Elizabeth A. Povinelli’s Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism advances a radical rethinking of power by arguing that late liberal governance can no longer be adequately understood through the familiar analytic of biopolitics, since contemporary regimes increasingly operate through the unstable distinction between Life and Nonlife. Povinelli proposes geontopower as a conceptual framework for analysing how liberalism governs not only living bodies, populations and deaths, but also the boundaries that decide what counts as alive, inert, extinct, animate, resource, ancestor, landscape or world. Her intervention begins by questioning the inherited Foucauldian emphasis on life as the privileged object of modern power, suggesting that this emphasis obscures a deeper ontological operation: the maintenance of a division between the lively and the non-lively upon which biopolitics itself depends. In the context of climate change, settler colonialism, extractive capitalism and Indigenous struggles, this division becomes increasingly fragile. Rocks, fossils, deserts, creeks, carbon deposits and ancestral lands are no longer passive backgrounds to human politics; they become sites where liberal governance, scientific classification, market extraction and Indigenous ontologies collide. Povinelli’s three figures of geontology—the Desert, the Animist and the Virus—crystallise the anxieties of late liberalism: the Desert names the imagined space of lifelessness awaiting governance or exploitation; the Animist marks those Indigenous and other worlds dismissed for refusing the Life/Nonlife divide; and the Virus troubles the stability of life itself by existing at the threshold between animation and inertness. The book is especially significant because it situates these abstractions within settler colonial contexts, particularly through Povinelli’s long engagement with Karrabing worlds and analytics. From this standpoint, geontopower is not a detached philosophical invention but an analytic emerging from the constrained conditions in which Indigenous communities must defend forms of existence that liberal law and capitalist markets often render unintelligible. The question “Can rocks die?” therefore becomes more than provocation: it exposes the inadequacy of political languages that recognise injury to persons, populations or ecosystems, yet struggle to apprehend the destruction of relations among humans, lands, ancestors, minerals and nonhuman existents. In this sense, Geontologies complements but also exceeds debates on the Anthropocene, Capitalocene and climate crisis by showing that environmental catastrophe is not only a matter of ecological damage, but of ontological governance. Late liberalism manages difference by deciding which worlds are real, which attachments are credible, and which existents may be sacrificed as mere matter. Povinelli’s contribution is thus both theoretical and political: she reveals that struggles over extraction, sovereignty, indigeneity and ecological survival are also struggles over the terms by which existence itself is classified and governed. Ultimately, Geontologies offers a demanding critique of liberal reason, insisting that any adequate account of contemporary power must confront the trembling boundary between Life and Nonlife, and the worlds that have long lived otherwise.
