3rd Kyoto University-Inamori Foundation Joint Kyoto Prize Symposium
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July 10, 2016
[Arts]
Marina Gržinić
Research Advisor, The Institute of Philosophy of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts
Professor, Academy of Fine Arts Vienna
Title of Presentation
“Humans, life, and death: Between science, philosophy and art ”
Both my artistic endeavors and my theoretical work are about life and death, about what it means to be a human being, about refugees; today, all of these notions and conditions are seized with persistently violent relations of power, management, etc., in the world around us. But, I approach them through theory, history, science, politics, and arts. The situation of the refugees and the statuses of their lives and bodies in the camps in Europe, at the borders of the European Union, or as corpses recovered from the Mediterranean Sea, cannot be described solely as unwanted death, or destiny. These situations of massive suffering, death and misery are also connected to certain historical situations that both differ from and are in continuity with what we have here and now. In other words, what we are seeing is a process of persistent dehumanization.
The basic relationship in these processes is the relationship between death and life. This is not only connected with immanently philosophical questions such as “What is life?” and “What is death?” but is also, increasingly, concerned with the ways of governmentality of life and death, of strategies and techniques through which life and death are managed, run, controlled by the State, by governments and by their institutions.
We are seeing a paradoxical situation that in contemporary capitalist societies that are promoting a politics of making life better—a process that is known in theory by the word “biopolitics”— this is not really the case today. Biopolitics is a term coined in the mid-1970s by noted French theoretician Michel Foucault (who died in 1980) that posited a link between LIFE (Latin: bio) and politics. Since 2001, we have been witnessing another condition which is antithetical to the so appreciated biopolitics; neoliberal global capitalism is actually producing value (profit, control) through management not of life but, rather, of death.
This process is called “necropolitics,” a term coined in 2003 by the African theoretician Achille Mbembe, and it posits a link between DEATH (Latin: necro) and politics. Necropolitics defines the transformation of regulation of life within the extreme conditions produced by capital; these are conditions of death. In necropolitics, life is regulated through the perspective of death, thus transforming life into a mere existence below every life minimum. Necropolitics is connected to the concept of “necrocapitalism,” i.e., contemporary capitalism, which is organized around forms of capital accumulation that involve dispossession and the subjugation of life to the power of death. Did not the Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster in March 2011 result in the kind of “necro-scape” (death space) that is so central to necrocapitalism?
All of these processes are also connected with history and with the ways in which we inscribe these events in history, or how we recontextualize history through archives and objects. This questioning is central not only to my videofilms (made in collaboration with Aina Šmid since the 1980s) but also in the work of the Japanese artist Ishiuchi Miyako and that of the Polish artist Zofia Kulik.
Therefore, I will discuss the following topics:
I. How to further expose the relations between biopolitics and necropolitics.
II. The consequences of these relations for conceptualization of humanity,
human beings, and refugees.
III. And, finally, the status of visibility and the body in these relationships.
In order to implicate art centrally within my talk, I will use a particular figuration: the diagram.
