WFHB Bloomington Community Radio
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Last week was a tense time for many, as Joe Biden has claimed victory in the presidential election, and for the first time in one hundred and fifty years, the sitting president has refused to concede. This has raised the prospect, however distant and indistinct, of civil war and called survival into question.
It’s in this context that Interchange producer Bella Bravo spoke with Indiana University professor Edgar Illas, whose most recent book, The Survival Regime: Global War and the Political, was published by Routledge in 2019.
Drawing on the work of Frederic Jameson, Illas re-approaches the supposed “postmodern condition” with a practical mindset, finding that on a global level, the cultural logics of the late 20th century have given way to the emerging predominance of the logic of war and survival. Black Lives Matter, in laying claim to the importance of survival in the face of the naked reality of ongoing racist police murders, exemplifies this transition domestically, while the predominance of aerial bombing in contemporary conflict is an important reference internationally.
What does it mean to survive today under global capitalism and global war? In The Survival Regime Illas takes up that challenge by examining how living bodies and institutions struggle for existence while at the same time producing forms of life able to withstand the drift of state of protection. Illas defines survival as the central question of our time, a necessary step to becoming active and militant.
The impossibility of smoothly mediating contemporary conflicts has now returned to the arena of US politics. Illas’s reflections on the contours of war and survival today are key to understanding this moment and the fundamental problems we will continue to face in the 21st century.
Illas will also be speaking at this weekend’s online conference on the Undercommons and Destituent Power, hosted by IU as part of the Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Symposium. Registration for the conference and more information can be found at Destituent Commons. Illas is on Panel #3 – Hostility Inside and Around the Fort: Fugitive Approaches to COVID-era Conflict (Zoom link) on November 15, 2020, 1pm-4pm EST.
GUEST
Edgar Illas is an associate professor of Catalan Studies in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Indiana University, Bloomington. He has published Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City (2012) and various articles on Marxism, politics, and architecture.
RELATED
Survival, or, the War Logic of Global Capitalism by Edgar Illas
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Is Catalan Separatism a Progressive Cause? by Edgar Illas
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MUSIC
All of our music for this episode features Rashied Ali who was an American free jazz and avant-garde drummer born and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
“Swift Are the Winds of Life” (Swift Are the Winds of Life)
“Face of Forgotten Thought (Moon Flight)
“No One in Particular” (No One in Particular)
“No Messages” (Songlines)
“…It is Solved by Walking” (Songlines)
CREDITS
Episode Producer: Bella Bravo
Editor: Bradi Heaberlin
Mixing: Doug Storm
Host: Doug Storm
Executive Producer: Kade Young
