Episode description

Hope as Site and Struggle of Global Dis/Ordering

Moving beyond modernist modes of seeing and ordering the world – ways of governing often entangled with sentimental tropes of liberal hope – this episode reflects on hope as a set of sensibilities and practices of living ‘after the end of the world’. Hope is seen, in this sense, as a specific mode for dis/ordering the world and our place within it. This entails an attentiveness to the diverging onto-epistemologies that sustain varying expressions of hope, as well as the political subjectivities and forms of refusal and resistance these engender. What is the space of hope and hopelessness – or the ‘death of hope’ – in a context of mass extinction and its many foreclosed futurities? Which expressions of hope – speculative, pragmatic, nihilist – can be foregrounded against the ever-receding horizon of liberal hope?

The speakers:

Claire Colebrook is Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Philosophy, and Women, Gender & Sexuality Studies at Penn State University. Her most recent book, Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (Nebraska University Press, 2023), won the 2024 Hugh Silverman Book Prize in Philosophy and Literature. She completed three books on extinction: The Death of the Posthuman (2014), Sex After Life (2015), and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (2016, with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller). She co-authored Theory and the Disappearing Future (2011) with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller, and co-edited Deleuze and Law (2012) with Rosi Braidotti and Patrick Hanafin, Deleuze and Gender (2009) with Jami Weinstein, Deleuze and History with Jeff Bell (2008), and Deleuze and Feminist Theory (2000) with Ian Buchanan. Claire is currently completing a book on fragility (of the species, the archive, and the Earth).

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations, University of Westminster in London. He edits the open access journal Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. His recent books include Hope in the Anthropocene: Agency, Governance and Negation (2024, edited with Valerie Waldow and Pol Bargués);  Race in the Anthropocene: Coloniality, Disavowal and the Black Horizon (2024, authored with Farai Chipato); The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (2023, authored with Jonathan Pugh); Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (2021, authored with Jonathan Pugh); Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (2019, authored with Julian Reid); and Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (2018).

Event Resources:

·      bell hooks, ‘Postmodern Blackness’, in Yearning: Race, Gender, and Cultural Politics (1990)

·      Calvin Warren, ‘Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope’ (2015)

·      W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Comet’, in Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920)

·      Claire Colebrook, Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (2023)

·      Claire Colebrook, ‘Toxic Feminism: Hope and Hopelessness after Feminism’ (2010)

·      David Chandler, ‘The Politics of the Unseen: Speculative, Pragmatic and Nihilist Hope in the Anthropocene’ (2023)

·      David Chandler et al., ‘Hope after “the end of the world”: rethinking critique in the Anthropocene’ (2023)

·      David Chandler, ‘The Death of Hope? Affirmation in the Anthropocene’ (2019)