World, in many of the major philosophical traditions of the last century, presumes a totality of things, a form of being that exists through the sorting of subjects from objects, objects from things and things from unseen forces. And while “world,” and “life” seem to offer vectors for utopian thinking (“another world is possible”), these totalizing concepts have also been predicated upon anti-blackness and from the elevation of the human above all other forms of life. Rather than holding out for new worlds, revitalized notions of life, or remade utopian dreams, this lecture begins with the premise that world-making as we currently conceive of it can only proceed by way of unworlding, world unmaking in which concepts such as the human, subject, object, animal, vegetative are tipped out of their hierarchical formations and disordered in meaning and in their relations to one another. The talk follows a series of aesthetic experiments from the 1970’s to the present that revel in collapse, destruction and ruination. With: Jack Halberstam is Director of the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality; Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University.
New York City, NY; NYC