Elsa Dorlin

“On the qui vive: to be on the qui vive, what are our troubled lives? Who lives like this, how? Who is made to live on the qui vive and who is made to live in the comfort of inattention, comfort, rest, entitlement and denial?The sharpness of the body, the tension of the muscles, the belly, the breath, the heart that struggles; the gazes on the lookout for prey are like the first moments of politics – a politics that begins by sparing lives when others are still defending themselves.” Elsa Dorlin

Elsa Dorlin is a professor of contemporary political philosophy at the University of Toulouse Jean Jaurès. For the past twenty years, she has been working on an alternative history of bodies through the genealogy of modern power relations. She was awarded the CNRS bronze medal in 2009 for her research in feminist philosophy and epistemology. She was a visiting professor at the University of California, Berkeley (2010-2011), a Fellow at the Columbia Institute for Ideas & Imagination in 2018-2019, and a resident at the Camargo Foundation (2020-2021). She is the author of Matrice de la race. Généalogie sexuelle et coloniale de la Nation française, Paris, La Découverte, 2006-2009, 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, this book received the Frantz Fanon prize of the Caribbean Philosophical Association. She recently edited the collective work Feu! Abécédaire des féminismes présents, Paris, Libertalia, 2021. Pursuing her reflection on the complexity of the mechanics of domination, sexism, racism and capitalism, her thinking is as close as possible to acts of resistance grasped at the level of the flesh, the muscles and the senses.