Foreclosures of Finitude: On Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology

Abstract

Abstract:In conversation with Kiarina Kordela's Epistemontology, this essay considers how biopolitical capitalism relies upon the structural exclusion of experiences of dying and loss, while valorizing semblances of immortal transcendence. Following Kordela's argument that biopower attempts to "eternalize" the capitalist equation of being and value as coterminous with life through the production of experiences of false transcendence, this essay adds that the Hegelian critique of finitude clarifies the stakes of biopower's foreclosures of the death-event. With Lacan's account of foreclosure in mourning in Seminar VI, the essay concludes with how the potentiality of loss can reinscribe the subject's (non)rapport with eternity.