Earth Beings at the Commodity Frontier: Federico Luisetti at University of Amsterdam

Date: Feb 25, 13.00-15.00
Location: University of Amsterdam (Doelenzaal, University Library) + Live stream
Registration:maithri.maithri@student.uva.nl or j.g.c.debloois@uva.nl/j.diamanti@uva.nl
Credits: 6 ECTS (for seminar)
Organizers: Joost de Bloois and Jeff Diamanti

Part of Political Ecologies seminar 2021-2022 (Links to an external site.)

In Earth Beings: Ecologies of Practice across Andean Worlds (Duke University Press 2015), Marisol de la Cadena translates the Quechua word tirakuna, the plural of earth, as “earth-beings.” Earth-beings are for Quechua speakers other-than-human subjects that frighten and preannounce, protect and punish, deceive and heal, sharing emotions, feelings and expressions with the people (runakuna). Caught in the commodity frontiers of the contemporary regime of capitalist accumulation, also socio-ecological entities such as melting glaciers and mutating viruses can be perceived as eccentric subjectivities. They are earth-beings that resist enclosure by the global environment and announce the alliance between counter-hegemonic politics of nature.

Biography

Federico Luisetti is an Italian philosopher, he is professor of Italian Culture and Society at the University of St Gallen (Switzerland). From 2005 to 2017 he taught Italian Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill,  where he has been the chair of the Department ofRomance Studies from 2014 to 2017. He is the author of several books and numerous essays on philosophy, literature, visual art, the Avant-gardes, and political philosophy. He has also worked on decolonial thought, anthropology and the Anthropocene.

Federico Luisetti’s current project“Unruly Topologies” is part of a transdisciplinary collaborative research project at the University of St. Gallen on “earth-beings”. The aim is to encounter these socio-natural multi-layered domains, promote cross-disciplinary conversations, unsettle categories, and envision ecopolitical initiatives not aligned with neoliberal ecologies. Link: https://unrulytopologies.ch/ (Links to an external site.)

His publications include:
The Anomie of the Earth: Philosophy, Politics, and Autonomy in Europe and the Americas, Duke UP, 2015; Una vita. Pensiero selvaggio e filosofia dell’intensità, Mimesis, 2011; Estetica dell’immanenza. Saggi sulle parole, le immagini e le macchine, Arance, 2008.

For registration and readings please contact maithri.maithri@student.uva.nl.