Dr. Kiarina Kordela and the Comrades of the Melancholic Revolution

On Thursday, April 8th, the Society of Fellows hosted a remote lecture via Zoom delivered by Dr. Kiarina Kordela entitled “Biopower From Here to Eternity.” I attended this event at the behest of our President, as he thought it up my alley, and indeed the premise was greatly intriguing to me, and I would have attended regardless of assignment had I caught the email the first time around. I like to think he nudged me in the direction of Dr. Kordela’s talk to make up for the last time I was sent on assignment to a campus event, a two-hour talk and the future of some obscure (or not, I wouldn’t know) subcategory of gene editing, in which I was the only undergraduate in attendance, and of which I understood not a word.

Similarly, this time around I was once again the only undergraduate student, to my knowledge, in attendance, though only just; one recently-graduated ‘20 also sat in. I am happy and relieved to report to the reader that I did, in part, comprehend the context of the lecture, and so will be able to more adequately cover the event in question. My apologies to anyone unfortunate enough to have read my coverage of the biology event, and may this article offer some meager condolence.

I found the meeting felt more like a dinner party, one to which I was lucky enough to be invited and as such stood, enraptured, in the corner of the room, thirstily imbibing the impassioned discussion of the great minds before me, rather than another Zoom meeting.

The event was small and intimate, or as intimate as one can get in a Zoom meeting room, and we totalled nine, including Dr. Kordela herself. It was organized and hosted by Dr. James A. Godley, a postdoctoral scholar of the Society of Fellows here at Dartmouth, whose dissertation examined the religious structure of mourning and grief in postbellum America, a subject matter that became quickly cogent to the meeting toward the close of the event. Dr. Kordela in turn comes from Macalester College in St. Paul, where she is a Professor of German and the Director of the Critical Theory Program. The content of her lecture was developed, for the most part, in her book, Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan: The (Bio)Power of Structure, which was published in 2018.

Dr. Kordela’s insight in this context comes primarily from her synthesis of the works of Spinoza, Marxist economic theory, and contemporary psychoanalysis in the vein of Lacan. She finds that Marx’s conception of commodity fetishism maps quite nicely on to Spinoza’s depiction of being and extension, or being as self-actualization, and thus the monism of Spinoza offers insight into the dynamics of linguistic structuralism and contemporary political discourse. For in Spinoza, being also includes the power of self-actualization, not the mere physical moment of being, and thus commodification must capture both being and power, or body and extension. The being is converted, under a capitalist framework, into Value, an abstraction of the being, and thus linguistic structuralism arises as capitalism arises in order to offer a framework for dealing with abstractions. Power, then, becomes the object of, and is subsumed in, biopower, the control governing bodies or systems exert over bodies.

I have read a fair amount of theory in my day, from the obfuscating and tedious words of Hegel, to the existential pragmatism of Fanon, to the winding and illuminating histories of Foucault. I find that, among these writers and thinkers, the most memorable of them stand out not only for their ideas but for their grasp of writing, for their employment of narrative, for their craft. Dr. Kordela places herself squarely among the best in terms of oratory; she weaves stories of her own discovery of the ideas she discusses with the ideas themself, she embellishes with humor and charisma, and she leads her audience on a journey alongside her, as opposed to beating them over the head with her theory. As a result I found the meeting felt more like a dinner party, one to which I was lucky enough to be invited and as such stood, enraptured, in the corner of the room, thirstily imbibing the impassioned discussion of the great minds before me, rather than another Zoom meeting.

Particularly engaging was the fact that the subject matter of the meeting was at all moments tied to the present and beyond. This became immediate and explicit as the basics of her ideas were cemented and their utility in examining contemporary political discourse and the figure of Trump became central. She traces the development of various biopolitical technologies and their attempt to repress power through the offer of what Lacan calls the semblance de jouissance. Political correctness, she notes, stood as a powerful technology of power wielded in liberalism, one around which political discourse revolved certainly since the mid-twentieth century and perhaps before. Yet Trump emerges, shocking everyone, as an appeal to sovereignty, a political technique more akin to the demagogues of the 18th and 19th centuries. His explosion onto the political scene and subsequent election enabled the release of a jouissance of racism, of populist xenophobia and anti-intellectualism, all sentiments that had been previously repressed for generations under political correctness.

Political correctness, she notes, stood as a powerful technology of power wielded in liberalism, one around which political discourse revolved certainly since the mid-twentieth century and perhaps before.

The important thing to note is that in either of these cases biopower above all values life (or perhaps vitality in the case of Trumpism), values power, the extension of the body. It aims to erase mortality, to obfuscate death among statistics and abstractions, to, as Dr. Kordela notes, prevent the body from risking itself for some greater aim. The fear of death, she illustrates, ultimately means that some form of exploitation must always be accepted by the body.

It is here the project takes a radical turn, and though it may be inappropriate to deem it utopian, it feels so in spirit. Professor Klaus Mladek, of the German Studies and Comparative Literature departments, who is in attendance (and is also, I add in the spirit of transparency, one of the best professors I have had the good fortune to learn under in my time at Dartmouth), brings up the term “melancholic revolution.” This is a phrase he has coined, or helped coin, and comes from a project he is currently co-authoring with Professor George Edmondson of the English department entitled A Politics of Melancholia. The project, as I understand it, and my sincerest apologies to Professor Edmondson and Professor Mladek if I misrepresent, aims to show melancholia to be not a malady of the individual but a manifestation of the spirit of a community, a necessary response to and powerful tool against coercive forces. The melancholic revolution describes a resistance of the community that is fueled by their very melancholia, a despair which stands in opposition to the fear of death and thus hopes to shrug off the chains of biopower.

The lecture comes to a close, and I leave these comrades of the melancholic revolution, Kordela with her radical insight, Godley with his preoccupation with mourning, Edmondson and Klaus with their melancholic revolution, and, though merely exiting a Zoom meeting, feel myself a bit lighter on my feet, a bit more equipped to throw my grief into the collective melancholia.