Geography of the world’s ending: Capital and the production of terminal spaces
Abstract
Apocalypse happens all the time and is no longer a time, but a place. Catastrophes are no longer singular events, but geographical structures with their own spatial and juridico-political configuration: disaster-spaces that confine what Agamben calls Homo Sacer. Their territorial counter-poles are the maximum security, luxury enclaves of the world’s new sovereigns in Carl Schmitt’s sense: the global super-rich, who live outside state regulations in hightech neoliberal utopias symbolised by Dubai. These terminal spaces are not Foucauldian heterotopias, nor can their complexity be captured by other outmoded theoretical vocabularies. Today’s capitalism is anisotropic: it generates and interconnects different types of spatiality, with different laws of movement, for which only some forms of science fiction and contemporary art offer valid tropes.Downloads
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