Anticipating and Postponing: Some Aspects of a Politics of Suspension

Department seminar with Professor Thomas Lemke, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt.

The talk brings together two disparate and hitherto largely unconnected strands of research: the critical analysis of cryopreservation technologies – the storage of organic material at very low temperatures – and the debate on modes of anticipation. Focusing on wildlife cryobanks and the freezing of human eggs, I argue that cryopreservation practices are part of contemporary technologies of anticipation. They are linked to a politics of suspension by mobilising a liminal biological state in which frozen organisms or biological material are neither fully alive nor ultimately dead. This seeks to avert and/or enable distinctive futures by extending temporal horizons and keeping vital processes in limbo.

All members of the Department of Sociology and research staff from across the faculty are invited to attend.