Biocriticism, or How I Learned to Love Disease (original) (raw)
Related papers
All Diseased Things Are Critics
Communication and the Public, 2020
This essay argues that pathology as an analytical form functions as the ethical critique of mutual vulnerability. In the broad sense of assessing what is life-giving and life-taking, a sustained critical engagement with pathological forms circulating through public life positions the study of rhetoric as a kind of immunotherapy for democracy. In that sense, embracing pathology as a critical analytic accepts biopower (expansively construed) as the operative framework for politics, which would seem like a kind of surrender to life-under-assault as the landscape of power. However, if wounds and their pathologies are understood as ethically ambiguous, it is possible to envision the critical potential of pathologia not only as immunotherapeutic but also as constitutive of new configurations of being together. Contrasted with a conception of pathology that presupposes a fixed difference between vital and morbid conditions, it is suggested that pathology be more precisely considered as the ethically ambiguous project of defining vitality and life that is “more than normal.”
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 .
Women’s Work in Revolt! Feminist Struggle and Insurrectionary Memory discussion event, 2017
This talk will explore how bodies became so semiotically and ethically productive in recent political vocabularies, and will attempt to trace a line to theories of social reproduction and abstraction. With the emergence of 'the body' as the central signifier of much poststructuralist and postfoundationalist cultural theory and philosophy some decades ago, and the
"Changing Life? Fortunes and Misfortunes of "Biopolitics" in the Age of Covid-19"
Crisis and Critique (Vol. 7, Issue 3), 2020
The ongoing pandemic seems to have has dramatically affirmed the relevance of the notion of biopolitics and the subject of life more broadly. The notion was, however, developed by Michel Foucault in a very different social and political context from that of ours. After investigating the background and implications of his analysis, this article focuses on Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito's reappropriation of biopolitics and the metaphysical turn that they brought about. Besides these approaches, the notions of bio-economy and bio-capitalism open up new pathways that are more attentive to today's economic and social realities. Within the light of these questions and Agamben's and Esposito's theoretical elaborations, Marxist approaches to metabolism and social reproduction apprehend the question of life in an decisive way, directly connected to the will to construct an alternative to the form of Disaster Capitalism that currently menaces nature and humanity.
Resisting the Present: Biopower in the Face of the Event (Some Notes on Monstrous Lives)
CR: The New Centennial Review, 2019
In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. The main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious forms-of-life and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this essay, I interrogate the theoretical presuppositions of biopolitical rationality. I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers using biopolitics as an interpretative model. I re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower finds itself anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions of ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’ and Francesco Vitale’s work on ‘biodeconstruction’, I deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality and attempt to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. In particular, I follow the tracks of “the monster” in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Malabou. Foucault tells us that the monster is a singular figure, parasitic and subversive, beckoning a life beyond life, at once organic and non-organic, located at the limit between the normal and the exceptional, and exceeding the scope of biopolitical normativity in both theoretical and practical terms. It exists at the intersection of what Foucault names “the symbolics of blood” and “the analytics of sex”. As such, it materialises a self-transformative dimension of the living which remains, I argue, inadequate to Malabou’s representation of plasticity. The monstrous is a self-deconstructive motif calling for another biopolitical rationality, before or beyond ontological reductions or reconstructions.
2021
In this thesis I explore through literary texts new perspectives on the biopolitical devices and discourses that permeate contemporary western societies. To this end, I examine their representations in Jerusalem, A Man: Klaus Klump, and Joseph Walser’s Machine, by Gonçalo M. Tavares, in “Fernando Morales, This Is Your Death!”, The Walkers, and Nexhuman, by Francesco Verso, in Intrusion and The Execution Channel, by Ken MacLeod, and in The Hunger Games trilogy, by Suzanne Collins. I start from the idea that by the beginning of the 21st century, bios and polis, life and politics have become almost completely juxtaposed, and that although the body is submitted to a constant and ubiquitous control, its materiality also constitutes a site of resistance. I go on to assess through a comparative analysis the connections and the differences between the selected novels of these four writers, with the intention of understanding how their dystopian aesthetics and essayistic dimension may potent...
Risk, Fear and Immunity: Reinventing the Political in the Age of Biopolitics
As an update of his continual concern for contemporary risk society since 1980s, Ulrich Beck's latest work World at Risk (2009) alerts us to the deterritorializing effects of global risk on national, geographical, and disciplinary boundaries. On an increasingly global scale, risk mixes up natives and foreigners, while risk calculus connects natural, technical and social sciences, and incorporates almost all aspects of everyday life. Fear, accordingly, spreads out as a kind of carrier that binds so-called global, multicultural civil society; it even prospers as a lucrative risky business. Such an era has witnessed a structural transformation of the roles of the state and various biopolitical institutions, of life itself, of subjectivity and agency. Drawing on Žižek's theory of ideology critique and radical ethics and politics, this paper firstly presents a critical survey of contemporary biopolitics, focusing on how health needs contagion as its uncanny double to define and immunize itself, and on how new forms of biomedical experts and knowledge of life flourish with uncertainty and administer our body and life. All of these will be discussed in relation to theoretical accounts of the contemporary risk society and culture of fear to critically look at how risk and fear function as depoliticizing biopolitical instruments for disavowing social antagonism. Theorists such as Judith Butler and Roberto Esposito caution us against the (auto)immunitary biopolitical logic and call for vulnerability, precariousness and finitude to be adopted as the ethical principles for a " positive " biopolitics, while this paper will query whether human subjects are victimized and depoliticized in their discourses. The final part of this paper will turn to Žižek's recent formulation of radical ethics and politics to address the possibility of reinventing the political in contemporary biopolitics.
Deconstruction and bio-politics: Asymmetrical visuality, spacing, power
2016
Introduction This chapter speculatively investigates the relationship between Jacques Derrida’s metaphysical critique, deconstruction, and Michel Foucault’s conception of the politics of life, bio-politics. Drawing on crucial recent works by Kalpana Rahita Seshadri 1 and Kevin Attell 2 which have posited strong connections between Derrida and ‘the greatest contemporary divulgator of Foucault’s biopolitical narrative’, Giorgio Agamben, 3 the chapter then examines Foucault’s original bio-political thinking – namely his work on Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’ – in an attempt to connect this to a lesser-known area of Derrida’s deconstructive juridical thought.