Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring Visiting Fellow, Matthew Wolf-Meyer

How do we reckon with the twin forces of knowing about impending disaster and the willingness to do nothing about its curtailment? This essay addresses this nexus of dispositions through the development of thanatocapitalism, the articulation of a homeostasis-seeking death drive alongside the urge to accumulate resources to secure oneself and one’s kin. In developing this concept, this essay draws on psychoanalytic elaborations of the death drive and the pleasure principle and puts them into dialogue with recent discussions of anthropogenic climate change. To elaborate thanatocapitalism and its components, the essay offers textual analysis of two recent series, Greg Rucka & Michael Lark’s graphic novel series Lazarus and the Sylvester Stallone-led movie series, The Expendables. What is often latent in contemporary American social norms reveals itself through the texts and their elaboration of complacency and expendability in relation to the figure of the family. For those who are expendable, the family offers a logic for producing a future through the hoarding of resources, but this fails to address the cause of anxiety, leading to its perpetuation.

Matthew Wolf-Meyer is an anthropologist and historian of science and medicine in the U.S. He is currently Professor and Undergraduate Program Director of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of many books, most recently American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within.

Precirculated materials will be available here about two weeks prior to the event.

Respondents include Tomas Matza, Director of Graduate Studies & Associate Professor, Anthropology and CE Mackenzie, Humanities Center Post Doc. This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available about two weeks prior and up to the event.