Geontologies

<div>In <i>Geontologies</i> Elizabeth A. Povinelli continues her project of mapping the current conditions of late liberalism by offering a bold retheorization of power. Finding Foucauldian biopolitics unable to adequately reveal contemporary mechanisms of power and governance Povinelli describes a mode of power she calls <i>geontopower</i> which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert the Animist and the Virus. <i>Geontologies</i> examines this formation of power from the perspective of Indigenous Australian maneuvers against the settler state. And it probes how our contemporary critical languages-anthropogenic climate change plasticity new materialism antinormativity-often unwittingly transform their struggles against geontopower into a deeper entwinement within it. A woman who became a river a snakelike entity who spawns the fog plesiosaurus fossils and vast networks of rock weirs: in asking how these different forms of existence refuse incorporation into the vocabularies of Western theory Povinelli provides a revelatory new way to understand a form of power long self-evident in certain regimes of settler late liberalism but now becoming visible much further beyond.</div>