Biopolitics and national identities: between liberalism and totalization , Nationalities Papers, 45:1, 1-7 (original) (raw)
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Identity politics, Liberalism, and the Democratizing Power of Biopolitics (Constellations, 2020)
Constellations, 2020
This article theorizes democratic politics as a continual struggle to expand the sphere of the political over against attempts to assert a more or less strict demarcation between political space and social or private life. To this end, the specific analysis I offer here tries to reframe the logic and utility of identity politics as a strategy or practice of democratic struggle by linking it to Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. After drawing on recent work in political theory that defines identity politics on the basis of its critical universality, I offer a brief genealogy of identity politics that rearticulates this controversial form of politics as an adaptive (and adapting) response to the polyvalent ways in which liberalism has been employed to shield private power from democratic challenge. By reframing identity politics as a population- or demographic-based political rationality that tries to overcome the specific democratic limitations of liberalism—and especially liberalism’s unique form of universality—I conclude the article by arguing that contemporary identity politics constitutes a form of democratic biopolitics. Rethinking biopolitics in this manner offers an alternative to the hegemonic interpretation of the concept produced by theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, and it also suggests certain challenges, but also opportunities, for differently understanding and applying the political theory of Michel Foucault today.
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 .
A Companion to Political Geography, 2015
In view of the so-called biopolitical turn, this chapter traces the genealogies of the critical understanding of biopolitics in human geography, and more specifically in political geography. It highlights two routes for such genealogies – one via Foucault's legacy as well as Agamben's recent readings of biopolitics, while the other originates from the Geopolitik tradition. Covering the well-known route via Foucault and Agamben, the chapter goes beyond this conventional narrative, to introduce the genealogical accounts of biopolitics offered by Italian political philosophers as well as the German sociologist Lemke. It then seeks to explore the multiple “new” geographies inspired by the “biopolitical imperative.” The chapter ends by reflecting on the essential link between the “bio” and the “geo,” recalling the historical concept of living/vital space and the geopolitical ontologies of the Third Reich.
Biopolitics Among the Disciplines
History and Theory, 2019
A new wave of publications attempts to bring together theory and history in order to reconsider the past, present, and future in light of a looming catastrophe. Whether in political theory, sociology, anthropology, or intellectual history, scholars are attempting to reflect about the present beyond the old boundaries that separate left and right, inner and outer, civilian and solider, friend and enemy. Three recent publications, by Catherine Mills, Didier Fassin, and an anthology edited by Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzel, do so by considering the growth of biopolitical critique in their respective disciplines.
Biocommunism and its Role as it Overcomes Biopolitics
Polish Sociological Review, 2020
Biopolitics is often understood as a form of power that is exercised over a population, not over people. Within this paradigm, a population is understood objectively as wealth, manpower, labour capacity, but also demographically as the object of statistical analysis. If biocommunism is to gain any political significance, if it is to become not only the result of the birth of biopower but also an active and actual agent of new political devices, then it must face the problem of "population empowerment." In this process of empowerment, "power over life" is to be transformed into "the power of life itself." In this article, the author tries to develop the idea of biocommunism according to which life is nothing but the fold of being onto itself. Up to now, we have thought of politics as what subsists, thanks to the division and articulation of life, as a separation of life from itself that qualifies it on different occasions as human, animal, or vegetal. For biocommunism, life is a form generated by a multitude of living forms.
Biopolitics and Russian Studies: An Introduction
Russian Politics, 2018
This introductory article explains how the concept of biopolitics can be used as an analytical tool in the sphere of Russian studies. The author elucidates different approaches to the idea of biopolitics in contemporary political philosophy, and relates the extant theoretical debate to the ongoing political and academic discussions on power and identity in Russia, both from domestic and international perspectives. He claims that biopolitical vocabulary is a nuanced cognitive instrument for unpacking a plethora of social and cultural dimensions inherent to relations of power, and further conceptualizing the specificity of post-Soviet illiberal regimes.