Conferences by Nicole Grimaldi
Papers by Nicole Grimaldi
Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power, 2024
This introduction to the peer reviewed special journal issue ("The Necropolitics of Environmental... more This introduction to the peer reviewed special journal issue ("The Necropolitics of Environmental Decline") asks whether we can extend long-standing necropolitical insights to better crystallize pressing environmental challenges. Connecting the prevalent view of the earth as a limitless bounty from which infinite capitalist accumulation can be extracted with necropolitics, which explores the “subjugation of life to the power of death” (Mbembe 2019: 91), this special issue unravels the political ecology of death and its attendant violences as they relate to environmental and social decline, as well as the vast sprawl of species implicated in this deterioration. It proposes that environmental necropolitics thinks beyond its habitual anthropocentrism to tarry with slower-moving forms of aggregative damage that cannot necessarily be voiced by the peripheralized (and often human-scarce) ecosystems that endure it. This approach compels us to interrogate the politics of death, or necropolitics, anew—in an expanded, multi-species, and multi-scalar fashion.
This interdisciplinary issue brings together environmental scholars from the Global North and South to consider ecological violence not only as a means through which to sequester and subdue human populations, but focuses on land and non-human life as itself a target of sovereign power, connected to the destructive and imperial logics of modern sovereignty and its aftermaths.
Colloques Fabula, Sep 11, 2023
Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power, 2022
This article presents an articulation of what I term "bare death"—a concept connected to but also... more This article presents an articulation of what I term "bare death"—a concept connected to but also meaningfully distinct from Agamben’s bare life [la nuda vita]—which works as a conceptual horizon to better account for death’s multiplicity, the way contemporary death has grown highly politicized and is visibly and invisibly instantiated in ways not equivalent or reducible to complete biological cessation. Proceeding from the insights of scholars like Achille Mbembe, Orlando Paterson, and black feminist scholars such as Saidiya Hartman and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, I ask how we might think death-in-life in a way that simultaneously attends to both the collective “death-worlds” in which we live, as well as the individual necro-subjects who regularly face the horror of death and so are persistently born in and out of violent relations with power.
Taking up an urgent contemporary tract, I ultimately consider how "bare death" and what I call "myriadic death" (the perpetual subjection to non-lethal deaths) become useful conceptual implements to consider the current COVID-19 pandemic—a “death-world” that I argue encodes diffuse threats of death that are not wholly subordinateable by human efforts to order that death. The current pandemic escapes the complete eclipse of sovereign power as disseminated by disparately destructive and contingently interacting biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, indifferently scrambling existing systems in a way that humans can only partially control.
Alienocene: Journal of the First Outernational, 2021
This brief study considers the political status and stakes of Jane Bennett's influential text "Vi... more This brief study considers the political status and stakes of Jane Bennett's influential text "Vibrant Matter" (2010). After flagging important criticisms leveled at new materialist philosophies like Bennett's emerging from subject-oriented discourses (queer theory, critical race theory, feminist analyses, bio/necropolitics, postcolonial studies, and so on), this paper takes a different tract by asking whether Bennett's position cashes out on the distinct ontological grounds it sets out from. It argues that there are questions concerning method, epistemological allegiances, and philosophical presumption at play in Bennett that compromise from the start the overarching thrust of her project.
This paper examines 1) how Bennett’s terminological shift from “objects” to “things” is not reflected at the level of her political ecology beyond an insistence on the latter over the former, and 2) how Bennett’s plan to “bracket the human” in favor of a vibrant materialist analysis is performed through the reintroduction of a universalized human subject and its organizing consciousness, which operates “ontologically” via pre-proposed epistemological affinities (2, viii). I suggest that Bennett’s account is not radical enough in leaving a place for alterity in the spheres of the non-human or material, and therefore that her account does not philosophically invest in the unknowable power of things that it celebrates. Throughout, I argue for why a radical alterity must be central to an ecological, vitalist, or object-oriented ontology, such that these discourses do not effectively reinstall the appropriative human ecologies, terminologies, and epistemologies they aim to displace.
Calls for Papers by Nicole Grimaldi
Coils of the Serpent: Journal for the Study of Contemporary Power, 2023
This special issue connects the view of the living earth as a limitless bounty from which infinit... more This special issue connects the view of the living earth as a limitless bounty from which infinite capitalist accumulation can be extracted with necropolitics (which explores the "subjugation of life to the power of death") to unravel the political ecology of death and its attendant violences as related to environmental decline (Mbembe 2019: 91). Given the weddedness of the extractive economy to varied forms of violence, necropolitical considerations that decode how death is directed, monetized, politicized, and normalized by actant powers is part and parcel of conducting environmental criticism in the era of anthropogenic climate change.
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Conferences by Nicole Grimaldi
Papers by Nicole Grimaldi
This interdisciplinary issue brings together environmental scholars from the Global North and South to consider ecological violence not only as a means through which to sequester and subdue human populations, but focuses on land and non-human life as itself a target of sovereign power, connected to the destructive and imperial logics of modern sovereignty and its aftermaths.
Taking up an urgent contemporary tract, I ultimately consider how "bare death" and what I call "myriadic death" (the perpetual subjection to non-lethal deaths) become useful conceptual implements to consider the current COVID-19 pandemic—a “death-world” that I argue encodes diffuse threats of death that are not wholly subordinateable by human efforts to order that death. The current pandemic escapes the complete eclipse of sovereign power as disseminated by disparately destructive and contingently interacting biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, indifferently scrambling existing systems in a way that humans can only partially control.
This paper examines 1) how Bennett’s terminological shift from “objects” to “things” is not reflected at the level of her political ecology beyond an insistence on the latter over the former, and 2) how Bennett’s plan to “bracket the human” in favor of a vibrant materialist analysis is performed through the reintroduction of a universalized human subject and its organizing consciousness, which operates “ontologically” via pre-proposed epistemological affinities (2, viii). I suggest that Bennett’s account is not radical enough in leaving a place for alterity in the spheres of the non-human or material, and therefore that her account does not philosophically invest in the unknowable power of things that it celebrates. Throughout, I argue for why a radical alterity must be central to an ecological, vitalist, or object-oriented ontology, such that these discourses do not effectively reinstall the appropriative human ecologies, terminologies, and epistemologies they aim to displace.
Calls for Papers by Nicole Grimaldi
This interdisciplinary issue brings together environmental scholars from the Global North and South to consider ecological violence not only as a means through which to sequester and subdue human populations, but focuses on land and non-human life as itself a target of sovereign power, connected to the destructive and imperial logics of modern sovereignty and its aftermaths.
Taking up an urgent contemporary tract, I ultimately consider how "bare death" and what I call "myriadic death" (the perpetual subjection to non-lethal deaths) become useful conceptual implements to consider the current COVID-19 pandemic—a “death-world” that I argue encodes diffuse threats of death that are not wholly subordinateable by human efforts to order that death. The current pandemic escapes the complete eclipse of sovereign power as disseminated by disparately destructive and contingently interacting biopolitical and necropolitical regimes, indifferently scrambling existing systems in a way that humans can only partially control.
This paper examines 1) how Bennett’s terminological shift from “objects” to “things” is not reflected at the level of her political ecology beyond an insistence on the latter over the former, and 2) how Bennett’s plan to “bracket the human” in favor of a vibrant materialist analysis is performed through the reintroduction of a universalized human subject and its organizing consciousness, which operates “ontologically” via pre-proposed epistemological affinities (2, viii). I suggest that Bennett’s account is not radical enough in leaving a place for alterity in the spheres of the non-human or material, and therefore that her account does not philosophically invest in the unknowable power of things that it celebrates. Throughout, I argue for why a radical alterity must be central to an ecological, vitalist, or object-oriented ontology, such that these discourses do not effectively reinstall the appropriative human ecologies, terminologies, and epistemologies they aim to displace.