135
* Research Centre of the Slovenian Academu of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy
Filozofski vestnik | Letnik XLI | Številka 3 | 2020 | 135–157 | doi: 10.3986/fv .41.3.03
Marina Gržinić Mauhler*
Objectivity, Fiction and New Media Digital 
Technologies Elaborated through Death
1
In order to elaborate on such a proposal as is anticipated by the title of this ar-
ticle, I will, in the first part, analyse how this triadic format affects materialism, 
as “new materialism” is proposed as a substitute for what in the modernist era 
formed the relation between objectivity and materialism and realism, while in 
the second part I will expose the difference between thanatopolitics and nec-
ropolitics.
1
The Social as Anti-Totality
New materialism presents a set of theoretical approaches that come right after 
the poststructuralist linguistic turn or cultural turn (developed in the last dec-
ades under the spell of the fluidity of language). New materialism tries to pro-
vide, with what is said to be affirmation over criticism, a new view on significa-
tion and the methodologies of knowledge and history. It is a path in theory and 
philosophy where ontology and epistemology are not divided but instead are in 
interaction with each other, and, therefore, the new materialism is becoming 
fluid, changing, reshaped, and remodelled. 
The editors of the volume New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics pub-
lished in 2010, Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, asked imploringly, “How could 
we ignore the power of matter and the ways it materializes in our ordinary ex-
periences or fail to acknowledge the primacy of matter in our theories?”
2
 They 
claim that “the radicalism of the dominant discourses which have flourished 
1 This article is a result of the research programme P6-0014 “Conditions and Problems of 
Contemporary Philosophy,” the research project J6-9392 “The problem of objectivity and 
fiction in contemporary philosophy,” and the research project J6-2589 “Structure and Ge -
nealogy of Perversion in Contemporary Philosophy, Politics, and Art,” which are funded 
by the Slovenian Research Agency.
2 Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics, 
Duke University Press, Durham and London 2010, p. 1.

136
marina gržinić mauhler
under the cultural turn is now more or less exhausted.”
3
 They suggest utilizing 
diverse developments in digital technology, the natural sciences, biotechnolo-
gy, the environment, the economy and health. Coole and Frost propose return-
ing to the “materialist traditions developed prior to modernity” and avoiding 
the worldly determination of reality in order to find “fresh applications”
4
 of 
spiritualism. For the new materialists, the problem with the “cultural turn” is in 
part the “constructivist orientation”
5
 of its theory, which treats matter as a social 
construction with no existence or agency independent of humans. 
To enter the discussion, I will further summarize some of Kimberly DeFazio crit-
ical points of her re-evaluation in “The Spectral Ontology and Miraculous Mate-
rialism” on new materialism and how it operates at the present moment: “ma-
terialism in the ‘new materialism’ is largely a physicalist notion of matter (an 
experientialism which it justifies by allying itself with the discourses of natural 
science and phenomenology) and which is ideologically valuable precisely be-
cause it is ‘a materialism which excludes the historical process’.”
6
 It is a form of
materialism that cannot explain the material world as a dialectical process whose 
motion may be positively and reliably understood. At the same time, the new 
post-historical materialism is elaborated through a (“new”) posthumanist onto-
logical framework that seems to offer an understanding of the social as a totality, 
emphasizing interlocking “webs” of connections between the social and natural 
world, and the “vital,” corporeal “embeddedness” of the human in the nonhu-
man. […] 
Such allusions to totality of course have great appeal at a time when the global 
interconnections of social and natural life can no longer be avoided and when 
people struggle to understand the conditions to which their lives are ruthlessly 
subjected. But what is being offered by posthumanist ontology is in fact a theory 
blocking class understanding of issues in their material totality. It is a theory of 
“ecology” that empties the social out of the world, reducing it to physical and 
3 Ibid., p. 6.
4 Ibid. p. 4.
5 Ibid.
6 Kimberly DeFazio, “The Spectral Ontology and Miraculous Materialism”, The Red Critique 
(15/2014), available at: http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2014/spectralontologyan-
dmiraculousmaterialism.htm.

137
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
biological dynamics of local systems. Embeddedness and corporeality are ideo-
logical terms: their role is to limit knowledge to local knowledge and especially 
to the knowledge of experience. They are code words for anti-totality. It is not 
surprising, then, that the affirmation of individual experience and rejection of 
objectivity leads the new materialists to embrace spiritualism, the framework of 
which is rooted in individual beliefs and feelings. 
[...] Posthumanist ontology, in other words, turns out to be a very familiar spectral 
ontology—an idealism.
7
“‘Constructivist’ accounts of matter,” as argued by the new materialist critics, 
and as elucidated by DeFazio, are
no longer capable of addressing new realities like global climate change, ecolog-
ical crisis, and growing economic disparities worldwide, not to mention the way 
new technologies and new scientific discoveries have meant that “unprecedented 
things are currently being done with and to matter, nature, life, production, and 
reproduction” through, for instance, biogenetics.
8
 
Therefore, as explained by DeFazio,
9
 Coole and Frost “insist that the time has 
come for the return to materialism and the world of matter.”
10
 “Under the guise 
of a militant anti-theological return to the material world (which is needed to 
distinguish the new materialism from the Right’s crude defense of theocracy), 
the new materialists,” in the view of Coole and Frost, “advocate a subtle ‘new’ 
reading of the (spiritual) ‘life’ of matter.”
11
 
“[P]roponents of the new materialism,” as pointed out by DeFazio, “express 
frustration with what Coole and Frost refer to as the ‘alergy to “the real”’ of ear-
lier textual approaches that has had the effect of discouraging ‘critical inquirers 
from the more empirical investigation that material processes and structures re-
quire.’”
12
 “They suggest that it is now necessary to address the ways in which the 
7 Ibid.
8 Coole and Frost in DeFazio, New Materialisms.
9 DeFazio, “The Spectral Ontology”.
10
 Coole and Frost, New Materialisms, p. 3.
11
 DeFazio, “The Spectral Ontology”.
12
 Ibid.

138
marina gržinić mauhler
material world—the world not just of objects, nature, and the human body, but 
such phenomena as ‘the electricity grid, food, and trash’ […]—has an ‘agency’ 
which has hitherto not been accounted for.”
13
  In fact, Coole and Frost, as ar-
gued by DeFazio, “joyfully affirm the new materialism because its ‘post-dualism’ 
means that there can be ‘no definitive break between […] material and spiritual 
phenomena.’”
14
 
Therefore, to summarize schematically, DeFazio argues that “the new material-
ism, consequently, is not a rejection but an updating of the culturalism that has 
played an integral role in dismantling the materialist critique of capitalism in 
the postwar era,” where “the relation between subject and object […] reflects a 
deep confusion about, if not a deliberate rewriting of, some of the ‘fundamental 
questions’ of materialism and thus have profoundly problematic implications 
for materialism and the struggle for a world organized on the basis of meeting 
social needs.”
15
 
With this in mind, I would like to emphasize two main points that are crucial for 
understanding what the new materialism does. Firstly, it repudiates the human, 
simply saying that it is time to get rid of the humanist perspective and the hu-
manist position in seeing and correlating with the world. Secondly, it repudiates 
history, practices, and ideas, as stated by DeFazio, in order to isolate ideas and 
practices from the material relations of history while highlighting “the cellular, 
molecular, subatomic, and cosmic levels.”
16
 
As what is produced in new materialism according to the criticism developed 
by DeFazio, is a “posthumanist ontology,”
17
 a theory that prevents a class (and 
I also underline race and gender, but more on this below) understanding of is-
sues in their material totality. On the other hand, posthumanists “place us into 
radical relationality with other species, with whom we have co-evolved and con-
tinue to co-exist.”
18
 As Francesca Ferrando exposed, “New materialism is anoth-
13
 Ibid.
14
 Ibid. 
15
 Ibid.
16
 Ibid.
17
 Ibid.
18
 Lucian Gomoll, “Posthuman Performance: A Feminist Intervention”, Total Art Journal 1,  
(1/2011), available at: http://totalartjournal.com/archives/1764/posthuman-performance/.

139
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
er specific movement within the posthumanist theoretical scenario.”
19
 At this 
point it is important to shed light on the terminology. In a review of Cary Wolfe’s 
What is Posthumanism? Joshua (Sha) LaBare claims that “[w]hile transhuman-
ism actively embraces the matter/information dualism—proposing to transcend 
the human condition by somehow leaving the body behind—posthumanism, in 
the sense Wolfe gives it, rejects the very liberal humanist imaginary that makes 
that dualism possible. In short, Wolfe’s posthumanism can be seen as a rally-
ing cry for a poststructuralist approach that aspires to fully comprehend what 
amounts to a new reality: that the human occupies a new place in the universe, 
a universe now populated by what I am prepared to call nonhuman subjects.”
20
 
Racialized Society
Therefore, the critique that I will offer puts itself in opposition to OOO (ob-
ject-oriented ontology)
21
 and treats NGC (neoliberal global capitalism) as an ob-
ject of research, as well as capital maximization of surplus value (making a prof-
it and further maximizing it) and the consequent process of the privatization of 
everything and everybody. I will do this by exposing two major features of NGC 
lurking behind the new materialism, the logic of the humanization of capital, 
and the evacuation of history due to the flexibilization of power relations in cap-
italism. The latter is the ability of capitalism to depoliticize, or more accurately, 
de-historicize hierarchical and vertical relations of power, and to reduce the ri-
gidity of political control over society, quite perversely, in the name of “humani-
ty.”
22
 These two NGC processes present the political subject as non-existent, and 
it makes us wonder who this “human” is.
Modern scientific revolutions present the NGC system as being apart from his-
tory, or above history, preventing the possibility of historicizing the genealogy 
19
 Francesca Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, 
and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations”, Existenz 8 (2/2013, p. 30.
20
 Joshua (Sha) LaBare, “Review of What is Posthumanism?”, Science Fiction Film and Televi-
sion 4 (1/2011), pp. 136–137. 
21
 Graham Harman, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, Penguin Books 
Ltd, London 2018.
22
 See Marina Gržinić and Šefik Tatlić, Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: 
Historicization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life, Lexington Books, Lan-
ham 2014.

140
marina gržinić mauhler
of the “human” (precisely for being an ideologically racialized category) and 
understanding clearly that the present moment of the logic of the humaniza-
tion of capital started with capitalism and its political project in the 15
th 
century 
(colonialism). In the late twentieth century, in the era of neoliberal capitalism, 
as the dominant model of the organization of exploitation, we see a complete 
distortion of “humans” within NGC. The relationship between the oppressor 
and the oppressed is pacified and defined as a partnership. This occurs under 
the conditions in which capitalism is defined as a “post-ideological” project, in 
an era defined as the “end of history,” which creates the implication that that 
social conflict/antagonism in capitalism has ended. We have racialized labour 
divisions, and naturalized histories of colonialism and contemporary forms of 
coloniality
23
 (colonialism without colonies). These processes are an outcome of 
capital’s racialization (a system of racism, discrimination, and dispossession) 
and are directly connected with the nearly forgotten colonialism and its almost 
universalized and accepted imperial war machine, and the militarization of 
every level of the social, economic, and political in the present state of neoliber-
al financial global capitalism. NGC, with its processes of financialization, appro-
priates the places of politics, the social, economic, as well as theory and culture, 
for direct money laundering, while also heavily exploiting the new economy of 
attention that uses affective labour as an intrinsic part of the system of repro-
duction of global capitalism in a form of unprecedented dimensions for the new 
neoliberal global accumulation of capital and power. At the epicentre we see 
the financialization of life and labour, and the militarization of life, politics, and 
labour, where the “human” is a direct result of the capitalist war machine.
As Donna Haraway stated in her “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology 
and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,”
24
 published in Socialist 
Review in 1985, we are transitioning from “the comfortable old hierarchical 
dominations” to the “scary new networks” that she calls “the informatics of 
domination.”
25
 Some of these disturbing networks include neo-imperialism, 
23
 Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21, (2–3/2007), 
pp. 168–178.
24
 Donna Haraway, “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in the 
1980s,”  Socialist Review 80 (1985), pp. 65–108. Reprinted as “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, 
Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in: Simians, Cyborgs, 
and Women: The Re-invention of Nature, Free Association Press, London 1991, pp. 149–182.
25
 Ibid., p. 161.

141
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
population control, and communications engineering – but these intimidating 
systems are not meant to be seen as monoliths, nor does she present technology 
as automatically coercive. Haraway talks about the social relations of science 
and technology in order to point out that we are not dealing with technologi-
cal determinism; the interaction is much more dynamic than that. Rather than 
seeing our lives as determined and structured by technology that is beyond our 
control, she says that we need to see what sources of power we can find in that 
technology, and use it in creative and political ways. We face a political situation 
of death and corruption that presupposes an unspoken permissibility for wars, 
mass murder, and torture.
26
 The power of coloniality, as a structure of control, 
lies in speaking so forcefully that we see no alternative but to accept it, thus 
dispensing with human life.
One of the most tangible passages in this drawing of the genealogy of the NGC, 
and therefore the genealogy of the new materialism, is the shift from biopolitics 
to necropolitics. Biopolitics, coined by Michel Foucault
27
 in the 1970s as a mode 
of governing and managing life, which I translate (as briefly as possible) into 
“make live and let die,” was a way of governing life intended exclusively for the 
capitalist First (Western) World. Due to the pressing socialism all around it, the 
First Capitalist World in the 1970s provided (although under hidden regimes of 
discipline for its fellow Western citizens), comfortable life facilities, but almost 
exclusively for those perceived as “natural” citizens of the respective First-World 
capitalist nation-states. The other worlds were left to die, as they were outside of 
the interest of the First Capitalist World, until from time to time (and with vary-
ing frequency), of course, it was necessary for the former imperial and colonial 
nation-states, which were also all antisemitic states, to suppress the decoloniza-
tion struggles or attack socialism with military or paramilitary forces. This was 
the case when the “absolute democracy” of private property and surplus value, 
the two fundamental pillars of capitalism, were put into question. 
At the same time, migrants (both economic and political refugees) in the First 
Capitalist World (the strained relations between Latin America and the US are 
26
 Steve Martinot, “The Coloniality of Power: Notes Toward De-Colonization”, Open Comput-
ing Facility, available at:  https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/coloniality.htm.
27
 See Michel Foucault, The Foucault Effect: Studies of Governmentality, The University of 
Chicago Press, Chicago 1991. 

142
marina gržinić mauhler
at the centre of these discussions) have gone from their non-existent position in 
the past to an overtly and continually criminalized second-class and non-citizen 
status in the present. 
However, what we see today is a brutal intensification of the biopolitical regime 
of life from the 1970s. This intensification was named necropolitics by Achille 
Mbembe.
28
 
It was conceptualized by Mbembe in 2003 based on his analysis of the condi-
tion of Africa as a post-colony. Necropolitics centres on new capital’s logic and 
its processes of the geopolitical demarcation of world zones, which are based 
on mobilization of the war machine; necropolitics’ accumulation of capital is a 
result of the total dispossession and subjugation of life to the power of death. 
Therefore, if Foucault’s biopolitics, a term in-between bio (life) and politics, can 
be designated in an axiomatic way as “make live and let die,” then necropoli-
tics, a term in-between necro (death) and politics, can be designated in an axio-
matic way as “let live and make die.” There is a huge difference between “make 
live,” providing structures and facilities for life, and just “let live.” The latter 
presents the structure of the pure biopolitics of abandonment that is, in fact, 
necropolitics. The necropolitical now also punishes the natural nation-state 
citizens that are abandoned in the meanderings of laws and administrative pro-
visions, where the lives of those coming from so-called “third states” and their 
partners become caught in vicious regimes of poverty, deprivation, and seclu-
sion. Furthermore, aesthetic contradictions are profoundly re/articulated with-
in the intensified militarization and racialization of our lives. Initially, I exposed 
a process of de-historicization that is at stake here.
In The Production of Difference: Race and the Management of Labor in U.S. 
History,
29
 written by David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, and reviewed by 
Joe R. Feagin, the authors probe deeply into the relationship of institutionalized 
racism with the management of labour in the United States. As they emphasize, 
“race management” has been a much neglected topic in the social sciences.
30
 
28
 Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15, (1/2003), pp. 11–40.
29
 David R. Roediger and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the Man-
agement of Labor in U.S. History, Oxford University Press, New York 2012.
30
 Joe R. Feagin, “Whiteness as a Managerial System: Race and the Control of U.S. Labor,” 
Monthly Review 64 (8/2013), http://monthlyreview.org/author/joerfeagin/.

143
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
Some analysts, as commented by Joe R. Feagin, might suggest that this centrali-
ty of white-racist framing and related action in a critical era for the development 
of capitalistic management theory and practice is just a leftover from pre-mod-
ern impulses and efforts that will soon end, but Roediger and Esch reject that 
interpretation, and demonstrate that capitalistic management has for many 
decades, even to the present day, used the “irrationalities of race” to manage 
labour and much else in capitalistic economies.
31
 
Racialized “humans” (this new category of nonhumans) are formed by new 
populations of poor people, populations of those seen as less human. These 
racialized populations are the new class. It is clear that neoliberal global fi-
nancial capitalism, with its regime of whiteness, exponentially develops the 
processes of the abandonment of the structures of life and ferociously rejects 
demands for equality and life improvement.
The imperial, colonial, racial division, although expelled violently from global 
financial capitalism, is returning with a vengeance, in the OOO setting as well, 
through racialized labour theory and the racialized Other. Thinkers engaged 
in the new materialism, speculative realism, non-representational theory, con-
structivist philosophy, and posthumanism, when engaging critically with race 
and gender, accomplish this task through rethinking race as a material ontolo-
gy and as assemblage theory. Assemblage theory is used in order to challenge 
and extend the concept of intersectionality. Here also lie the possibilities and 
potentialities.
Transgressing boundaries is essential to Donna Haraway’s conception of the 
cyborg. She says, “[a] cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine 
and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social 
reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a 
world-changing fiction.”
32
 At first it may seem abstract to think of a person – if a 
cyborg is meant to be the model for a new, posthuman kind of person – who is 
at once organic and mechanical, artificial and natural, real and fictional. When 
the boundaries are blurred between the “natural” and “artificial” parts of what 
31
 Ibid.
32
 Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Re-invention of Nature, p. 149.

144
marina gržinić mauhler
makes us human, it becomes much harder to take “nature” for granted, and a 
whole array of assumptions are undermined.
Therefore, although the critique that OOO and the new materialism give legiti-
macy to a specific kind of politics that is non-anthropocentric and works hand 
in hand with a dangerous de/historicization and de/politicization has already 
been put forward, what I want to emphasize is that OOO’s objectification and 
commodification of humans incites the topic of the non-human. The relation 
is no longer between the human and commodity, but between objects and the 
non-human, as capital’s objects, goods are now at the centre of the processes of 
humanization. Racialization becomes the main form of differentiation in such a 
defined “society” and all those subjugated to it are tied under the brand of the 
“common destiny of humanity.” By analysing the genealogy of these processes 
in such a situation, it becomes clear that NGC has to insist on the posthuman as 
the human, since history and agency are completely co-opted, regulated, and 
reproduced under the order of the capitalist reproduction of exploitation, expro-
priation, and dispossession. It would be very unpleasant to leave the terrain of 
research open, and to be confronted with the state of things through a serious 
analysis within academic spheres. It is much more convenient to shift the dis-
course elsewhere into the post-human, as the human is transformed through the 
logic of the humanization of capital into something that is just biological matter. 
If we insist on the analysis of the “human” (which also has to be analysed very 
carefully since “the human” is an ideological category par excellence, repro-
duced firmly by capital), we will see that there is a brutal logic of the disposses-
sion of capital waiting for us at the centre of NGC and its contemporary discours-
es. As stated by Francesca Ferrando about bell hooks,
33
 “[a]s posthumanism 
attracts more attention and becomes mainstream, new challenges arise.”
34
 For 
example, some thinkers are currently looking to embrace “exotic” differences, 
such as robots, biotechnological chimeras, aliens, without having to deal with 
the differences embedded within the human realm.
33
 See bell hooks, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, South End Press, Boston 1984.    
34
 Ferrando, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, and New 
Materialism”, p. 30 

145
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
Social Anti-Matter
My initial objective of addressing objectivity and fiction and new media technol-
ogy through death (i.e. how the development of technologies has affected the 
status of the fundamental relationships between reality and fiction, visibility and 
invisibility, true image and false information, etc.) is based on a proposal to think 
of all these modernist categories from the “optics” of necropolitics. Necropolitics 
confronts us with the horrors of the human condition: death and killing, forced 
enclosure, total abandonment. If we think precisely about what is going on at 
the border between the European Union/Greece and Turkey, we can see a new 
relation about life and death where the colonial/racial division is applied. Those 
at the border come from states destroyed by imperialist Occidental appetites and 
racial differentiation between the white occident and the other parts of world 
that are viewed as illegitimate members of the regime of whiteness
35
 and its colo-
nial matrix of power that extends from the past to the present day. 
Death itself, as I presented above, has become a fallacious rite of passage in 
modernity’s instrumentalization of humanity. This has, in retrospect, terminal 
consequences for how technology and new media technology change time and 
space and the social sphere.
I developed some of these theses in the 1990s regarding the overdetermination 
of time over space, overdetermination in the sense proposed by Louis Althusser, 
which was made possible by new media and digital technologies (the internet 
was accessible to Occidental citizens in 1993). 
Following the 1930s and 1940s, after decades of accelerated change, the holo -
caust of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, deleted, at least symbolically, the concept of 
the future. If the future died in the 1940s with the explosion of the atomic bomb, 
35
 See Paul Gilroy,“There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and 
Nation, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1991; Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining 
Political Culture beyond the Color Line, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachu-
setts 2000; Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in 
Nineteenth-Century America, Oxford University Press, New York 1997; Bell Hooks, “Repre -
senting Whiteness in the Black Imagination”, Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg, C. Nelson, 
P . A. Treichler, Routledge, New York 1992, pp. 338–342.

146
marina gržinić mauhler
in the 1970s people literally lost interest in the future, as well as in the past.
36 
From the 1990s on, according to Peter Weibel, we have been able to think about 
a relation when we leave a historically defined position which imitates (even in 
the arts) the natural world of our senses.
37
 Our experience of place, position, and 
so on depends on what we call the natural interface: the body is, for example, a 
natural interface, and therefore we have a natural approach to space and time. 
Our interpretation of the media is experienced through natural interfaces. Our 
senses and organs are channelled and mediated by an ideology of naturality, 
neglecting the artificiality of the media. But the media of our time shows us that 
we have the possibility of an artificial interface, which is the media. According 
to Weibel, when McLuhan defined media as an extension of man, he just missed 
calling it an artificial extension.
38
 And in this artificial media space, we see that 
the basic concept of how to construct space and time are examples of non-natu-
rality. The media world is dominated by non-identity, or difference. 
Santiago López Petit states that this “difference” which was, in the not-so-dis-
tant past, known as social antagonism (class struggle), has been divided today 
within itself into order and disorder. In such a way the unity of levels is main-
tained and reality is made multiple.
39
 In such a way we can also read the pri-
macy of difference, but, as stated by López Petit, this difference is now pushed 
forward, pointing to the sameness that is the appendix of the rearticulation of 
difference. This identity, or sameness, is today the established co-propriety of 
capital/power that takes on very different names, depending on the specific so-
cial and political space.
40
Necessity is replaced by contingency. 
36
 Marina Gržinić, V vrsti za virtualni kruh: čas, prostor, subjekt in novi mediji v letu 2000 [In 
line for virtual bread: Time, space, subject, and new media in the year 2000], Znanstveno 
in publicistično središče, Ljubljana 1996.
37
 Peter Weibel, “Ways of Contextualisation, or The Exhibition as a Discrete Machine”, in 
Place, Position, Presentation Public, ed. I. Gevers, Jan van Eyck Akademie and De Balie, 
Maastricht and Amsterdam 1993, p. 225.
38
 Ibid.
39
 Santiago López Petit, La movilización global: Breve tratado para atacar la realidad [Glo-
bal mobilisation: A brief treatise for attacking reality], Editorial Traficantes de Sueños, 
Barcelona 2009, p. 38.
40
 Gržinić and Tatlić, Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism, p. 143.

147
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
In the “old world” of the social, via Arthur Kroker and David Cook,
41
 an eman-
cipatory politics entailed the production of meaning: the control of individual 
and collective perspectives against a normalizing society that sought to exclude 
its oppositions. Society was constructed on the notion of the emancipatory sub-
ject who demanded rightful inclusion in the contractual space of the political 
economy.
42
 Kroker and Cook, through a re-reading of Baudrillard, exposed al-
ready in the 1980s that what should be expected is the collapse of the normal -
izing, expanding, and positive cycle of the social into its opposite: an implosive 
and structural order of signs. Again, I worked on these theses at the beginning 
of the 1990s,
43
 although at that time, in the postsocialist condition of life and 
theory, this was a purely fictional scenario, or better put, a science fiction. The 
triumph of signifying culture entails the eclipse of genuine social solidarities.
44
 
We face a kind of exteriorization where strategies of normalization are replaced 
by the simulation of the masses. Here the “hyper-reality” of culture indicates a 
great dissolution of the space of the social.
45
Already back in the 1980s Baudrillard explored the brutal processes of de-his -
toricization and de-socialization, which structure the new communicative or-
der of the signifying culture.
46
 In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Baudrillard 
provides three strategic hypotheses about the existence of the social, all with 
murderous effect. The first hypothesis is that the social may only refer to the 
space of delusion; the social has basically never existed. The second hypothe-
sis sees the social as a residuum, and the third the end of the “perspective space 
of the social.”
47
 One consequence is that, if the social is a simulation, then the 
likely course of events (massacres, rapes, etc.) is a brutal de-simulation. This 
is the way, for example, that the war in 1990s in Bosnia and Herzegovina was 
perceived.
41
 Arthur Kroker and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-
Aesthetics, St. Martin’s Press, New York 1986.
42
 Ibid., p. 175.
43
 See also Marina Gržinič, “Real and Virtual Spaces: Confrontations and Exchange”, 2005, 
available at: https://www.helsinki.fi/sites/default/files/atoms/files/grzinic.pdf.
44
 Arthur Kroker and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-
Aesthetics, pp. 172–173. 
45
 Jean Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Jean Baudrillard and Semiotext(e), 
New York 1983, pp. 3–4.
46
 Kroker and Cook, The Postmodern Scene, p. 175.
47
 Baudrillard, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, pp. 3–4.

148
marina gržinić mauhler
The above also refers to two of the four great refusals of Jean Baudrillard con-
cerning the classical (or perhaps rather “modernist”) models of society’s func-
tioning: a rejection of the naturalistic discourse of the historical, and a rupture 
with the normalizing order of reality, and hence an accumulative conception 
of power.
48
 For Kroker and Cook, in the 1980s, television, already, is not just 
a technical ensemble, a social apparatus, which implodes into society as the 
emblematic cultural form of a relational power. Television’s major form of social 
cohesion is provided by the pseudo-solidarities of electronic television imag-
es, whose public is, according to Baudrillard, the dark, silent mass of viewers. 
They are never permitted to speak while the media elite, which is allowed to 
speak, “has nothing to say.” The explosion of information and the implosion of 
meaning are the keynote of mass communication; a massive circularity in which 
the sender is the receiver, an irreversible medium of communication without 
response. Such is the strategic consequence of television manipulating the soci-
ety.
49
 The TV audience has already been described as the most pervasive type of 
social community. If this is so, then it is an anti-community, a social anti-matter, 
an electronic mall that privileges the psychological position of the voyeur, a so-
ciety of the disembodied eye, or the cultural position of the tourist in a society 
of spectacle.
50
 What else are Western Europe, European peace movements, civil 
associations, and, last but not least, millions of TV viewers and other squatters 
but social anti-matter? Baudrillard’s hypotheses about the media in connection 
with hyper-reality and simulation, so ferociously criticized by “serious” philos-
ophers as to be a theoretical simulation (almost science fiction) seem, in the 
context of proxy wars, the complete abandonment of refugees, and the arrest of 
democratic processes, to warrant serious re-evaluation.
 
Baudrillard described the current mood in Simulacra and Simulation: “Melancho-
lia is the inherent quality of the mode of disappearance of meaning, of the mode 
of the volatilization of meaning in operational systems. And we are all melan-
cholic.”
51
 Martin Jay, in his book, Force Fields,
52
 refers to a similar idea in the 
48
 Kroker and Cook, The Postmodern Scene, p. 171.
49
 Ibid., p. 176.
50
 Ibid., p.  274.
51
 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. S. Faria Glaser, The University of Michi-
gan Press, Ann Arbor 1994, p. 162.
52
 Martin Jay, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique, Routledge, New 
York and London 1993.

149
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
Derridean coinage “destinerrance,” which suggests the impossibility of messag-
es ever reaching their assigned destinations. Melancholia is thus, Jay suggests, 
not simply an illness, but a kind of permanent dimension of the human condi-
tion. A great number of authors distinguish between melancholia and mourn-
ing, which are not specific states of mind, but two different attitudes toward the 
world. In relation to Freud’s text “Mourning and Mania” from 1917, Jay points 
out that the refusal to test reality can still help us make sense of the distinction 
between mourning and melancholy. It is precisely the ability to do so that dis-
tinguishes the former from the latter.
53
 Melancholy, with its manic-depressive 
symptoms, suggests the inability to mourn, or to reflect reality. “Melancholy,” 
wrote Jay, “seems to follow the logic of what Freud calls elsewhere disavowal 
or foreclosure (Verwerfung), in which inassimilable material seems to be cast 
out of the psyche and reappears in the realm of a hallucinatory ‘real.’”
54
 Instead 
of being able to consciously identify what actually has been lost, he or she “re-
mains caught in a perpetually unsubstantiated dialectic of self-punishing fear 
and manic denial.”
55
 Some traits of these definitions of melancholy can apply di-
rectly to what we have witnessed in 2020, at this present moment (Nov. 2020), as 
Donald Trump shows no sign of conceding defeat after losing the US presiden-
tial election to Joe Biden. The Trump administration is acting like a dictatorship 
in the USA as Trump denies election defeat. While Trump himself, is caught in 
a perpetually unsubstantiated dialectic of maniacal denial and a massive psy-
chotic scenario of accusations.
The “paradigm” of melancholy that I analysed in the mid-1990s functioned like 
an analytical tool to shed light on the mode by which (Western) Europe and its 
civil institutions dealt with the war in the territory of ex- Yugoslavia, especially in 
Bosnia and Herzegovina in the 1990s. This resulted in the Srebrenica genocide
56
 
53
 Ibid., p. 93.
54
 Ibid.
55
 Ibid.
56
 The Srebrenica genocide was the massacre of more than 8,000 Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), 
boys and men, in July 1995 during the Balkan wars. The executions were carried out by the 
Army of Republika Srpska (VRS), which attacked the town of Srebrenica in eastern Bos-
nia and Herzegovina. See International Criminal Tribune for the Former Yugoslavia, “Sre-
brenica Genocide: No Room for Denial”, available at:  https://www.icty.org/en/outreach/
documentaries/srebrenica-genocide-no-room-for-denial (accessed 16 November 2020).

150
marina gržinić mauhler
The questions that such hypotheses raise are obvious: What is the object (or ob-
jects) whose loss cannot be confronted? Why does it remain so resolutely disa-
vowed and so resistant to a conscious working through?
57
 We are trying to locate 
a specific historical trauma that resists the mourning process. According to Jay: 
[…] monotheistic religions like Judaism and Christianity sought to replace their 
mother-goddess predecessors with a stern patriarchal deity, then perhaps the 
lost object can be understood as in some sense maternal. Mourning would mean 
working through the loss produced by the archaic mother’s disappearance. An in-
ability to renounce the regressive desire to reunite with the mother in a fantasy of 
recaptured plenitude, when accompanied by the unconscious self-reproach that 
her death was covertly desired, would result in melancholia instead.
58
 
The Muslim reality in Europe, if I may cynically paraphrase Derrida, is under-
stood like both a poison and a cure.
Mourning is important, as it allows us the strategic and emotional process of 
reflexivity, which enables us to survive this transitional period. On the other 
hand, mourning as a complete working through of lost material, is itself a uto-
pian myth. “[T]he hope of finding a means to [completely] transcend the repeti-
tion and displacement characteristic of apocalyptic melancholia is necessarily 
doomed to failure.”
59
And a consequence of the new media technology and digital social platforms 
is that social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have become new sites 
associated with narcissistic tendencies. Social networks are an ideal stage for 
narcissists to showcase themselves, but also a reservoir for the dissemination of 
the most terrifying, violent populist and right-wing thoughts. 
Pierre Lévy
60
 has pointed out in exactly the same manner that up until now 
we have mainly envisaged virtual realities as simulating physical spaces. 
57
 Jay, Force Fields, p. 94.
58
 Ibid.
59
 Ibid. p. 97.
60
 Pierre Lévy, “Toward Super-language”, in: ISEA 94: The 5
th 
International Symposium on 
Electronic Art Catalogue, ed. Minna Tarkka, University of Art and Design Helsinki, Helsinki 
1994, pp. 10–17.

151
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
Alternatively, we need to speak of the production of symbolic spaces in the form 
of virtual worlds as expressive of significations, and of knowledge characteristic 
of a collectivity. These virtual worlds, as Levy declares, express acts of collective 
communication in real time, with the direct involvement of, and the tactile com-
ponent suggested by, words. The deepened split between the physical realities, 
including the dangers of urban life and the phantasmatic world of “on-line” so-
ciality, is both encouraging and depressive.
In the age of new media and digital technologies we see an entanglement of 
ecstasy and decay, hyper-primitivism and hyper-imaging. 
I have tried to show that virtual reality cannot be reduced to a mere technologi-
cal or a discursive object. It is a complex social amalgam, in which its existence 
as a textual figure is inseparable from its machinist use. 
The New Melancholy and the Vertiginous Presence of Death
Massimo Recalcati, in his Le nuove melanconie: Destini del desiderio nel tempo 
ipermoderno,
61
 says that melancholy is no longer what it used to be, that melan-
choly, as Freud argued, still involved some sense of guilt; today, however, mel-
ancholy has acquired new declinations, characterized by a fundamental lack of 
awareness of life and also of maintaining life in its transmission from one gen-
eration to the next. Freud talks about melancholy;
62
 the old melancholy brings a 
feeling of guilt in front of laws that are too severe, but contemporary melancholy 
stems from an incapacity to give meaning to the – I will add “Occidental” – ex-
perience. 
 
In the Occident, the relation between subject and object can be put in a geneal-
ogy as a series of discontinued modalities.
61
 Massimo Recalcati, Le nuove melanconie: Destini del desiderio nel tempo ipermoderno [The 
new melancholies: Fates of desire in hypermodern times], Raffaello Cortina Editore, Mi-
lano 2019. 
62
 Sigmund Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete 
Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, trans. J. Strachey, The Hogarth Press, 
London 1957, pp. 243–258.

152
marina gržinić mauhler
In the 1960s and 1970s western youth tried to distance themselves primarily from 
the fetishism of objects. In the 1990s, after the fall of Berlin Wall, so to speak, 
consumer hedonism was pushed to the forefront and replaced political passion. 
The former East of Europe entered this process fully and quickly. In the 2000s we 
rely heavily on objects, they are mobile and transversal; our smartphones and 
technological gadgets are a hyper overabundance of objects, to such an extent 
that online social platforms display an incommensurability of emptiness, loss 
of meaning, the disappearance of ideologies, loneliness, and self-quarantine 
conditions (not only due to COVID-19). This condition is what Recalcati names 
the new melancholy. He talks about life connected to senselessness. 
Without desire, life is senseless; the body is dead weight to be moved, pushed 
around. This Occidental subject is incapable of relating to alterity, to otherness. 
It is symbolically reduced to a proper border of impossibility and clinging to 
these borders is the last possibility of a proper salvation. As Recalcati writes: 
 
The absence of boundaries inherent in the freedom of the hypermodern turbo 
consumer has gradually translated into a widespread feeling of anxiety caused by 
the loss of stable symbolic reference points, but above all it has given rise to a new 
demand for protection and security. We have thus gone from a manic emphasis on 
the dissolution of banks and borders, to the need for their re-establishment and 
security enhancement 
63
 
Again, we see this melancholy palpably in the form of silence and the failure 
to act, with many EU citizens inert in the face of what is happening to refugees 
again in 2020 (as was the cataclysmic situation in September 2020 when fires de -
stroyed Greece’s largest migrant camp, an overcrowded facility on the island of 
Lesbos, leaving nearly 13,000 people without shelter). Instead of revolt and ac -
tion, what mattered and today only matters is, as Recalcati says, the syndrome 
that has at its centre the protection of EU citizens’ biopolitical lives. This protec-
tion of our biopolitical lives in the Occident is fully embedded in the barbed wire 
and closure of Europe, the EU in Fortress Europe. 
63
 Recalcati, Le nuove melanconie,  p. xi; trans. M. Gržinić. 

153
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
The walls and barbed wire are the new objects of investment of the EU’s citi-
zens. This entails a demand for an excess of immunization. In classical Freudian 
psychoanalytic theory,
64
 Todestrieb, the death drive, is the drive toward death 
and self-destruction. Under this death drive we see an excess of immunization, 
which transforms into an autoimmune illness. An autoimmune disease is a con-
dition in which the immune system mistakenly attacks a healthy body, which 
leads to destroying and abandoning any other body or bodies seen as a disease 
or threat. Fortress Europe is, therefore, also a specific quarantine against refu-
gees. In March 2020 this escalated due to Covid-19 and slowly transformed first 
Italy and then gradually other EU states into state-imposed quarantine(s).
In the biopolitical condition of Fortress EU, the death drive (Thanatos) is the 
politics of death that seems to reside only in the Occidental subjective intimacy. 
However, we can see that this death drive, which opposes Eros, the tendency 
toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives, 
changes from preservation (as it is still presented) to destruction. From its inti-
macy, it externalizes itself by means of real fences, walls, military war machin-
eries, pure destructions, immobilization, and ultimately the death of thousands 
of refugees. Still, through biopolitical optics, thanathopolitics is not an enemy 
that undermines life from the outside, but something that is internally produced 
by life. In the occidental discourse, thanatopolitics is the knot that ties together 
the death drive and the desire to live.
At this point we have to clarify the difference between thanathopolitics and ne-
cropolitics, which cover each other in the Occidental theoretical imaginary too 
easily, or thanatopolitics is used as a form of a substitute notion for performing 
a continuity with biopolitics.
65
 
64
 See Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, W. W. Norton 
& Company, New York and London 1961; Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, 
trans. James Strachey, W. W. Norton & Company, New York and London 1961.
65
 See Marina Gržinić, “Introduction: Burdened by the Past, Rethinking the Future. Eleven 
Theses on Memory, History, and Life,” in Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-
Nationalism: Rethinking the Past for New Conviviality, ed. M. Gržinić, J. Pristovšek, S. Uitz, 
Cambridge Scholars Publishing, Newcastle upon Tyne 2020, pp. 1–21.

154
marina gržinić mauhler
In short, the trouble, a serious trouble (as Judith Butler would say), with 
THANATOPOLITICS IS THAT IT IS A PURE OCCIDENTAL (REGIME OF WHITE-
NESS) CATEGORY. In such a situation, refugees are not at all important as 
everything is centred on this preservation, which in the end is pure destruction. 
This is why thousands of refugees are kept on Greek islands in the ultimate sub-
human conditions of life or left in the limbo of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which 
itself is a state (in the middle of Europe) in a state of a limbo.
Thanatopolitics is a pure occidental category that spreads like a deadly conta-
gious virus from the intimacy of the Occidental subject into the neoliberal glob-
al world, which literally exports contagion into other places, or this contagion 
has already been contracted through the legacy of Western colonialism (such as 
imposed on Africa). 
The vertiginous presence of death is the result of a life without consciousness of 
Occidental (proper) vulnerability, which is pathological, centred on itself, and 
incapable of having a relation to others. Now we come to NECROPOLITICS. It is 
a pure EXTERNALIZATION OF THANATOPOLITICS. Necropolitics is the regime 
of neoliberalism’s fake vitalism that has also cut the ties with the categories of 
the negative.
66
 
Furthermore, we no longer witness protests by young people in the EU’s public 
spaces (let’s say in thousands peacefully protesting) against what is going on 
with the refugees. It is a psychosis situation that is a situation entailing a total 
self-relation to itself only, i.e. a deadly form of social autism. Although we can 
think that this is not the place to propose such a point for further discussion, 
this is an important issue that needs to be emphasized. Why? Because the out-
come of the current state of things is the utter neoliberal, capitalist, biopoliti-
cal inability to have any relation with the Other, which is fully drenched in the 
necrocapitalist, neoliberal, capitalist, deadly machinery. 
This circumstance is precisely captured by Recalcati: 
The apparently manic inclination of the capitalist’s discourse has reinforced a 
neo-melancholic inclination in young people, who tend to let themselves be ab-
66
 Ibid.

155
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
sorbed by the ever-present presence of an object, transforming the object into an 
object-Thing. It is no longer the object that appears against the background of 
the mourning of the Thing, but it is the object-Thing that melancholically denies 
that mourning. While the exciting impulse of the maniacal discourse pushes 
towards an unceasing exchange of the object in a succession of fragmented pre-
sents without historical continuity, this new and particular adhesiveness to the 
object – for example, to the technological object – reveals the undercurrent of 
this euphoric thrust: the neo-melancholic bonding to the object, the impossi-
bility of sustaining its loss, the rejection of the mourning of the Thing. […] The 
world of the object-Thing replaces the world of encounter with the Other and its 
inevitable turbulence.
67
In short, and again, what is going on with the refugees is actually deeply con-
nected with the terrifying modulation of the Occident. 
References
Baudrillard, Jean, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities, Jean Baudrillard and Semiotext(e), 
New York 1983
— Simulacra and Simulation, trans. Sheila Faria Glaser, University of Michigan Press, 
Ann Arbor 1994
Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost (eds.), New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and 
Politics, Duke University Press, Durham and London 2010
DeFazio, Kimberly, “The Spectral Ontology and Miraculous Materialism”, The Red 
Critique (15/2014), available at: http://www.redcritique.org/WinterSpring2014/spec -
tralontologyandmiraculousmaterialism.htm
Feagin, Joe R., “Whiteness as a Managerial System: Race and the Control of U.S. Labor”, 
Monthly Review 64 (8/2013), available at: http://monthlyreview.org/author/joerfe-
agin/
Ferrando, Francesca, “Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, 
and New Materialisms: Differences and Relations”, Existenz 8 (2/2013), pp. 26–32
Foucault, Michel, The Foucault Effect: Studies of Governmentality, The University of 
Chicago Press, Chicago 1991
Freud, Sigmund, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, trans. James Strachey, W. W. Norton & 
Company, New York and London 1961
— Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey, W . W . Norton & Company, New 
York and London 1961
67
 Recalcati, Le nuove melanconie, p. 141, trans. M. Gržinić.

156
marina gržinić mauhler
— “Mourning and Melancholia”, in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological 
Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XIV, trans. J. Strachey, The Hogarth Press, London 
1957
Gilroy, Paul, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line, Harvard 
University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 2000
— “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation, 
University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1991
Gomoll, Lucian, “Posthuman Performance: An Feminist Intervention”, Total Art Journal 
1 (1/2011), available at: http://totalartjournal.com/archives/1764/posthuman-perfor -
mance/
Gržinić, Marina, V vrsti za virtualni kruh: čas, prostor, subjekt in novi mediji v letu 2000 
[In line for virtual bread: Time, space, subject, and new media in the year 2000], 
Znanstveno in publicistično središče, Ljubljana 1996
— “Introduction: Burdened by the Past, Rethinking the Future. Eleven Theses on Mem-
ory, History, and 
Life,” in Opposing Colonialism, Antisemitism, and Turbo-Nationalism: Rethinking the Past 
for New Conviviality, ed. M. Gržinić, J. Pristovšek, S. Uitz, Cambridge Scholars Pub-
lishing, Newcastle upon Tyne 2020
— “Real and Virtual Spaces: Confrontations and Exchange”, 2005, available at: https://
www.helsinki.fi/sites/default/files/atoms/files/grzinic.pdf
Gržinić, Marina and Šefik Tatlić, Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism: 
Histori cization of Biopolitics and Forensics of Politics, Art, and Life, Lexington Books, 
Lanham 2014
Hartman, Saidiya V ., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-
Century America, Oxford University Press, New York 1997
Harman, Graham, Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, Penguin Books 
Ltd, London 2018
Haraway, Donna, “Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Social Feminism in 
the 1980s”, Socialist Review 80 (1985)
— Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Re-invention of Nature, Free Association Press, 
London 1991
hooks, bell, Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center, South End Press, Boston 1984
— “Representing Whiteness in the Black Imagination”, Cultural Studies, ed. L. Grossberg, 
C. Nelson, P . A. Treichler, Routledge, New York 1992
International Criminal Tribune for the Former Yugoslavia, “Srebrenica Genocide: No 
Room for Denial”, available at: https://www.icty.org/en/outreach/documentaries/
srebrenica-genocide-no-room-for-denial (accessed 16 November 2020)
Jay, Martin, Force Fields: Between Intellectual History and Cultural Critique, Routledge, 
New York and London 1993

157
objectivity, fiction and new media digital technologies elaborated through death
Kroker, Arthur and David Cook, The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and Hyper-
Aesthetics, St. Martin’s Press, New York 1986
LaBare, Joshua (Sha), “Review of What is Posthumanism?”, Science Fiction Film and 
Television 4 (1/2011), pp. 136–140
Lévy, Pierre, “Toward Super-language”, ISEA 94: The 5th International Symposium on 
Electronic Art on Electronic Art Catalogue, ed. M. Tarkka, University of Art and Design 
Helsinki, Helsinki 1994
López, Santiago Petit, La movilización global: Breve tratado para atacar la realidad 
[Global mobilisation: A brief treatise for attacking reality], Editorial Traficantes de 
Sueños, Barcelona 2009
Martinot, Steve, “The Coloniality of Power: Notes Toward De-Colonization”, available at: 
https://www.ocf.berkeley.edu/~marto/coloniality.htm (accessed 16 November 2020)
Mbembe, Achille, “Necropolitics”, Public Culture 15 (1/2003), pp. 1–40
Recalcati, Massimo, Le nuove melanconie: Destini del desiderio nel tempo ipermoder-
no [The new melancholies: Fates of desire in hypermodern time], Raffaello Cortina 
Editore, Milano 2019
Roediger, David R. and Elizabeth D. Esch, The Production of Difference: Race and the 
Management of Labor in U.S. History, Oxford University Press, New York 2012
Quijano, Aníbal, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality”, Cultural Studies 21 (2–3/2007), 
pp. 168–178
Weibel, Peter, “Ways of Contextualisation, or The Exhibition as a Discrete Machine”, 
in Place, Position, Presentation Public, ed. I. Gevers, Jan van Eyck Akademie and De 
Balie, Maastricht and Amsterdam 1993