigenous masculinity, this article appraises the Janus-faced and ambivalent figure of the indigenous heterosexual patriarch; both oppressor and oppressed. The dialectics between hetero-patriarchal masculinity and feminism, and colonised/coloniser become complicated, as indigenous masculinities are both imbibed with privilege and denied it; both performing colonial hetero-patriarchy and resistant to it. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E73
July 22 · 1 min
Ya Falastin: Networks of Resistance Against the Economy of Genocide
Kočović De Santo, M. (2026) ‘Ya Falastin: Networks of Resistance Against the Economy of Genocide’, Capitalism Nature Socialism, 37(1), pp. 108–132. doi: 10.1080/10455752.2025.2607978. Abstract: This work offers a radical ecological reading of Palestine as a more-than-human subject. What pedagogies emerge when we listen to olive roots, children's voices, poets addressing land as sentient witness? Using the Tree of Life and Death as a methodological metaphor, I trace how pluriversal relational pedagogies form counter-metabolism against capitalism's parasitic logic. The Tree framework structures analysis: roots hold pre-monotheistic ontologies where earth and body remain inseparable; branches express steadfastness, care, and reciprocity; mycorrhizal networks sustain life while sharing soil with Armillaria – capitalism feeding on death. I map three necro-economic patterns: epistemicide (killing the word “genocide”), economy of genocide ($225 billion through arms/tech/finance), and ecocide (one million olive trees as temporal annihilation). Palestinian voices persist as epistemologies. When poets address “Ya Falastin,” land becomes a listening subject – trees witness, roots remember, soil responds – these are not testimonies but theory. Counter-hegemonic processes that allow the forest of life to survive depend on unlearning growth ideology and cultivating global solidarities rooted in collective refusal. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E72
July 20 · 1 min
Diaspora, Digital Media, and Death Counts: Eritreans and the Politics of Memorialisation
Bernal, V. (2013) ‘Diaspora, Digital Media, and Death Counts: Eritreans and the Politics of Memorialisation’, African Studies, 72(2), pp. 246–264. doi: 10.1080/00020184.2013.812875. Abstract: This article analyses a war memorial established on a website by Eritreans in diaspora as an example of how diasporas are transforming the ways national politics are conducted and understood. Establishing a war memorial is normally the prerogative and responsibility of the state. In performing this task the Eritrean diaspora makes visible the failure of the state to make public important national information and to hold itself accountable to the Eritrean people. The establishment of the memorial online by the diaspora, furthermore, works to de-centre the state, symbolically at least, as the embodiment of the nation and creates an opening for alternative visions of the nation and state-citizen relations. The Internet is making possible innovative forms of diaspora political engagement and activism that challenge conventional relations of citizenship and sovereignty. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E71
July 18 · 2 min
Where Do Animals Go When They Disappear? The animal spectre as a more-than-human epistemology in performance
Masini, T. (2024) ‘Where Do Animals Go When They Disappear? The animal spectre as a more-than-human epistemology in performance’, Performance Research, 29(7), pp. 100–109. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2024.2569240. Abstract: This essay addresses the disappearance of non-domesticated animals as both material beings and spectral figures within contemporary aesthetic, ecological and political imaginaries. Through a posthumanist lens, I argue that animals rarely ‘leave' the scene of human representation; rather, they return as phantasmatic presences whose absence signals a form of haunting. Drawing on Critical Animal Studies and performance epistemologies, I interpret the vanishing animal not as a mere lack, but as a generative fault line that disrupts human-centered understandings of presence, visibility and embodiment. In this sense, disappearance becomes a performative event in which nonhuman life continues to act through ghostly remainders and traces. The text situates this spectrality within the broader context of animal exploitation, environmental crisis and the anthropocentric imaginary, suggesting that the disappearance of animals coincides with their transformation into symbols or commodities. Yet these spectral animals also carry the potential to destabilize anthropocentric epistemologies by interrupting the smooth functioning of representation. The essay explores this disruption as a form of 'bug': a generative error that exposes the fragility of human mastery, and renders visible the limits of anthropocentric systems of meaning-making. By treating the spectral animal as an active participant in performance and cultural production, I propose a rethinking of disappearance not as final erasure, but as a mode of critical thinking. Ultimately, the essay argues that the spectral animal forces us to inhabit a temporal and ethical space in which disappearance and survival are no longer opposites but intertwined processes. The haunting returns of animal life invite a different kind of perception: one that is attuned to the possibility that something continues to speak and resonate even when it is no longer materially present. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E70
July 16 · 1 min
Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities
Lo, M. S. (2015) ‘Senegalese immigrant families’ ‘regroupement’ in France and the im/possibility of reconstituting family across multiple temporalities and spatialities’, Ethnic and Racial Studies, 38(15), pp. 2672–2687. doi: 10.1080/01419870.2015.1042894. Abstract: This paper interrogates the structural conditions, macropolitics and governmentality of family ‘regroupement’ in France in an era of shifting immigration policies in Europe and the imaginative possibilities that Senegalese immigrants exercise to maintain family and kinship ties with those left behind. It argues that while the need to maintain ties from diasporic locations is mediated by policies, material and emotive transnational practices, the materiality of displacement as well as the state's politics of immigration render more elusive possibilities of maintaining family in situ. What tensions and creative strategies emerge? How is ‘home’, the primordial site of family structure, reimagined and reconstituted? Taking into account state's politics and immigrants’ entrapment within multiple spheres of power and their active agency as determinants, this paper uncovers how displacement gives rise to multiple ruptures while simultaneously motivating a search for active agency to reconstruct and reimagine kinship, family and conjugality across multiple temporalities and spatialities. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E69
July 14 · 2 min
Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish
Paynter, E. (2025) ‘Black Mediterranean hauntings: border violence, burial, and anti-racist care work in Strange Fish’, Cultural Studies, 39(6), pp. 887–911. doi: 10.1080/09502386.2025.2538523. Abstract: This article explores forms of haunting that shape lives and livelihoods in the Mediterranean, recognising the sea as a site of movement, labour, and death. The Mediterranean is now widely understood as a kind of deathscape, as people on the move from former European colonies risk and lose their lives en route to Europe. Yet the production of migrant death – its materiality and simultaneous spectacle and invisibility – is not simply a consequence of harsh border policies. Here, I trace how migrant death in the Mediterranean is a crucial part of the racialized mechanisms that maintain a precarious labour force within Europe and transform livelihoods across Mediterranean shores. Engaging the Black Mediterranean as a site of haunting, I centre the relationship between haunting and care in a reading of the 2018 documentary Strange Fish (dir. Giulia Bertoluzzi), which describes how the production of death in the Central Mediterranean has transformed the labour of fishermen in Zarzis, Tunisia, who have been rescuing migrants and burying the dead since the early 2000s. Writing as an ‘implicated subject’ (Rothberg) who has spent extended time in Italy with people who have survived the sea crossing, I read the film both in terms of the unfolding history it documents, as well as through the visual and sonic elements it employs to illustrate these entangled forms of care and labour. In solidarity with people on the move, I argue that, as necropolitical border regimes threaten to upend notions of the refugee and related issues of rights and justice, it is crucial to understand and engage death at sea not strictly as a migration issue, but as a quotidian reality entangled in questions of labour and social justice on all shores of the Mediterranean. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E68
July 12 · 1 min
The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain's temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)
Abstract: This article analyses how hunger and guillotines, revolution and food, butchers and protests are connected in the Spanish collective imaginary during the current temporality of crisis (2008–2013), with the aim of establishing its cultural grammar. By examining different representations of the crisis by means of gastronomy – including examples of graffiti and slogans, cooking TV shows and horror movies – I will describe the existing tensions between practices of resistance and collective imaginations of violent political change. I will propose that the social circulation of food and food images is a decisive contributing factor in the symbolic landscape of the crisis, shaping divided political economies according to the role of the citizens, the state or the corporations in control and the management of the collective access to nutritional goods. Pig slaughter versus the supermarket of the gods: two political universes offer their opposing poetic poles. On one side we will find (i) the subaltern logic of the popular distribution of proteins acquired, thanks to a founding act of communal violence (the slaughter of the pig). On the other side we recognize (ii) disciplinary, hegemonic logics based on the masking of biopolitical links between nutrition, economy and society (the supermarket of gods). Citation: Méndez, G. L. (2014) ‘The cannibal wave: the cultural logic of Spain’s temporality of crisis (revolution, biopolitics, hunger and memory)’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 15(1–2), pp. 241–271. doi: 10.1080/14636204.2014.935013. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E67
July 10 · 1 min
The exigencies of the necropolitical: rehearsing livability through feminist performative storytelling
Sargsyan, N. (2022) ‘The exigencies of the necropolitical: rehearsing livability through feminist performative storytelling’, Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, 32(3), pp. 289–305. doi: 10.1080/0740770X.2022.2360786. Abstract: In this audio-textual performance woven as an Armenian fairy tale from ethnographic research, poetry, and songs, I employ the performative as part of a feminist aesthetic and pedagogical praxis. Through this feminist performative storytelling I affectively study and mourn the immobilizing effects of the densely interconnected processes of death-making whether it be through colonization, ecological extraction, militarization and war, or sex-selective abortions. Drawing on transnational feminist knowledge, I suture life-sustaining moments of respite and healing, however transient and quick, into this protracted study and mourning to practice living in the wake of ongoing catastrophes and crises. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E66
July 8 · 1 min
Zoetropes: Turning Fetuses into Humans at the National Memorial for the Unborn
Rowland, A. L. (2017) ‘Zoetropes: Turning Fetuses into Humans at the National Memorial for the Unborn’, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 47(1), pp. 26–48. doi: 10.1080/02773945.2016.1238105. Abstract: This essay advances a theory of zoetropes, or rhetorical figures that modulate the social status of living entities. Using fetal memorialization at the National Memorial for the Unborn as a case study, I identify the humanizing zoetropes of naming (antonomasia), en/voicing (apostrophe), and en/facing (prosopopeia). While the malleability of the fetal entity lends itself toward zoetropes, arguably all subjects are made zoetropologically. To be tropologically animated, or given life, means immediate absorption into a biopolitical field of regulation. Humanhood is among the most consequential of biopolitical thresholds through which an entity can be zoetroped. This essay contributes to rhetorical theory by locating the tropological means by which entities gain the public status of humanhood. The biopolitical discourses that work to include entities into humanhood are the obverse side of the coin from the necropolitical discourses that work to exclude entities from humanhood. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E65
July 6 · 1 min
Silence as erasure: incorporating party-and-play (PnP) and hookup app education into queered health curriculum
Scaramuzzo, P. (2026) ‘Silence as erasure: incorporating party-and-play (PnP) and hookup app education into queered health curriculum’, International Journal of LGBTQ+ Youth Studies, pp. 1–18. doi: 10.1080/29968992.2026.2657861. Abstract: The opioid and stimulant overdose crisis has increasingly intersected with queer sexual cultures, particularly through party-and-play (PnP) practices embedded within hookup, dating, and companionship apps (HUDCAs). While public health research has documented elevated risks associated with app-mediated, substance-involved sex, health education in secondary schooling has largely failed to address these realities. This conceptual article examines how curricular silence around HUDCAs and PnP functions as structural erasure, rendering queer adolescent youth – especially BIPOC queer youth – hyper-visible in risk surveillance yet invisible in curricular care. Drawing on Foucauldian analyses of power and silence, queer theory (QT), and critical race theory (CRT), the article argues that omission operates as a biopolitical mechanism that displaces sexual learning into unstructured digital spaces without guidance or harm-reduction support. Through historical parallels with HIV/AIDS education, the analysis demonstrates that educational discomfort has often preceded survivability-oriented intervention. The article concludes by proposing a queered, harm-reduction-centered framework for secondary school health education that integrates HUDCA literacy, PnP-informed harm reduction, and attention to racialized inequities, reframing education as anticipatory preparation rather than abandonment. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E64
July 3 · 1 min
Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement
Agathangelou, A. M. and Killian, K. D. (2006) ‘Epistemologies of Peace: Poetics, Globalization, and the Social Justice Movement’, Globalizations, 3(4), pp. 459–483. doi: 10.1080/14747730601022453. Abstract: Poetics, as an epistemological approach, articulates alternative imaginaries to those proffered by the neoliberal world order. With a long history of drawing upon various sites to further its aims (e.g. the academy, the international studies association, political parties, the state), the neoliberal world order has used its epistemologies to constitute a hegemony emphasizing the state as the primary actor of political life. Feminists and scholars in postcolonial IR, black studies, and ethnic studies have challenged this idea, arguing that there are differential epistemological economies in world politics. Larger questions at stake in these different sites/cites include self and collective knowledge of marginal peoples and the envisioning of alternative, oppositional histories of decolonization, struggle and contestation. Traditional disciplinary boundaries become sites/cites of contestation about the forging and making of alternatives as academics, grassroots organizers, and activists, through poetics, work together to creatively engage questions of economies, power, history, and subject-formations. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E63
July 2 · 1 min
Political Theology, Radical Democracy, and Virtue Ethics; or Alasdair MacIntyre and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Consciousness
Bretherton, L. (2021) ‘Political Theology, Radical Democracy, and Virtue Ethics; or Alasdair MacIntyre and the Paradoxes of a Revolutionary Consciousness’, Political Theology, 22(7), pp. 627–649. doi: 10.1080/1462317X.2020.1867406. Abstract: This essay analyses three concerns that arise at the intersection of ethics and politics through situating the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, particularly his conception of the relationship between Christianity and Marxism, in the context of debates in the British New Left and drawing parallels and connections between these debates and the work of C. L. R. James and Black Marxism. The first concern is the modern suspension of ethics in the name of politics. The second is the relationship between structural and personal transformation. The third is how forms of social life exceed, but are always under pressure from, existing forms of political economy and how this concern shapes articulations of political agency outside of statist and property-based understandings of citizenship. I contend that addressing these concerns is a background condition for the emergence of a revolutionary consciousness. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E62
July 1 · 2 min
Only Cyborgs and Cockroaches
Stojnić, A. (2017) ‘Only Cyborgs and Cockroaches’, Performance Research, 22(2), pp. 123–128. doi: 10.1080/13528165.2017.1315991. Abstract: In 2013 a cyborg-cockroach which was advertised as “RoboRoach, the world's first commercially available cyborg” appeared at the market. RoboRoach is a live cockroach whose moves can be remotely controlled via a smartphone app, thanks to the electronic device that has been surgically applied to its body. It was promoted as a “science kit” for children. Two years later cyborg cockroach gained a completely new role. Teams of researchers, engineers and entomologists form renowned universities have been testing their possibilities to access areas that are difficult for humans to reach such as earthquake sites or nuclear disaster zones. From the smart toy, cyborg-cockroaches advanced to the rescue squads that could, for instance, be navigated to record and find human life in disaster zones. However, we can easily imagine, I will argue here, that the next (if not already present) iteration of the cyborg-cockroach will be for military purposes abused in the war machine, as well as another symptom of the mode of governmentality that Gilles Deleuze has defined as “the society of control”. Relating to the question of “turning animal” the above mentioned example offers the opportunity to investigate the unstable relations and problematic distinctions between humans, animals and machines, through the concept of cyborg. Here, I would like to introduce a decolonial perspective as well as the topic of necropolitics, into post-humanist debate, in order to question who has the position (the privilege?) to proclaim “the human” as obsolete and what is the politics that is revealed in such a theoretical and practical move. Who can turn the cockroach into remotely controlled cyborg and what does this “turning into” mean for humans and non humans alike? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com
S1 · E61
June 30 · 1 min
Could the State Benefit from Aristophanic Comic Relief? Philosophical Perspectives on Carnal Politics in Postcolonial Uganda
K’Akumu, O. A. (2025) ‘Could the State Benefit from Aristophanic Comic Relief? Philosophical Perspectives on Carnal Politics in Postcolonial Uganda’, Journal of Homosexuality, 72(12), pp. 2441–2465. doi: 10.1080/00918369.2024.2431269. Abstract: This article is a critical analysis of the anti-homosexuality legislation in Uganda, a state in East Africa. It primarily uses Plato’s political philosophy as expressed in Aristophanes’ speech in the Symposium. Using the Aristophanic viewpoint, the study derived six analytical concepts that structure its findings, discussion and conclusion. These are: the origin and fall of man; all sexual orientations are valid whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; sexual cravings are natural phenomena whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; law encumbers natural feelings of love and should not be used to prohibit any aspect of sexual orientation; homosexual (man-man) relations generate greater political benefits than the rest; scientific knowledge can be used to justify Aristophanes mythological explanations of sexual orientation. These concepts have been transformed into analytical questions in the study regarding the morality, naturality and legality of homosexuality in Uganda. This has led to several conclusions: All sexual orientations are valid whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; Sexual cravings are natural phenomena whether lesbian, homosexual or heterosexual; and Law encumbers natural feelings of love and should not be used to prohibit any aspect of sexual orientation. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit necropolitics.substack.com

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