Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

Elizabeth Povinelli
Role: Author
Winner of the 2017 Lionel Trilling Book Award

In Geontologies, Winner of the 2017 Lionel Trilling Book Award, 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 geontopower, which operates through the regulation of the distinction between Life and Nonlife and the figures of the Desert, the Animist, and the Virus.