Povinelli, E.A. (2016) Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

In Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism, Elizabeth A. Povinelli advances a decisive critique of contemporary political ontology by arguing that late liberal governance no longer operates exclusively through the biopolitical administration of life and death, but increasingly through the management of the distinction between Life and Nonlife itself. Building upon and simultaneously displacing Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower, Povinelli introduces the concept of geontopower, a modality of governance concerned not merely with regulating biological populations, but with stabilising ontological hierarchies that separate the animate from the inert, vitality from geology, and existence from extinction. Central to her intervention is the claim that Western metaphysics has always functioned as a concealed biontology, privileging life as the normative measure of being while subordinating rocks, deserts, fossils, atmospheres, and minerals to the category of passive matter. The contemporary crises associated with the Anthropocene, climate change, extractive capitalism, and settler colonialism expose the instability of this distinction and compel the emergence of new political figures through which governance is articulated. Povinelli identifies three such diagnostic figures: the Desert, symbolising anxieties surrounding extinction and barren futurity; the Animist, associated with Indigenous and vitalist ontologies that refuse the separation of life from matter; and the Virus, which destabilises all fixed distinctions through contagious, adaptive, and insurgent forms of existence. Drawing extensively from her long collaboration with Indigenous communities in Australia’s Northern Territory, Povinelli demonstrates how settler colonial governance has historically depended upon denying agency to Nonlife while simultaneously rendering Indigenous cosmologies intelligible only as irrational belief. The enduring significance of Geontologies resides in its demonstration that the contemporary political crisis is not solely ecological or economic, but ontological: a crisis concerning what counts as existence, agency, and worldhood within the collapsing architectures of late liberal reason.