Biopolitical Education: The Edukators and the Politics of the Immanent Outside (original) (raw)
Related papers
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...
Critique of biopolitical violence
CRITICAL STUDIES ON SECURITY, 2021
Written 100 years ago, Walter Benjamin’s ‘Critique of violence’ offers an escape from the biopolitical spiral into death. It confronts the violent underside to a politics of life by refusing to justify force on set politicallegal grounds, and, by offering readings that continually undermine any official position. First, critique is mindful of the spurious ends and means of biopower: the violence deployed to protect life that requires evermore force against anything threatening, and, the violence said to optimise life that eliminates anything debilitating. Second, critique moves beyond such justifications. It does so in reference to Benjamin’s concept of the divine that appreciates violence through criteria irreducible to official foundations. An understanding of violence is not mediated by government, but continually extended in how individuals live such violence in novel ways. A critique of biopolitical violence accordingly moves from a deadly productivity coincident with political-legal authority (the violence of biopower), to how such violence generates new ways of thinking and acting (a bio-politics of violence).
Philosophy, Terror, and Biopolitics
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....
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.
Art Inquiry. Recherches Sur Les Arts, Vol. XXII (XXXI): Grzegorz Sztabiński and Paulina Sztabińska-Kałowska (eds.), Art Narratives - Narratives on Art, Łódź: Łódzkie Towarzystwo Naukowe, s. 157-181, (ss. 25), 2020
The paper attempts to map out the main issues of Visual Culture Studies as the emergent theoretical formation of the performative narrativity of biopictures in the context of biopower, biopolitics and the “War of Images” as the examples of iconophobia and clonophobia. The subject of the performative narrativity of biopictures has been taken up in a discussion on some main ideas that seem to have been fundamental both for the negative and positive aspects of W.J.T. Mitchell’s agency concept of “visual subjects” in the context of meaning reproduction and iterability. The concept of biopictures also includes notions such as the very idea of an analogy to living forms of organisms, which is a metaphorical relationship, similar in the nature of things to the relation between biological and social bodies. The narrative issues of biopictures are addressed in the scenes where we see the velociraptor with the letters of the DNA code projected onto its skin, in Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park (1993), and the anonymous storm troopers who march off to their deaths, in George Lucas’s Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002). Performative biopictures can be considered as living organisms, thematically referring to visual digital techniques and genetic engineering. Writing on biopictures as the tools of biopower and biopolitics, Mitchell recalls Michel Foucault’s and Giorgio Agamben’s concepts in which biopower and biopolitics have participated in the fundamental process of neoliberal power and creating living beings while exercising control over them. In the paper, the narrative and performative features of image as a “visual subject” have been described in feminist theory, cultural studies (Jacques Lacan, Stuart Hall) and visual culture studies (Nicholas Mirzoeff). The paper contains descriptions of the photo-collage From Dust to DNA by Kevin Clarke and Mikey Flowers, and a mural on the viaduct on the road to Tikrit, depicting Saddam’s clone army. These artworks have been discussed in the context of the “War on Terror,” in which all contemporary terrorism is bioterrorism based on the “suicide metaphor” of an “autoimmune disease” used by Jacques Derrida. The essay concludes with a reference to Mieke Bal’s “close reading” concept, in which performativity is combined with narrativity, as narrators can assign the agency to the subject of narration and they embody anxieties over the processes of images making and destroying (iconoclasm).
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.
Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence
International Political Sociology, 2007
This paper argues that western security practices are as biopolitical as they are geopolitical. Explaining that biopolitical security practices revolve around ''life'' as species existence, the paper explores how biopoliticized security practices secure by instantiating a general economy of the contingent throughout all the processes of reproductive circulation that impinge upon species existence. For this reason, ''Governing Terror'' does not merely reference the massive global security effort that is now devoted to governing terror. It observes how western security practices are themselves now also governed by a widespread fear of terror. It locates that fear in the way that western biopolitics has long adopted ''the contingent'' as its principle of formation. Here, ''the real'' is understood and experienced differently, as a general economy of emergence: ''life'' understood as constant nonlinear adaptation and change. The paper concludes that the state of emergency, which governs western politics of security at the beginning of the twenty-first century is not that of Carl Schmitt or Giorgio Agamben. The state of emergency which governs western security politics is the emergency of emergent life itself. Suam habet fortuna rationem (Chance has its own reason) (Petronius, Satyricon).
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 .