Infraworlds: infrapolitics in an era of extinction

Abstract

This essay aims to put the philosophical discussion on infrapolitics (a notion that seeks to think about life on the margins of politics) in dialogue with reflections on extinction, from a multispecies feminist perspective, that engage with life on the margins of anthropocentrism. In so doing, it focuses on the concept of world, hegemonically understood as universal order and the experience of demarcation, which has engendered relationships of domination over the non-human, leading to the current era of extinction. This essay proposes the concept of infraworld as a way of thinking about the margins: a space of cohabitation for the human and nonhuman bodies that have been cast out of the world order and, by extension, politics. In that sense, infrapolitical events project themselves as the germination of a Third Landscape, a factual possibility for the living, in hostile or inhospitable terrain. The infrapolitical, as an infraworld of politics, constitutes itself as a marginal opening in a world shuttered by absolute exchangeability.