Biocriticism, or How I Learned to Love Disease (original) (raw)
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.
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.
The British Journal of Sociology, 2008
Howard S. Becker's prior two books in his current series, Writing for Social Scientists and Tricks of the Trade, are sociologically informed, practical aids to research and writing. Telling About Society, although presented by its publisher as a 'Guide to Writing, Editing and Publishing', is more like Becker's earlier substantive work, where he undermines presumptive authority and opens up a new line of social research by describing the process of producing social facts widely treated as compelling. Readers are likely to leave in search of a guide who could show them how to navigate in the brave new world of sociological work that Becker sees beyond conventional horizons. Becker incorporates experiences from decades of free-spirited investigation, analysing the social production of diverse ways of representing society, including photojournalism, sociological dramatization, maps as used in practical life and in social research texts, charts and tables as used in ethnographies like Davis' Deep South, Goffman's writing style, films, 'legitimate' theatre productions and 'site-specific theatre', reader-friendly fiction by Jane Austin and reader-challenging prose experiments by Georges Perec and Italo Calvino. He establishes that empirical claims about social life are essential to the logic of each genre, and then he usually asks the same questions. Through what series of social relations does the product evolve as it works toward an audience? At each stage of production, how is the product shaped by anticipations of how necessary actors, most especially audiences, will act at subsequent stages? Is there any reason that sociologists do not make use of these perfectly sensible ways of telling about society, other than because they are conventionally impractical? These explorations raise powerful questions that Becker has always left unanswered, but that in his earlier substantive work on deviance and charisma (charisma in the form of revered art) were less problematic when left at rest. If deviance is not a quality of the person but a label conferred based on various social contingencies having nothing to do with the label's target, then we need to study the organization of those contingencies, their histories and the culture that hides them from revelation, and we should be suspicious of what authorities do with the people they have defined as deviant. No matter that Becker would not show where, if anywhere, condemnation and punishment should be directed. There is plenty to do about the social construction of deviance as researchers and as political actors. Conversely, if art is not a self-manifesting sign of genius but the product of a multitude of frequently arbitrary social contingencies that distinguish 'art' from 'craft', and that get only
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.
The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to pursue reflection on the concept of dispositifs for organisation studies; and, second, to discuss the waltz between the expected practices of actors, as rationalized in the definition of the apparatus of biopower, and their actual practising when they are confronted with the implementation of that apparatus. Based on a classical case-study comparative framework, our objective is to develop a practice-based approach to dispositifs in a specific class of public issues dealing with biosecurity and epidemiological control of animal or vegetal populations in farming activities. By means of a diachronic account of the creation and performation of the apparatus of biopolitics (an epidemiological surveillance network for animal diseases and an EU project on the scientific assessment of agro-terrorism), the highly complex alignment of practices for the purpose of public health and risk surveillance of biological resources (that is, biosafety) is problematized. An interpretive analysis of the differences between practices as expected and virtualized within the script of the dispositif, and practices as a subjectivation of the dispositif, is proposed. This practice-based approach to the dispositif of biopower in agriculture affords the possibility of questioning the status of organization studies in the new areas of biopolitics.
On Reconciling Biopolitics and Critical Theory
The European Legacy, 2016
This article examines attempts to reconcile biopolitics and Critical Theory, by drawing on Miguel Vatter's The Republic of the Living (2014). Vatter contends that modern neoliberal government has become biopolitical by incorporating biological life into the calculations of political rationality. To counteract its "normalising" impacts, he recommends an "affirmative politics" of the living, one that escapes the techniques envisaged to administer and govern life. Only a dual approach, he suggests, that fuses both democratic and critical political and economic arguments, can contest neoliberalism. Vatter asserts that the basis of such a critique was first established by the Critical Theory tradition. However, for a biopolitical critique to become effective today, it is crucial to enhance the descriptive and normative understanding of the concept of Zoë or species life within the critical theoretical discourse. This shift in emphasis, however, raises several interpretative tensions with the fundamental perspectives and values of Critical Theory that are not fully acknowledged in Vatter's proposed reconciliation of biopolitics and Critical Theory. It is something of a law of modern life that a novel approach or doctrine comes to the fore by emphasizing its difference from, and superiority to, established forms of thought. The emergence of biopolitics as a potent new critical perspective on contemporary neoliberal society seems to confirm this law. Originating from the works and lectures of Michel Foucault in the late 1970s, its critical thrust underlined its differences from the Marxism that dominated the Western critical discourse of the Left at that time. Foucault's major theoretical departure was to shift the focus of political discussion from economics to power. For him, the key to understanding modern society was to recognize the nature of the "punitive" dimension in all aspects of socialization. Whereas the past allocated absolute authority to the sovereign and consigned the citizen to the passive role of recipient and obedient subject, the new reality of capitalist economics and large populations now required not only a more disciplined but also a more agile and resourceful citizen. To meet such unprecedented demands, government had to transform its understanding of political rationality by turning its attention to the construction of this new form of subjectivity. Governmental strategy thus had to incorporate all the conditioning factors that shape the human subject into its own calculations: it had to oversee the lives of its subjects, both their biological conditions and their training, so that they would become productive economic subjects who could meet the demands
Toward an Affirmative Biopolitics
This essay responds to German theorist Thomas Lemke's call for a conversation between two distinct lines of reception of Foucault's concept of biopolitics. The first line is comprised of sweeping historical perspectives on biopolitics, such as those of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, and the second is comprised of the more temporally focused perspectives of theorists such as Paul Rabinow, Nikolas Rose, and Catherine Waldby, whose biopolitical analyses concentrate on recent biotechnologies such as genetic techniques and the biobanking of human tissues. This essay develops this conversation by bringing the two lines to bear on the neoliberal " bioeconomy " that has developed over the past three decades and uses the perspective of Italian theorist Roberto Esposito to represent the first line. Esposito's unique combination of Foucauldian biopolitics and the Maussean gift tradition provides a critical perspective that engages and challenges the neoliberal inclination of many theorists from the second line.
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.
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.
Perspektywy Kultury
The present coronavirus pandemic has confronted each of us individually and our society at large with new existential and theoretical-practical challenges. In the following article I present a look at the pandemic from the point of view of biopolitics (Michael Foucault, Giorgio Agamben) and psychopolitics (Byung-Chul Han). The reflections on biopolitics and psychopolitics, on top of the terms they used, make us aware of the fragility of human life on the one hand, and on the other hand, they encourage us to look for historical equivalents to our current struggle with the pandemic. For me, such an equivalent would be the culture of Romanticism: for example, works by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, Juliusz Słowacki, and Friedrich von Schelling. Starting from a short description of the Romantic era, I proceed to my goal which is to show how, during the pandemic, fundamental questions asked by biotechnology and psychopolitics come to the fore as questions about us, huma...
The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society, 2014