Ghassan Hage on “Fantasies of Omnipotence”

Location: Katholische Hochschulgemeinde, Leopoldstr. 11, 1. OG Saal, 80202 Munich

Conveners: The Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, and the Chair of Sociology and Gender Studies, LMU Munich

This talk explores the degree to which fantasies of total control continue to permeate Western colonial domination of the non-West and the human subjugation of nature. Fantasies of omnipotence or of total control have been linked to fascist politics by many psychoanalytically inclined theorists, from Wilhelm Reich to Slavoj Žižek. The link is also made in Arendt’s analysis of totalitarianism. Adorno and Horkheimer famously extend this desire for total control over humankind to the desire to control nature. Building on his theorization of generalized domestication in his book Is Racism an Environmental Threat?, Ghassan Hage will explore what he considers an intensification of the colonial fantasy of omnipotence today in the face of global warming and the crisis of colonial hegemony? What are the consequences of this intensification, and how does it construct the “omnipotent subject” and shape their relation to the social and natural environment?

Ghassan Hage holds a first lecture on Wednesday, 12 November, at 17:00. See here for more information. 

Ghassan Hage is a professor of anthropology working between Australia, Lebanon, and Europe. He is currently the Visiting Simon Professor at the University of Manchester. His work covers many areas of inquiry, which include an engagement with multiculturalism, racism, and White supremacy in Australia, the relation between White colonial domination and the human domination of the environment, ethnographic explorations among the Lebanese diaspora in the world, and critical anthropological theory.