Friedrich Ratzel, Lebensraum and the death motif

Abstract

This intervention explores ‘death’ as an interpretive key both to Friedrich Ratzel's Lebensraum essay and his oeuvre more generally. Ratzel, I argue, was preoccupied with death in a number of ways, including a biogeographical concern with extinction, an ethnological interest in cannibalism and a fascination with the ruins of exterminated civilisations. Indeed, Ratzel grappled with the aesthetics of death itself in the later stages of his life. An appreciation of Ratzel as a thanatological thinker, I argue, opens the door to a recognition of his place not just at the inception of modern geopolitics but as an early thinker of biopolitics too.