The Perverse Universals of the Microeconomic Mode

From pop phenomena such as Game of Thrones and The Hunger Games to the literary triumph of Jesmyn Ward’s Salvage the Bones, the microeconomic mode redefines human being as the intersection of inescapable embodiment, threat to survival, and what Elliott has called “binary life,” or the conviction that humans always choose to exist at the expense of other life. In this talk Elliott will consider the consequences of binary life for longstanding debates regarding the role of suffering, spectatorship and identification in the recognition of universal personhood, via readings of the recent films including Wind River (2017) and Avengers: Infinity War (2018).