We are, at present, at a crisis point where the rhetoric and policy practices surrounding the preservation of the American state, as espoused by its highest-ranking officials, has ceased to mask the racism and xenophobia that have long characterized it. Faced with a state politics that is more than ever desirous of visiting its fears upon the most vulnerable, an intervention in the political via critical practice—practice capable of lending nuance to the conception of the political and exposing its vulnerabilities—is (...) urgently necessary. To do so requires an approach capable of engaging in a rigorous way with the state’s conception of itself and the machinery it employs to pursue that conception, a machinery that... (shrink)

While fidelity is a crucial aspect of Jacques Derrida’s thinking as it pertains to issues of faith, ethics, and responsibility, this key position in deconstructionist discourse has hardly yet been brought to light. Less still have the biopolitical resonances of Derrida’s work, with its careful attention to the terms and stakes of life particularly in his later writing, been considered as a deconstructionist practice of fidelity and infidelity in its own right. In pursuing these threads, this essay argues that thinking (...) a deconstructionist ethics through fidelity and biopolitics makes possible the crafting of a new philosophical weave for catching our responsibilities to others – to the very otherness of life itself – that Derridean hospitality opens up. Taken together in this way, a deconstructionist fidelity to life otherwise, to a biopolitics to come, makes possible an infidelity to political order as we know it that explodes the limitations of biopolitical theory. In squinting, blinking, tearing up, and listening, the borders of life are blurred in an ambivalent ethics of a transness within which life itself is made to waver and arrive anew. (shrink)

This review article surveys recent work in political theory that has brought together biopolitics and the COVID-19 pandemic. Centered on 2021 books by Giorgio Agamben and Benjamin Bratton, the essay outlines prominent visions of “negative” (Agamben) and “positive” (Bratton) biopolitical responses to the pandemic, engages public reactions to these approaches, and reassesses the position of biopolitical thinking in light of these. In doing so, the article recalls the foundations and original interventions of biopolitical theory, calling for a renewed engagement with (...) the perspectives afforded by biopolitics that pushes past the negative/positive binary. Ultimately, the essay gathers together major developments in biopolitical thinking today, counters moves to discard the theoretical approach despite the limitations of recent examples, and repositions biopolitics as an ambivalent tool for political thought and practice going forward. (shrink)