Global Liberal Governance: Biopolitics, Security and War (original) (raw)
Related papers
In Wilmer, S. and Zukauskaite, A. (eds.), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies, 57-73., 2016
Forty years ago, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault first pronounced in a lecture the semantic merger of life and politics that would shape his subsequent work and the ensuing theoretical debates (Foucault 2000a, 137). 1 His notion of "biopolitics" points to a historical shift at the threshold of modernity. According to Foucault, biopolitics marks a discontinuity in political practice since it places life at the center of political rationalities and technologies. He distinguishes historically and analytically between two dimensions of biopolitics: the disciplining of the individual body and the social regulation of the population. Furthermore, Foucault's concept signals a theoretical critique of the sovereign paradigm of power. According to this model, power is exercised as interdiction and repression in a framework of law and legality. In contrast Foucault stresses the productive capacity of power, which cannot be reduced to the ancient sovereign "right of death." While sovereignty seized hold of life in order to suppress it, the new life-administering power is dedicated to inciting, reinforcing, monitoring and optimizing the forces under its control .
2018
This book addresses the unprecedented convergence between the digital and the corporeal in the life sciences and turns to Foucault's biopolitics in order to understand how life is being turned into a technological object. It examines a wide range of bioscientific knowledge practices that allow life to be known through codes that can be shared (copied), owned (claimed, and managed) and optimised (remade through codes based on standard language and biotech engineering visions). The book's approach is captured in the title, which refers to 'the biopolitical'. The authors argue that through discussions of political theories of sovereignty and related geopolitical conceptions of nature and society, we can understand how crucially important it is that life is constantly unsettling and disrupting the established and familiar ordering of the material world and the related ways of thinking and acting politically. The biopolitical dynamics involved are conceptualised as the 'metacode of life', which refers to the shifting configurations of living materiality and the merging of conventional boundaries between the natural and artificial, the living and non-living. The result is a globalising world in which the need for an alternative has become a core part of its political and legal instability, and the authors identify a number of possible alternative platforms to understand life and the living as framed by the 'metacodes' of life. This book will appeal to scholars of science and technology studies, as well as scholars of the sociology, philosophy, and anthropology of science, who are seeking to understand social and technical heterogeneity as a characteristic of the life sciences.
Biopolitics, Totalitarianism, and Globalization
Ángel Prior and Ángel Rivero (eds.), Ágnes Heller and Hannah Arendt: A Dialogue, Newcastle upon Tyne (UK), Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2018, pp. 94-120.
After the end of the Cold War, philosophical works that refer to the studies of Michel Foucault and Hannah Arendt in order to link the concepts of biopolitics, totalitarianism and globalization have proliferated. The Hungarian philosophers Ágnes Heller and Ferenc Fehér were the first ones to do so, but later, several Italian philosophers have aroused great interest, including Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri and Roberto Esposito. In this paper, I first discuss how these three authors make use of these three concepts; second, I propose a more considerate reinterpretation of the links between Foucault and Arendt; and, finally, I outline a new historical-political ontology to comprehend our present time.
Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2024
What is the relationship between war and liberalism? Over the last two decades, an extensive and influential literature inspired by Michel Foucault’s conception of biopolitics has argued that the ‘war on terror’ is defined by distinctly liberal forms of government. Underpinning this approach is an assumption of the primacy of contingency to the contemporary biopolitical imaginary. Through this governing cosmology, the ‘war on terror’ is said to be motivated by a politics of fear and uncertainty. This article contests this account of liberal war by demonstrating the biopolitical significance of potentiality. By illustrating how a specific configuration of potentiality informs contemporary governing understandings of humanity and temporality, this article argues that liberal war is also waged according to a politics of hope and certainty. Adopting a cosmological approach allows this article to develop the case for a pluriversal conception of biopolitics which better reflects the complex and contradictory character of liberal war in the 21st century. Such a perspective invites us to see how the ‘war on terror’ is not only a reflection of our darkest fears but also of our highest hopes.
Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2019
Showing how Michel Foucault moved from his analyses related to disciplinary power, to biopolitics, biopower, governmentality, and political economy, this article seeks to firstly contextualise the study in Foucault's own methodological and discursive oeuvre with regard to his move from 'disciplinary power' to 'biopolitics' and 'biopower'. This is followed by his very brief and concise description of what the study of biopolitics and biopower entail. Secondly, the focus is on Governmentality/ Governmental Reason, with five sub-topics, viz., political economy, regimes of veridiction, the limiting of the exercise of power by public authorities and 'utility', the birth of governmental rationality extended to a world scale (colonisation and imperialism), and the birth of civil society. The study concludes with some remarks related to the distinction between ideal critique, real transformation, and a few perspectives on what real transformation would entail in the postcolony, as it relates to the role of 'thought', the reason in governance, or governmentality.