Biography
Professor of contemporary political philosophy at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès (France), Elsa Dorlin is a senior member of the Institut Universitaire de France.
For more than twenty years, she has been developing an alternative history of bodies through the genealogy of modern and contemporary power relations. She received the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2009 for her research in feminist philosophy and epistemology.
She has been a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (2010–2011), a Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas & Imagination (2018–2019), and an artist-in-residence at the Camargo Foundation (2020–2021).
She is the author of La Matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la Nation française (Paris, La Découverte, 2006/2009) and Sexe, genre et sexualités. Introduction à la philosophie féministe (Paris, PUF, 2008/2021).
In 2017, she published Se Défendre. Une philosophie de la violence (Paris, Zones), translated into several languages and awarded both the Frantz Fanon Prize from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the prize of the North American Society for Social Philosophy.
She also edited Feu! Abécédaire des féminismes présents (Libertalia, 2021) and Guadeloupe, mai 67. Massacrer et laisser mourir (Libertalia, 2023), which received the Fetkann Maryse Condé Prize.
Continuing her reflection on the complex mechanisms of domination—sexism, racism, and capitalism—her thought remains closely attuned to the resistances that manifest themselves at the level of the flesh, the muscles, and the senses.
Intervention
Aviso: Thinking from the Oceans and Seas, Resistances to a Death-Dealing Capitalism - Reading and Discussion
AVISO noun, masculine
Etymology: 18th century. Borrowed from Spanish aviso, “announcement, warning,” later used as a naval term, derived from the verb avisar, “to inform, to warn.”
FIELD OF USE: NAVY / MILITARY. Formerly: a small, fast vessel carrying dispatches and orders, performing reconnaissance and liaison missions. Today: a light warship assigned either to territorial waters surveillance or anti-submarine operations. To dispatch an aviso, several avisos. Aviso-escort: a large aviso designed for distant oceanic operations and overseas stations.
— Dictionary of the Académie française
Aviso. Flotilla. Freighter. Raft. Factory ship. Slave ship. Vessel. Aircraft carrier. Boat. Yacht. Sailing ship. Ocean liner. Dinghy…
This historical, social, and political fleet anticipates a wholly different geography of current power relations. It materializes forgotten, realistic narratives of struggles in which seas and oceans are — and have been — the first global social world: stories of devastation and exploitation, of resistance and uprisings.
Aboard a vessel, how can one write these experiences almost without land, almost without archives? What do they tell us about bodies, lives, mourning, and weapons?
How can we rethink, through this free maritime and aquatic abecedary, the raw abysses of a supposedly solid world?
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