After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice Cover Image

After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice
After the End of the World: Entangled Nuclear Colonialisms, Matters of Force, and the Material Force of Justice

Author(s): Karen Barad
Subject(s): Ethics / Practical Philosophy, Military history, Philosophy of Science, Studies in violence and power, WW II and following years (1940 - 1949), Peace and Conflict Studies
Published by: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Jagiellońskiego
Keywords: Force; Nuclear Colonialism; Marshall Islands; US nuclear bomb “tests”; The Dome; Quantum Field Theory;

Summary/Abstract: This essay is an invitation to take up the nature and problematics of hospitality in its materiality. It begins and ends with the Marshall Islands, at the crossroads of two great destructive forces: nuclear colonialism and the climate crisis. In the aftermath of sixty-seven US nuclear bomb “tests” visited upon the Marshall Islands, the concrete “dome” built on Runit Island by the US government was an act of erasure and a-void-ance—an attempt to contain and cover over plutonium remains and other material traces of the violence of colonial hospitality that live inside the Tomb (as the Marshallese call it). Taking the physicality of the hostility within hospitality seriously, and going into the core of the theory that produced the nuclear bomb, I argue that a radical hospitality—an infinity of possibilities for interrupting state sanctioned violence—is written into the structure of matter itself in its inseparability with the void.

  • Issue Year: 58/2020
  • Issue No: 3
  • Page Range: 85-113
  • Page Count: 30
  • Language: English