Cosmos/Bios/Polis Panel at the AAA meetings

Cosmos/Bios/Polis
Organizer: Eben Kirksey

Thursday, November 17, 2011: 10:15-12:00
Panel at the American Anthropological Association
Montreal Convention Center 511B (Palais des congrès de Montréal)


10:15 Biopolitical Thought and Neo-Vitalism
Cary Wolfe (Rice University)

10:30 From Rhizome to Banyan
Eben Kirksey (CUNY Graduate Center)

10:45 Fabricating Relations In Peru’s Digital Innovation Networks
Anita Say Chan (Illinois--Urbana Champaign)

11:00 Towards a Subalternist Cosmopolitics
Matthew C Watson (North Carolina State University)

11:15 Living Logics Beyond the Human: Thoughts from an Amazonian Forest
Eduardo Kohn (McGill)

11:30 Matei Candea (University of Durham)

11:45 Dorion Sagan (Independent Scholar)

This panel will explore the challenges of building common worlds—with former enemies who might become allies, with technological networks, with other species—while remaining open to surprises from the unknown. If the promise of a perpetual peace from Kantian citizens of the cosmos no longer rings true, then what are the prospects of Isabelle Stengers' cosmopolitical proposal? Cosmopolitics presences “the question of possible nonhierarchical modes of coexistence among the ensemble of inventions of non-equivalence, among the diverging values and obligations through which the entangled existences that compose it are affirmed.” Giving resonance to the unknown cosmos beyond our fragile constructions, this panel will reckon with how common cosmopolitical worlds are created when many players work together, tooth and nail. Thinking within the constraints imposed by the unknown, we will bring cosmos together with bios, the biographical life that concerns the polis. Appreciating the foolishness of human exceptionalism, this panel will follow Donna Haraway to explore contact zones where the outcome, where who is in the world, is at stake. Working to get past the thanatological drift in contemporary biopolitical thought, speakers will probe the attractions and limitations of the search for an affirmative biopolitics. Being polite, or political in common worlds, where multiple species meet, may require discomforting intra-actions with newly recognized subaltern subjects.