This article offers an analysis of marketing as an ideological set of practices that makes cultural interventions designed to infuse social relations with biopolitical injunctions. We examine a contemporary site of heightened attention within marketing: the rise of online communities and the attendant profession of social media marketing managers. We argue that social media marketers disavow a core problem; namely, that the object at stake, the customer community, barely exists. The community therefore functions ideologically. We describe the ideological gymnastics necessary (...) for maintaining momentum behind a practice that barely exists and we ponder why such ideologies are necessary, and what they allow the marketer to do. Working with such concepts as ‘the wild’, ‘communicative capitalism’, and ‘biopolitical marketing’, we explore a genre of popular business literature that proselytizes for online customer communities and we reflect on the broader implications. (shrink)

In the spring of 2010, major newspapers in the U.S. announced arrival of a “recovery” from the economic recession precipitated by the 2008 financial crisis. This essay examines the biopolitics of recovery in the wake of the disaster capitalism of the financial meltdown, arguing that twentieth-century social welfare biopolitics that derived wealth from the populace have been replaced by new forms of financial power whose global circulations and convergences exploit wealth informatically and transactionally, rather than biopolitically, through devices (...) such as derivatives and technologies such a high-frequency trading. Carbon derivatives trading is used to illustrate how wealth can be generated informatically from a thanatopolitics of destruction. (shrink)

Biopolitics as a System of Thought takes seriously Foucault's claim that biopolitics is the primary technique of government, the means by which the organisation of our social relations operates. Engaging with modern political discussions such as black lives matter and Roe v Wade, Richards draws from jurists such as Pierre Legendre, Yan Thomas, and philosophers such as Agamben, Arendt, Esposito to explore how the same institutions that offer rights protection can easily and without much notice, take them away.

The concept of biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used in recent years in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In Biopolitics, Mills provides a wide-ranging and insightful introduction to the field of biopolitical studies. The first part of the book provides a much-needed philosophical introduction to key theoretical approaches to the concept in contemporary usage. This includes discussions of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri. (...) In the second part of the book, Mills discusses various topics across the categories of politics, life and subjectivity. These include questions of sovereignty and governmentality, violence, rights, technology, reproduction, race, and sexual difference. This book will be an indispensable guide for those wishing to gain an understanding of the central theories and issues in biopolitical studies. For those already working with the concept of biopolitics, it provides challenging and provocative insights and argues for a ground-breaking reorientation of the field. (shrink)

This article revises Foucault's account of biopolitics in the light of the impact of the molecular and digital revolutions on `the politics of life itself'. The confluence of the molecular and digital revolutions informationalizes life, providing an account of what it is to be a living thing in terms of complex adaptive and continuously emergent, informationally constituted, systems. Also revisiting Foucault's The Order of Things and its interrogation of the modern analytics of finitude, the article argues that our contemporary (...) politics of life is therefore distinguished by the quasi-transcendentals that now distinguish informationalized life: circulation, connectivity and complexity. Here, too, the article argues, the figure of Man, which once united the quasi-transcendentals of life, labour and language, is replaced by the contingency that now unites circulation, connectivity and complexity. Observing that a life of continuous emergence is also one in which production is continuously allied with destruction, such a life is lived as the continuous emergency of its own emergence. This account of contemporary biopolitics, together with its emergency of emergence, contrasts, in particular, with that offered by Agamben in his appropriation of Schmitt. (shrink)

This essay examines the relevance of Kierkegaard’s analysis of “the present age” for our own age, focusing specifically on the existential implications of neoliberalism and biopolitics. By examining the significance of Kierkegaard’s view of ethical and religious existence-stages, I argue that his concerns about leveling and despair bear directly upon pressing problems concerning sexuality, identity, and political exclusions. Kierkegaard becomes an ally of contemporary critical theory, and, in this alliance, Kierkegaard’s religious existentialism foregrounds the spiritual or religious dimensions of (...) our present-day critical projects. (shrink)

At the focal point of contemporary biopolitical knowledge and power is human life in its contingent, evolutionary and emergent properties: the living as adaptive and affective beings, characterized in particular by their capacity to experience stress and fear that works together with vital survival mechanisms. This article addresses new techniques of psychiatric power and therapeutic epistemologies that have emerged in present-day military-scientific as well as media technological assemblages to define and capture the human in its psychobiological states of emergency. Specifically, (...) the focus of this article is on one special kind of screen medium, called Virtual Iraq, a virtual reality device designed to treat post-traumatic stress disorder among war veterans. The article analyses Virtual Iraq as an example of new forms and strategies for the management of affectivity and memory that have been developed in conjunction with contemporary neuroscientific discourses on the evolutionary origins of emotional life and its neurobiological functionality among humans qua species. Furthermore, it discusses Virtual Iraq as an example of the biopolitical work of contemporary screen media in which the reality of images starts to concern the organism’s internal functioning instead of being anthropological or communicative, tapping into the brain’s capacity of self-organization as well as contributing to the production and maintenance of psychological immunity. (shrink)

This article explores how technological interventions into animal bodies refigure the borders of political community, in assemblage with sexuality, race, nation, and species. To this end, the article reconceptualizes “feral” as a biopolitical figure that unsettles categorical divisions such as culture/nature, domestic/wild, and belonging/exclusion. Alongside the theoretical development of “feral,” I extend the discussion to two sites: the use of long-tail macaques for bio-defense research in the post-9/11 United States and the transspecies intimacy and feral violence/justice in the South Korean (...) film Howling. This article pursues two overarching questions. First, how do such biopolitical operations implicate the biomedical and biotechnological interventions into these animals? And second, what kind of feral affects and trajectories emerge from these events at the intersections of species, race, sexuality, and nation? I argue that the feral as a biopolitical concept helps us to engage with the dynamics between the capturing biopower and the escaping bodies in the contemporary biopolitical landscape. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the relationship between biopolitics and race theory. Starting from Foucault, many authors have considered totalitarian anti-Semitism as a depravity of biologism. This essay would like to challenge this all-too-simple positivist, materialist, and evolutionist picture of biopolitics in the Third Reich. It examines another "tradition" of racial theories, central to National Socialism, much closer to the revered Western philosophical tradition than Darwinism ever was. This kind of racism presents itself as the authentic heir of that (...) "Metaphysics of Form," which traces its roots back to classical antiquity, in particular to Plato's work. Through the analysis of some Platonist and racist texts the essay tries to point out the ambivalences that connect some of the assumptions of our philosophical tradition to Nazi totalitarianism. (shrink)

In this paper I shift the center of utopian debates away from questions of ideology towards the question of power. As a new point of departure, I analyze Foucault's notion of biopower as well as Hardt and Negri's theory of biopolitics. Arguing for a new hermeneutic of biopolitics in education, I then apply this lens to evaluate the educational philosophy of John Dewey. In conclusion, the paper suggests that while Hardt and Negri are missing an educational theory, John (...) Dewey is missing a concept of democracy adequate to the biopolitical struggles of the multitude. Thus, I call for a synthesis of Dewey and Hardt and Negri in order to generate a biopedagogical practice beyond both traditional models of education as well as current standardization. (shrink)

With Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri reinvigorated debates in political theory and radical philosophy about the cultivation of revolutionary subjectivity. Their theorization of Empire and multitude has also significantly affected the tenor of critical approaches to educational theory during the past two decades. In this article, we discuss Hardt and Negri’s contribution to what we call the biopolitical turn in educational theory, emphasizing the influence of autonomist Marxism on their work. Even more specifically, we discuss the impact of the (...) autonomist tradition on their formulation of the nature of the relationship between the multitude and Empire: that the multitude is the generative force of the social world, whereas Empire is merely an apparatus of capture. This autonomist approach reveals a set of questions regarding subjectivity, materialism, and social ontology, which we argue are ripe for engagement by educational theorists, and indicate the enduring relevance of Empire as a valuable text for educational theorists interested in matters of biopolitical production, collective opposition, and revolutionary subjectivity. (shrink)

a. The literature on biopolitics emerged 1970s with Michel Foucault’s ‘Right of Death and Power over Life’, part five of The History of Sexuality: An Introduction :For a long time,...

As environments and their inhabitants undergo a multitude of abrupt changes due to climate, in the aesthetic field there has been a hardening of a few representational figures that stand in for those contested political ecologies. Biodiversity loss and habitat change can be seen to be forcing an acceleration of archival practices that mobilize various images of the ‘play of the world’, including the making of star species to represent planetary loss, and the consolidation of other species into archives implicitly (...) organized around the category of their destruction. The first section of this article looks at Jacques Rancière’s concept of political aesthetics in order to extend an argument about the importance of aesthetics in multispecies living beyond a concentration on practices per se and into a more excessive engagement articulated by Georges Bataille. I argue that aesthetics must be considered as part of the practice of politics and a space that configures the realm of what is possible in that politics. This is to suggest aesthetics as a form of ethics or an ‘aesthetics of existence’, as Foucault put it. The conclusion considers how a biopolitical aesthetic comes into being through such archival practices, and asks what aesthetic shifts would make the ‘play of the world’ more present in its absences. (shrink)

Michel Foucault and Roberto Esposito have been two of the most influential biopolitical thinkers of the twentieth century, but their respective approaches to the relationship between life and politics do not address the main problem of the Anthropocene: the relationship between life and energy. Thus, this article analyzes the biophysical limits of biopolitics in the works of Foucault and Roberto Esposito and, to overcome these limits, it proposes to analyze the physiological assembly of the devices of power within the (...) energetic flows of social metabolisms. The article concludes that the physio-political approach to human societies allows us to overcome the biophysical limits of both Foucauldian biopolitics and Esposito's immunological paradigm. (shrink)

The topic of biopolitics is a timely one, and it has become increasingly important for scholars to reconsider how life is objectified, mobilized, and otherwise bound up in politics. This cutting-edge volume discusses the philosophical, social, and political notions of biopolitics, as well as the ways in which biopower affects all aspects of our lives, including the relationships between the human and nonhuman, the concept of political subjectivity, and the connection between art, science, philosophy, and politics. In addition (...) to tracing the evolving philosophical discourse around biopolitics, this collection researches and explores certain modes of resistance against biopolitical control. Written by leading experts in the field, the book’s chapters explore resistance across a wide range of areas: politics and biophilosophy, technology and vitalism, creativity and bioethics, and performance. Resisting Biopolitics is an important intervention in contemporary biopolitical theory, looking towards the future of this interdisciplinary field. (shrink)

Biosemiotics and the analysis of biopower have not yet been explicitly brought together. This article attempts to find their connecting points from the perspective of biosemiotics. It uses the biosemiotic understanding of the different types of semiosis in order to approach the practices of biopower and biopolitics. The central concept of the paper is that of the ‘semiotic threshold’. We can speak of (1) the lower semiotic threshold, signifying the dividing line between non-semiosis and semiosis; and (2) the secondary (...) semiotic thresholds, signifying the borders between different types (iconic, indexical, symbolic) of semiosis. Speaking in terms of types of semiosis means speaking in terms of different capabilities for normativity, which is why the article uses the approaches of Michel Foucault on normalization in biopower and of Georges Canguilhem on organismic normativity. As an example on which biopolitics and biosemiotics could connect, the discourse of regenerative and anti-aging medicine is used. (shrink)

Within the political economy of informational capitalism, commercial surveillance practices are tools for resource extraction. That process requires an enabling legal construct, which this essay identifies and explores. Contemporary practices of personal information processing constitute a new type of public domain—a repository of raw materials that are there for the taking and that are framed as inputs to particular types of productive activity. As a legal construct, the biopolitical public domain shapes practices of appropriation and use of personal information in (...) two complementary and interrelated ways. First, it constitutes personal information as available and potentially valuable: as a pool of materials that may be freely appropriated as inputs to economic production. That framing supports the reorganization of sociotechnical activity in ways directed toward extraction and appropriation. Second, the biopolitical public domain constitutes the personal information harvested within networked information environments as raw. That framing creates the backdrop for culturally situated techniques of knowledge production and for the logic that designates those techniques as sites of legal privilege. (shrink)

By engaging with Giorgio Agamben’s article on the Italian government’s measures during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, we argue that COVID-19 points to the limits of the classical biopolitical and thanatopolitical logics of analysis and therefore requires a new conceptual framework. The outbreak of COVID-19 is an example of zoonotic globalisation in which the human species as a biological and geological actor is merely one among many other species that influence biological and geological processes on Earth, thus challenging (...) humanist conceptualisations of politics. Here, the human role in politics is decentralised by thinking the virus as one of the actors that exert influence on how the political sphere is governed. We argue that the virus is the epitome of the ungovernable – an entity or broadly a historical challenge that cannot be subjected to existing mode of governing – due to its interstitial and borderline character, resting between the ontological roots of the dominant modes of governing bios and geos, and challenging them by merely existing. We draw upon the works of Ghassan Hage, Nils Bubandt, Elizabeth Povinelli, and Donna Haraway to interrogate the limits of biopolitics and diagnose theoretical conundrums stemming from the division of nature vs. culture and life vs. nonlife entrenched in the existing social-political paradigms. Rather than providing finite answers about the role of the virus as a non-human actor in the political sphere, we raise questions as to how and why it should matter. (shrink)

This article focuses on the interrelationship of law and life in human rights. It does this in order to theorize the normative status of contemporary biopower. To do this, the case law of Article 2 on the right to life of the European Convention on Human Rights is analysed. It argues that the juridical interpretation and application of the right to life produces a differentiated governmental management of life. It is established that: 1) Article 2 orients governmental techniques to lives (...) in order to ensure that both deprivation and protection of lives is lawful; 2) A proper application of Article 2 grounds itself on a proper discrimination of lives which causes Article 2 to be applied universally but not uniformly to all juridical subjects; 3) The jurisprudence of Article 2 is theoretically appreciable only in a ‘politics of life’. Finally, the article ends with a plea to analyse other fundamental human rights in the context of ‘biopolitical governmentality’. (shrink)

This anthology collects the texts that defined the concept of biopolitics, which has become so significant throughout the humanities and social sciences today. The far-reaching influence of the biopolitical—the relation of politics to life, or the state to the body—is not surprising given its centrality to matters such as healthcare, abortion, immigration, and the global distribution of essential medicines and medical technologies. Michel Foucault gave new and unprecedented meaning to the term "biopolitics" in his 1976 essay "Right of (...) Death and Power over Life." In this anthology, that touchstone piece is followed by essays in which biopolitics is implicitly anticipated as a problem by Hannah Arendt and later altered, critiqued, deconstructed, and refined by major political and social theorists who explicitly engaged with Foucault's ideas. By focusing on the concept of biopolitics, rather than applying it to specific events and phenomena, this Reader provides an enduring framework for assessing the central problematics of modern political thought. _Contributors_. Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Timothy Campbell, Gilles Deleuze, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt, Achille Mbembe, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Adam Sitze, Peter Sloterdijk, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek. (shrink)

Biopolitics and Utopia explores the intersection of biopolitics and utopian thought. As an interdisciplinary work, it addresses many salient biopolitical issues (state and medical interventions in the body, fears over scientific progress, resistance to state biopower, and ethical concerns), while also engaging in the utopian drive behind biopolitical efforts. The book is structured into four main sections: Actions, Speculations, Reactions, and Reflections. The chapters in Actions examine the practices of direct, medical intervention to 'normalize' citizens' bodies. The next (...) section, Speculations, approaches the intersection of utopia and biopolitics through a literary lens, reviewing science fiction texts as expressions of cultural and social fears about scientific progress. Reactions outlines potential acts of resistance in the face of biopower. Finally, Reflections offers a more philosophical essay, which engages the reader in the potential for creating an ethics for scientific standards. (shrink)

With the coronavirus pandemic and the Omicron variant once again forcing countries into lockdown, this essay seeks to outline a Foucauldian critique of various legal measures taken by the Danish government to cope with COVID-19 during the first year and a half of the pandemic. The essay takes a critical look at the extra-legal measures employed by the Danish government, as the Danish politicians attempted to halt the spread of the, now almost forgotten, Cluster 5 COVID-19 variant. This situation will (...) serve as a critical point from where to start using Foucault’s writings on life and biopolitics in order to expose various legally problematic governmental decisions that became visible during the handling of COVID-19 in general and the Cluster 5 mutation in particular. Reframing the pandemic within Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, this essay concludes that the state of exception has led to an increase in biopolitical logic, where some lives have come to matter more than others. As a critical counterpoint to this logic, the conclusion suggests that the notion of biocommunism could provide a suitable reconfiguration of communism. A reconfiguration that could mitigate some of the issues related to biopolitics is uncovered earlier in the essay. (shrink)

Michel Foucault claimed that the term biopolitics can be fully understood only within the context of modern forms of governing society. From this perspective, the development of modern medical knowledge, the re-organization of the hospital as a health institution, the growing attention to issues related to birth and population, and the rise of biological racism can be attributed to the influence of economic rationality on the most influential political strategies. In this book, Marzocca further explores the crucial role that (...) the family structure has played throughout the history of biopolitics, explaining how family is firstly a place of government of life as well as a means to extend various forms of biopower to the whole society. By analysing the works of key figures in the debate on biopolitics - such as Agamben, Negri, Esposito, Rose, Cooper, Lemke, among others - this volume offers a systematic examination of this notion also in relation to the current ecological crisis, addressing fundamental problems of modern and contemporary political thought. (shrink)

Foucault’s concept of ‘biopolitics’ has sparked a lively debate within critical theory, although Foucault himself rarely used it after The History of Sexuality, Volume 1. In this chapter I argue that the reasons both for the way ‘biopolitics’ stirred Foucault’s readers and for his subsequent abandonment are to be found in the relation between Foucault’s model of critique and the role ‘biopolitics’ plays in it: it names the counter-truths derived from Foucault’s critical diagnosis of the dispositif of (...) sexuality. Since ‘biopolitics’ was introduced as a notion with a specific critical function closely tied to Foucault’s model of critique, I first explicate this model of critique as a diagnostic practice of prefigurative emancipation before re-reading Le Volonté de Savoir from this methodological perspective. After Le Volonté Savoir, Foucault tried turning ‘biopolitics’ into a descriptive term, no longer naming the critical diagnosis but the object to be criticised. Yet within Foucault’s model of critique, this required him to produce a new critical diagnosis which he never did. The implication for contemporary usages of ‘biopolitics’ in critical theory is that it either needs to develop its own counter-truths from a critical analysis of biopolitics or use a different model of critique. (shrink)

A missed phone call. A misheard word. An inaudible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement. Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between (...) biopolitical theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings. Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of "over-hearings" between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability. Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality's subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening. Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound's capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered. (shrink)

This book is a critical attempt to approach world cinema in a new global frame that updates the national frame of territorial cinemas and the transnational frame of their interplay. The global frame implies the reintegration of border-crossing forces onto the postpolitical plane of troubled globalization with two ethical facets: the soft ethical inclusion of differences in multicultural, neoliberal systems and their hard ethical symptoms of fundamentalist exclusion and terror. Reflecting both, global cinema is formulated as staging crucial challenges that (...) today's globalism and its antinomies bring to the notions of subjectivity and community. Many films indeed depict the antagonism between the inclusive global system and its excluded remnants, allegorizing the impossible political change in various modes of catastrophe and nihilism. A global community often takes on a totalized network of sovereign violence and (counter)terror stuck in the impasse of utopian imagination. Yet some films suggest alternative ethics irreducible to collective politics when abject figures, deprived of social subjectivity and rights, become contingent agents of existential 'gift-giving' by fostering commonality without community, solidarity without unity. The psychoanalytic notion of abjection is redefined here as both the biopolitical mode of bare life and its potential for the ethical agency that opens atopian, if not utopian, networking on the edge of the global regime beyond the problematic 'soft/hard' ethics of tolerance/violence or pity/hate. This precarious yet precious abject agency is explored through a vast net of globally circulating contemporary films and a core cluster of political, ethical, and psychoanalytic philosophies. (shrink)

Many scholars have historicized biopolitics with reference to the emergence of sovereign nations and their colonial extensions over the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. This article begins to conceptualize and trace the history of biopolitics beyond the nation, arguing that the history of world health - the great 20th-century reach of 19th-century health and hygiene - should be understood as a vital politics of population on a newly large field of play. This substantive history of world health and (...) world population is analysed as sites for thinking about global bio-politics; and the article looks seriously at the interwar period as a point at which ‘the world’ (or Hardt and Negri’s ‘Empire’) was already challenging the idea of ‘inter/national’. (shrink)

The problematic of biopolitics has become increasingly important in the social sciences. Inaugurated by Michel Foucault's genealogical research on the governance of sexuality, crime and mental illness in modern Europe, the research on biopolitics has developed into a broader interdisciplinary orientation, addressing the rationalities of power over living beings in diverse spatial and temporal contexts. The development of the research on biopolitics in recent years has been characterized by two tendencies: the increasingly sophisticated theoretical engagement with the (...) idea of power over and the government of life that both elaborated and challenged the Foucauldian canon and the detailed and empirically rich investigation of the concrete aspects of the government of life in contemporary societies. Unfortunately, the two tendencies have often developed in isolation from each other, resulting in the presence of at least two debates on biopolitics: the historico-philosophical and the empirical one. This Handbook brings these two debates together, combining theoretical sophistication and empirical rigour. The volume is divided into five sections. While the first two deal with the history of the concept and contemporary theoretical debates on it, the remaining three comprise the prime sites of contemporary interdisciplinary research on biopolitics: economy, security and technology. Featuring previously unpublished articles by the leading scholars in the field, this wide-ranging and accessible companion will both serve as an introduction to the diverse research on biopolitics for undergraduate students and appeal to more advanced audiences interested in the current state of the art in biopolitics studies. (shrink)

Scholar of religion Karl Kerényi’s last book, Dionysos, is a grand attempt at reinterpreting ζωη ( zoe ), the Greek concept of indestructible life, which he distinguishes from βίος (bios), finite life. In Kerényi’s view, the meaning and sensual experience of zoe was expressed in its richest form in the Cretan beginnings of the cult of Dionysos. The major characteristics of this cult, as Kerényi describes, were beyond the cultural, political, and sexual limits of the Christian interpretations of life and (...) nature. Searching for modern analogies to zoe , Kerényi explains the idea in relation to molecular biology’s minimum definition of life. Despite the fact that Kerényi’s book contains only minor references to contemporary philosophy, the philosophical consequences of his interpretations of Dionysos are not only radical but outline a notion of biopolitics far in advance of the mid- to late 20 th -century development of it. By the affirmation of indestructible life and animality , Kerényi proposes a new humanism that moves beyond the limits of Kantian anthropology and also takes a radically different perspective to that of Heidegger’s philosophy of being, or Agamben’s notion of biopolitics. According to Kerényi’s investigations, since this alternative humanism, which is based on the radical recognition of the individuality and diversity of life forms, was once possible in an earlier stage of human culture, it is possible to reanimate it in order to shape anew how zoe is understood and therefore lived. Our relation to nature can thereby undergo a Dionysian transvaluation and assign us new responsibilities as well as open up a new trajectory for the 21 st -century human. (shrink)

A principal challenge facing the progressive bioethics project is the crafting of a consistent message on biopolitical issues that divide progressives. -/- The regulation of enhancement technologies is one of the issues central to this emerging biopolitics, pitting progressive defenders of enhancement, “technoprogressives,” against progressive critics. This essay [PDF] will argue that technoprogressive biopolitics express the consistent application of the core progressive values of the Enlightenment: the right of individuals to control their own bodies, brains and reproduction according (...) to their own conscience, under democratic states that work for the public good. -/- Insofar as left bioconservatives want to ensure the safety of therapies and their equitable distribution, these concerns can be addressed by thorough and independent regulation and a universal health care system, and a progressive bioethics of enhancement can unite both enthusiasts and skeptics. Insofar as bioconservative concerns are motivated by deeper hostility to the Enlightenment project however, by assertion of pre-modern reverence for human uniqueness for instance, then a common program is unlikely. -/- imageAfter briefly reviewing the political history and contemporary landscape of biopolitical debates about enhancement, the essay outlines three meta-policy contexts that will impact future biopolicy: the pressure to establish a universal, cost-effective health insurance system, the aging of industrial societies, and globalization. Technoprogressive appeals are outlined that can appeal to key constituencies, and build a majority coalition in support of progressive change. Finally, some guiding principles for a technoprogressive approach to biopolicy are offered. (shrink)

While Foucault’s work on biopolitics continues to inspire diverse studies in a variety of disciplines, it has largely been missing from the debates on the possibility of “affirmative biopolitics” which have been primarily influenced by the work of Agamben and Esposito. This article restores Foucault’s work to these debates, proposing that his final lecture course at the Collège de France in 1983–1984 developed a paradigm of affirmative biopolitics in the reading of the Cynic practice of truth-telling. The (...) Cynic problematization of the relation between truth and life and their transvaluation of conventional truths by relocating them to the domain of bare life not only seeks to transform one’s life in accordance with the truth but also, through the confrontation with the existing conventions and norms, to transform the world as such. Cynic parrhesia is thus biopolitical, insofar as it reclaims the power of one’s life from the social order and its rationalities of government and applies it to oneself, investing one’s existence with truth. Since Foucault developed this reading of Cynicism in the context of his political engagement on behalf on East European dissidents, the article proceeds to analyse the resonances between parrhesia and Václav Havel’s idea of “living within the truth,” elaborating the biopolitical significance of both practices. We conclude by addressing the implications of our interpretation for Foucault scholarship and the wider debates on biopolitics. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years, biopolitics has become an established research field within the humanities and the social sciences. However, scholars agree that the academic status of biopolitics remains problematic due to the latter’s conceptual fuzziness, unmanageable scope and weak foundations. To address these issues, biopolitics theorists have engaged in reflexive efforts to convert biopolitics into a respectable discipline with a clear definition, research agenda and canon. In this article, I examine the reflexive biopolitics scholarship (...) that has emerged in the last decade and conclude that while biopolitics may not satisfy the criteria for achieving disciplinary respectability due to the chief aporia that both underpins and undermines the academic biopolitics project – namely, its seemingly infinite reach – the structure of biopolitics matches that of experimental knowledge, also known as counterscience, the university without condition and nomad science. (shrink)

While the governance of human existence is organised ever-increasingly around life and its potential to proliferate beyond all limits, much critical reflection on the phenomenon is underpinned by considerations about the very negation of life, death. The challenge is to construct an alternative understanding of human existence that is truer to the complexity of the present, biopolitical moment. Palladino responds to the challenge by drawing upon philosophical, historical and sociological modes of inquiry to examine key developments in the history of (...) biomedical understanding of ageing and death. He combines this genealogy with close reflection upon its implications for a critical and effective reading of Foucault's and Deleuze's foundational work on the relationship between life, death and embodied existence. Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Death proposes that the central task of contemporary critical thought is to find ways of coordinating different ways of thinking about molecules, populations and the mortality of the human organism without transforming the notion of life itself into the new transcendent truth that would take the place once occupied by God and Man. (shrink)

Public health advocates, government agencies, and commercial organizations increasingly use nutritional science to guide food choice and diet as a way of promoting health, preventing disease, or marketing products. We argue that in many instances such references to nutritional science can be characterized as nutritional scientism. We examine three manifestations of nutritional scientism: the simplification of complex science to increase the persuasiveness of dietary guidance, superficial and honorific references to science in order to justify cultural or ideological views about food (...) and health, and the presumption that nutrition is the primary value of food. This paper examines these forms of nutritional scientism in the context of biopolitics to address bioethical concerns related to the misuse of scientific evidence to make claims regarding the effect of diet on health. We argue that nutritional scientism has ethical implications for individual responsibility and freedom, concerning iatrogenic harm, and for well-being. (shrink)

This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bı´os. The key to this affirmative biopolitics lies in the relationship between the munus, a form of gift that is the root of communitas and immunitas, and the gift discourse that developed throughout the 20th century. The article expands upon Esposito’s interpretation of four theoretical sources that are crucial to his biopolitical perspective: Mauss and the gift-exchange tradition; Hobbes’s social contract theory, (...) which Esposito presents as the anti-gift that founded modernity’s thanatopolitical ‘immunization paradigm’; Bataille’s dangerous concept of sacrifice, which gestures toward an affirmative biopolitical community; and, finally, Jean-Luc Nancy’s essay, L’Intrus, which reflects on the near-decade Nancy lived as the recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. This discussion of Mauss, Hobbes and Bataille is used to further develop Esposito’s interpretation of L’Intrus in a manner that supports his conception of an affirmative biopolitics ‘of, not over, life’. (shrink)

This article deals with the way in which Michel Foucault first introduced the notion of ‘biopolitics’ through the referential frame of sexuality and psychoanalysis. It focuses on the concept that is utterly and conspicuously missing from Foucault's account, in The History of Sexuality, of the psychoanalytic take on sexuality — namely, the unconscious. It argues that this omission has important and far-reaching consequences for the concept of biopolitics as such.

Roberto Esposito is one of the most prolific and important exponents of contemporary Italian political theory.

The general idea of this investigation is to emphasize the elusiveness of the concept of terrorism and the pitfalls of the so-called “War on Terror” by way of confronting, roughly, the reflections made in the immediate following of 9/11 by Habermas and Derrida on the legacy of Enlightenment, globalization and tolerance, with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics seen as the modern political paradigm and Agamben’s understanding of “the state of exception” in the context of liberal democratic governments. The main argument (...) will state that the modern Western individual and the modern terrorist are in a way linked together as products of the same biopolitical network. So I shall argue that religious fundamentalism and international terrorism are not external factors to the Western civilization, nor even some radical late forms of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ threatening the Western ‘way of life,’ but phenomena revealing what we could call, borrowing J. Derrida’s biological metaphor, a “crisis of autoimmunization” of Western neo-liberal democracies. The only long-term solution to the threat of global terrorism would have to involve the “deconstruction” of our common notion of tolerance and the experience of an unconditional hospitality that is actually the inversion of the terrorist action that is threatening us “from within,” according to Derrida. But we cannot reasonably hope for this radical change in our relationship to others unless we aren’t really trying to modify the relationship to the self that is prevalent in contemporary Western societies: a vision of us as self-encapsulated monads or ‘nuclear’ selves, for whom genuine community life is, at the most, only a nostalgic evocation of a past long gone, and the respect for the others, a strategic name for moral indifference. (shrink)

One of the most intriguing bio-objects in the emerging field of regenerative medicine is umbilical cord blood. Employed in existing haematological therapies, but also loaded with potentialities for future uses, cord blood has been lately the focus of a regulatory debate which confronts public and private forms of biobanking. This article explores the political and anthropological side of this debate, describing the ways in which different health practices related to the umbilical cord (and to its symbolic sibling, the placenta) have (...) been involved in processes of societal production and reproduction. Through the use of ethnological and historical data, and their comparison with current practices, I contend that the technical manipulation of cords and placentas goes much longer into the past than what a first glance suggests, and that these two objects can be understood as biological spaces in which forms of social belonging and versions of the societal bond are at play. The current conflict between public and private cord blood banks is therefore interpreted as part of a longer history of bodily practices, and as reflecting recent mutations in the biopolitical constitution of advanced liberal societies. (shrink)

BackgroundUndocumented migrants experience multiple institutional and legal barriers when trying to access healthcare services. Due to such limitations, healthcare workers often experience ethical dilemmas when caring for undocumented migrants. This article aims to understand how individual healthcare workers who regularly take care of undocumented migrants deal with these dilemmas in practice. So far, the role of healthcare workers in this context has mainly been theorized through the lens of biopolitics, conceiving of healthcare workers as merely obedient instruments of humanitarian (...) government or gatekeeping.MethodsBased on semi-structured, in-depth interviews and ethnographic observations with healthcare workers in Belgium, we explore how they ascribe meaning, reflect upon and give shape to care practices in relation to undocumented migrants. We use Foucault’s later work on care of the self to interpret the accounts given by the healthcare workers.ResultsHealthcare workers in clinical roles exercise a certain degree of freedom in relation to the existing limitations to healthcare access of undocumented migrants. They developed techniques such as purposefully being inattentive to the undocumented status of the migrants. They also try to master their affective responses and transform their bodily attitude towards undocumented patients. They perform practical mental exercises to remind themselves of their role or position in the wider healthcare system and about their commitment to treat all patients equally. These techniques and exercises are inspired by colleagues who function as role models, inspiring them to relate in an ethical way to limitations in healthcare access. The developed care practices sometimes reproduce, sometimes transform the legal and institutional limitations to care for undocumented migrants.ConclusionsThe findings nuance the biopolitical analysis regarding the role of healthcare workers in healthcare delivery to undocumented migrants that has been dominant so far. Theoretically this article provides a reconceptualization of healthcare ethics as care of the self, an ethical practice that is somewhat independent of the traditional professional ethics.Trial Registration Medical ethics committee UZ Jette, Brussels, Belgium – Registration date: 18/05/2016 – Registration number: B.U.N. 143201628279. (shrink)

This article seeks to do two things: articulate the function of biopolitics as a necessary correlate to human exceptionalism, and argue for the factory farm as a supplementary inverse of biopolitical logic. Human exceptionalism is based fundamentally in a desire to create protected lives, and lives that can be, or even need to be, exterminated. In other words, human exceptionalism is the very definition of biopolitics. However, biopolitical theory was mostly developed around thinking through issues of human genocides, (...) particularly the Nazi Lager. Despite attempts to think the analogies between Auschwitz and a factory farm, such analogies ignore important historical and theoretical specificities. While the biopolitical is an important, even necessary, theoretical understanding of humans’ relations to other animals, it is not sufficient for thinking the realities of factory farming. We need a conceptual apparatus not rooted in the ability to think the horrors of human genocide, but one rooted in the ability to think the horrors of the factory farm. Thus I propose the animals in the factory farm exist in the political ontology of deading life; that is beings who should be alive, but are somehow already dead. This conceptual apparatus is not meant to oppose the thought of the biopolitical, it is meant to supplement the biopolitical—to allow us to think with and beyond the biopolitical. (shrink)

I examine the tension between biopolitics and necropolitics through three themes that I have perceived and that are related to my life in Japan. First, I examine the transformation of hospitals and medical care, particularly for the elderly, through my experience of sharing the end of my mother’s life. Modern medicine has made great achievements in treating diseases that used to be fatal, but it has become institutionalized in the context of Big Pharma interests, with no insight into the (...) natural ageing and death of human beings. Second, I discuss how the ecological worldview on parasitism and symbiosis has been distorted by industrial logic, drawing on the work of my esteemed friend and parasitologist Professor Koichiro Fujita, who passed away in 2021. Finally, with regard to the Covid-19 pandemic, I would argue that it is not a sudden phenomenon triggered by a new virus, but in a sense a disaster that has been prepared for decades and must be seen as a war using bioengineering and epidemiology as weapons, rather than tanks and bombs. (shrink)

In this essay we take stock of the shortcomings, successes, and promises of ‘biopolitics' to understand and frame global health crises such as COVID-19. We claim that rather than thinking in terms of a special relationship between Western modernity and biopolitics, it is better to look at a longer and more global histories of populations’ politics of life and health to situate present and future responses to ecological crises. Normatively, we argue for an affirmative biopolitics, that at (...) once de-securitizes our approach to our biosocial condition and expands the politics of the human estate to other molar and molecular dimensions. (shrink)

This article examines discourse on immunity in general public engagements with pandemic influenza in light of critical theory on immuno-politics and bodily integrity. Interview and focus group discussions on influenza with members of the general public reveal that, despite endorsement of government advice on how to avoid infection, influenza is seen as, ultimately, unavoidable. In place of prevention, members of the general public speak of immunity as the means of coping with influenza infection. Such talk on corporeal life under microbial (...) threat is informed by self/not-self, network and ‘choice’ immunity, and therefore makes considerable allowance for cosmopolitan traffic with others, microbes, ‘dirt’ and immune-boosting consumer products. The immuno-political orientation of members of the general public, therefore, appears to trend towards a productive cosmopolitanism that contrasts with more orthodox bioscientific and governmental approaches to pandemic influenza. We reflect on the implications of the immuno-cosmopolitanism of everyday life for the advent of global public health emergency and for biopolitical rule in general. (shrink)

Since Foucault introduced the notion of biopolitics, it has been fiercely debated—usually in highly generalized terms—how to interpret and use this concept. This article argues that these discussions need to be situated, as biopolitics have features that do not travel from one site to the next. This becomes apparent if we attend to an aspect of biopolitics that has only received scant attention so far: the knowledge practices required to constitute populations as intelligible objects of government. To (...) illustrate this point, the article focuses on processes of biopolitical bordering: the delineation of the target population that is to be known via statistical practices. Drawing on the example of Estonia I show that methodological decisions involved in this work have important biopolitical implications as they affect the size and composition of the population, thus shaping the design of programmes of government aiming at its regulation. (shrink)

This paper is a review essay of Ottavio Marzocca, Biopolitics for Beginners. Knowledge of Life and Government of People, Milan/Udine: Mimesis International, 2020. Pp. 457. ISBN: 9788869771781 (paperback). It focuses on Marzocca's investigations into biopolitics, a topic of which the author offers an original ecological reconfiguration. The proposed reflections, which address the recent pandemic crisis of COVID-19, are developed from the work of Foucault but are not limited to this thinker. In fact, they offer an articulate examination of (...) the issue by also taking into broad consideration the thought of authors such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Donzelot, Robert Castel, Pierre Rosanvallon, Nikolas Rose, Melinda Cooper and Gregory Bateson. (shrink)