Yogyakarta, June, 4 2026 — A public lecture featuring Min Seong Kim was held on Thursday, June 4, from 11:00 a.m. to 1:00 p.m. in Room 205 of the Poerbatjaraka Building. On this occasion, Kim delivered a presentation entitled “Trembling Grounds of the Archipelago: Pluriversal Ontopolitics and More-than-Human Antagonism,” a study that reexamines the foundational assumptions of pluriversal politics through ecological and political experiences emerging across the Indonesian archipelago.
In his presentation, Kim addressed ongoing debates surrounding pluriversal politics that have recently gained prominence within environmental studies, decolonial thought, and posthumanist scholarship. As articulated by a number of contemporary thinkers, pluriversal politics seeks to challenge the modern worldview that separates humans from nature and treats the world as an object to be mastered and controlled. Instead, this perspective emphasizes that life is constituted through networks of interdependent relations among humans and a wide range of nonhuman entities, including animals, plants, landscapes, and the material forces of the earth.
According to Kim, pluriversal politics is generally grounded in the assumption that relationality constitutes the ontological basis of life. From this perspective, politics is understood as the effort to establish and sustain relationships that enable diverse forms of existence to coexist. However, Kim questioned whether relationality can truly serve as an adequate foundation for understanding political dynamics, particularly when confronted with conflict, tension, and division that cannot always be resolved through reconciliation and relational repair.
To develop this critique, Kim drew on the works of Adam Bobbette and Sophie Chao, whose research explores various forms of human–nonhuman relations in Indonesia. The cases they examine demonstrate that interconnectedness among beings does not necessarily produce harmony. Rather, such relations are often marked by frictions, competing interests, and forms of instability that reveal the political dimensions of the more-than-human world. The presence of nonhuman actors in politics, therefore, not only creates possibilities for collaboration and relationality but also gives rise to antagonisms that shape social and ecological fields.
Building on this reading, Kim connected the question of more-than-human politics to the tradition of post-foundational political thought, particularly the concept of antagonism developed by Ernesto Laclau. Within this framework, antagonism refers to the condition that no social order can ever be fully complete, final, or free from conflict. Every attempt to establish order inevitably encounters something that cannot be fully integrated into the existing system. Politics, therefore, is never simply a matter of creating relationships; it must also contend with the limits, tensions, and forms of negativity that accompany every mode of collective existence.
Through this analysis, Kim proposed that conflict and negativity should occupy a more central place in discussions of pluriversalism. Rather than treating relationality as a pre-given foundation, he argued that collective life—whether among humans or between humans and nonhumans—is always shaped through processes of negotiation, struggle, and antagonism that can never be entirely eliminated.
The public lecture offered a critical perspective on contemporary developments in political theory and ecological thought while opening a space for reflection on how societies understand their relationship with a world that extends beyond the human. At a time of growing concern over ecological crises and interspecies relations, Kim’s presentation provided a compelling framework for understanding conflict, tension, and uncertainty as inseparable dimensions of political life itself.
Author: Khotibul Umam
