Elizabeth A. Povinelli > Quotes

“But inheritance doesn't come from the past. Inheritance is the place we are given in the present in a world structured to care for the existence of some and not of others.”
― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, The Inheritance

“In turning away from each other, entities withdraw care for each other. Thus the earth is not dying. But the earth may be turning away from certain forms of existence. In this way of thinking the Desert is not that in which life does not exist, A Desert is where a series of entities have withdrawn care for the kinds of entities humans are and this has made humans into another form of existence: bone, mummy, ash, soil.”
― Elizabeth Povinelli

“Desert does not refer in any literal way to the ecosystem that, for lack of water, is hostile to life. The Desert is the affect that motivates the search for other instances of life in the universe and technologies for seeding planets with life;”
― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

“contemporary states make live, let die, and kill”
― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

“The Animist is, in other words, all those who see an equivalence between all forms of life or who can see life where others would see the lack of life. The theoretical”
― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism

“In other words, the Anthropocene and its companion concept of climate change should not be seen merely as meteorological and geological events but as a set of political and conceptual disturbances that emerged in the 1960s—the radical environmental movement, Indigenous opposition to mining, the concept of Gaia and the whole earth—and these disturbances are now accelerating the problem of how late liberalism will govern difference and markets globally.”
― Elizabeth A. Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism