When: Wednesday, May 8, 2024, 2:00 PM - 3:00 PM
Where: Online

As part of the Underworlds series, this event focuses on hope as a site 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 event will reflect 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 the author of New Literary Histories (Manchester UP, 1997), Ethics and Representation (Edinburgh UP, 1999), Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed (Continuum 1997), Gilles Deleuze (Routledge 2002), Understanding Deleuze (Allen and Unwin 2002), Irony in the Work of Philosophy (Nebraska UP, 2002), Gender (Palgrave 2003), Irony (Routledge 2004), Milton, Evil and Literary History (Continuum 2008), Deleuze and the Meaning of Life (Continuum 2010), and William Blake and Digital Aesthetics (Continuum 2011). She co-authored Theory and the Disappearing Future with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller (Routledge 2011), and co-edited Deleuze and Feminist Theory with Ian Buchanan (Edinburgh University Press, 2000), Deleuze and History with Jeff Bell (Edinburgh 2008), Deleuze and Gender with Jami Weinstein (Edinburgh UP 2009) and Deleuze and Law (Palgrave) with Rosi Braidotti and Patrick Hanafin. She is the co-editor, with Tom Cohen, of a series of monographs for Open Humanities Press: Critical Climate Change. She has written articles on visual culture, poetry, literary theory, queer theory and contemporary culture. She recently completed two books on Extinction for Open Humanities Press: The Death of the Posthuman, and Sex After Life, and has co-authored (with Jason Maxwell) Agamben (Polity, 2015) and (with Tom Cohen and J.Hillis Miller) Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (Open Humanities Press, 2016). Her most recent book is Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (Nebraska UP, 2023). She is now completing a book on fragility (of the species, the archive and the earth).

David Chandler is Professor of International Relations, University of Westminster. He edits the open access journal Anthropocenes: Human, Inhuman, Posthuman. His recent books include The World as Abyss: The Caribbean and Critical Thought in the Anthropocene (2023, with Jonathan Pugh); Anthropocene Islands: Entangled Worlds (2021, with Jonathan Pugh); Becoming Indigenous: Governing Imaginaries in the Anthropocene (2019, with Julian Reid); and Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (2018).

**Please note this seminar is online and joining details will be sent the day before.

Event Resources

• W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Comet’, this short story is the final chapter of Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920).
• David Chandler, The Politics of the Unseen: Speculative, Pragmatic and Nihilist Hope in the Anthropocene
• Claire Colebrook, ‘Toxic Feminism: Hope and Hopelessness after Feminism’

The Series: Underworlds – Sites and Struggles of Global Dis/Ordering

Engagement with practices of global ordering is often guided towards specific locations and legacies: the sovereign state, the formal sources and standards of international law, the intricacies of global diplomacy, the historical juncture and its (anti-)heroes, the international palaces of hope in Geneva, New York, or The Hague. These explorations entail ideas of where power resides and where it is to be unmasked or undone – ideas implicitly grounded in modernist geographies, temporalities, and subjectivities. Starting from the limits of these familiar perspectives, this lecture and workshop series traces the multiple ways in which these sites, actors, and events are cabined, crossed, and cut apart by alternative material arteries, lineages, and languages of global dis/ordering.

The series takes as starting point that authority and order are not fixed properties of specific actors or institutions, but the result of ongoing material processes of ordering and world-making. As such, it traces unconventional forms and sites of global dis/ordering – from raw materials to projections of hope – as material, infrastructural, and discursive compositions that shape patterns of power. The encounter between old- and new materialist, Marxist and decolonial methodologies and modes of critique is one of the key objectives of this series. Its aim, however, is not only methodological: it aspires to inspire new ethical and political openings that attend to our inevitable complicity in taking part in these processes, and reveal new modes of resistance and refusal, of struggle and sociality. These interventions are not narrowly targeted at the old nemeses of critique – the state, the truth, the universal – but work from within both entrenched and emergent material sites and practices of dis/ordering: oceans, oil / coal, breath, debt, commons, frontier(s), waste, hope, wild / feral, vessels.

Find out about all events in the series.

The series is convened by Marie Petersmann and Dimitri Van Den Meerssche and co-organised by QMUL (the Institute for Humanities and Social Sciences and the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context) and the LSE Law School.