Comment et pourquoi, au cours du « siècle racial » (selon le terme du spécialiste des génocides Dirk Moses, correspondant à l'époque comprise entre le milieu du XIXe siècle et le milieu du XXe siècle au cours de laquelle l'ensemble des questions politiques sont formulées dans le langage de la biologie), la transition vers les combustibles fossiles s'opère au détriment de l'environnement, et entraîne en même temps une intensification des processus de racialisation, dans un schéma chronopolitique.
From the eighteenth century onwards, Western science began to tap a large, yet non-renewable, capital store of energy. This transition from agricultural production dependent upon the flow of annual cycles (the sun) to industrial production based on the usage and subsequent depletion of energy stocks (fossil fuels) peaked around 1860. The period that followed roughly coincides with what genocide scholar Dirk Moses has dubbed "the racial century"—that is, the epoch when all political questions were articulated through the language of biology. This book considers the question: Why does the transition to fossil fuels entail an intensification of ongoing processes of racialization?
Extrapolating the steam engine's low thermal efficiency into the idea of a universe running out of time, the late nineteenth century mobilized evolutionary theory to counter the dissipative force of entropy. Flowing from this equation between time and energy, the discourse of the early twentieth century is marked by a search for "superman" types—a form of secular seekership that extends from technological to spiritual registers, leading to a conceptualization of technology that is closer to alchemy than mechanics. Against the backdrop of these structuring analogies, this book looks into the racialized inscriptions of difference energy conversions connote, and how they are mobilized in order to convert monetary value into cultural values.
Ana Teixeira Pinto (née à Lisbonne, vit et travaille à Berlin) est écrivaine et théoricienne culturelle. Elle est maître de conférences à l'Universität der Künste de Berlin et chercheuse à l'Université Leuphana de Lüneburg. Ses écrits ont été publiés dans des revues telles que
Artforum,
Mousse,
Third Text,
Afterall,
e-flux journal,
Manifesta Journal,
Springerin,
Frieze,
Domus,
Camera Austria,
Inaesthetics et
Texte zur Kunst. Elle dirige la collection
On the Antipolitical aux éditions Sternberg Press.
