“Emotional Necropolitics from Antigone to bin Laden” is the title of the lecture by Professor Isabel Capeloa Gil, at the Second Biennial Culture Literacy conference in Warsaw, 10-12 May 2017, a meeting under the subject of “(E)motion” hosted by Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

Burials are unquestionably rituals where private passions and public zones of intimacy come together, where private memorialization scenes interact with the organization of public sentiment, where affect is effectively ushered into the promotion of socially organized mourning practices. The talk looks at the cultural impact of burial denial on the affective experience of those other bodies who interact with the dead, the logistics of affect that organize or are organized by the social structure of feeling and the ways in which they promote a pedagogic or resistant affectivity. By addressing two representative case studies, Sophocles’ Antigone and the bin Laden affair, I wish to probe the manifold ways in which burial affects effectively matter. At stake are issues such as the governamentalization of the organic, the modalization of mourning, the mode of affect production and its interaction with the public technologies of affect. The production of an emotional necropolitics around the non-existing burial has social-political implications, negotiates cultural memory practices and articulates non-intentional modes of experience in their dealings with dominant ‘machinic assemblages’ of power (Grossberg). Of particular interest in this regard is the articulation of affective investment with erasure and the questioning of the role of aesthetics in the grey zone where burial prohibition is placed.

“Emotional Necropolitics from Antigone to bin Laden”, Isabel Capeloa Gil

More information about the conference HERE