Thanatocapitalism, Or, The Death Drive of Complacency and Accumulation in the Anthropocen: Conable Futures Lecture Series Presentation
Thanatocapitalism, Or, The Death Drive of Complacency and Accumulation in the Anthropocen
Speaker Info.: Matthew Wolf-Meyer is Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He is the author of The Slumbering Masses: Sleep, Medicine and Modern American Life (2012), Theory for the World to Come: Speculative Fiction and Apocalyptic Anthropology (2019), Unraveling: Remaking Personhood in a Neurodiverse Age (2020), and American Disgust: Racism, Microbial Medicine, and the Colony Within (2024). He is the editor of Proposals for a Caring Economy (2025), Mapping Medical Anthropology for the 21st Century (with Junko Kitanaka and Eugene Raikhel, 2025), and Naked Fieldnotes: A Rough Guide to Ethnographic Writing (with Denielle Elliott, 2023). His research focuses on the biology of everyday life, affective approaches to subjectivity, and posthuman bioethics.
Abstract: How do we reckon with the twin forces of knowing about impending disaster and the willingness to do nothing about its curtailment—or to even work to speed it along? 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 Sigmund Freud’s elaboration 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, aligned with the homeostasis of the death drive and the existential abandon of the pleasure principle. In conclusion, the essay considers how complacency thwarts the revolutionary demand of our current moment.
Event Snapshot
When and Where
Who
This is an RIT Only Event
Interpreter Requested?
Yes