| Juuso Tervo | Death is all things we see awake | | Presented at Skills of Economy sessions, Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, February 20 2016 | 1 Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep Juuso Tervo, Postdoctoral Researcher, Department of Art, Aalto University Presented in Kiasma at Skills of Economy Sessions, February 20, 2016 Abstract: This talk offers a collection of vignettes that position the relation between life and death as a central but unsolvable question for theorization in art and politics. Indeed, what to think of death in times when, yet again, the end of the world as we know it seems to be near? Introduction In his seminal essay “Necropolitics,” philosopher and political scientist Achille Mbembe writes, contemporary experiences of human destruction suggest that it is possible to develop a reading of politics, sovereignty, and the subject different from the one we inherited from the philosophical discourse of modernity. Instead of considering reason as the truth of the subject, we can look to other foundational categories that are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death. (Mbembe, 2003, p. 14) In “Necropolitics,” Mbembe famously extends Michel Foucault’s thesis according to which modern sovereignty finds its basis in biopower, that is, that human life as such has become the primary domain for exercising productive power (“making live and letting die” [biopower] contra “letting live and making die” [authoritarian power in Roman law]). Mbembe argues that in addition to examining the various ways that biopower makes life, we should also pay attention how it manifests itself as a systematic destruction of human beings (as necropower) (for Mbembe, the history of colonies is the primary example of necropower as sovereignty. (“under conditions of necropower [death-worlds, as Mbembe calls them], the lines between resistance and suicide, sacrifice and redemption, martyrdom and freedom are blurred” [Mbembe, 2003, p. 40]) The reason why I wanted to start with this quote is that I remain puzzled by Mbembe’s claim that life and death are somehow “less abstract and more tactile” categories for political thought than reason. Here, I’m not suggesting that life and death are mere abstractions: indeed, bodies, living or dead, are here, in this world (of course, reason is here too, but differently…). Rather, I see that in order to make use of life and death as “foundational categories” for politics today (a claim that I do agree with), I see that we should also approach their limits; those moments when life and death don’t form a clear binary pair that would let us define the concreteness that makes them less abstract. The title of this talk, “Death is all things we see awake; all we see asleep is sleep” (Kahn, 1981, p. 69 [fragment LXXXIX]) unfolds the kind of approach to relationship between life and death that I’m interested in developing in response to Mbembe’s claim. It is one of the fragments that have survived from the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus (the so-called weeping philosopher, best know for his phrase “everything flows”), whose thought united the