Towards a Biopolitics of the Victimized Body (original) (raw)
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BMC Public Health
This article focuses on policy and law concerning violence against women as a public health issue. In Sweden, violence against women is recently recognized as a public health problem; we label this shift "The public health turn on violence against women". The new framing implies increased demands on the Swedish healthcare sector and its' ability to recognise violence and deal with it in terms of prevention and interventions. The aim was to describe and discuss the main content and characteristics of Swedish healthcare law, and national public health and gender-equality policies representing the public health turn on violence against women. Through discursive policy analysis, we investigate how the violence is described, what is regarded to be the problem and what solutions and interventions that are suggested in order to solve the problem. Healthcare law articulates violence against women as an ordinary healthcare issue and the problem as shortcomings to provide good healthcare for victims, but without specifying what the problem or the legal obligation for the sector is. The public health problem is rather loosely defined, and suggested interventions are scarce and somewhat vague. The main recommendations for healthcare are to routinely ask patients about violence exposure. Violence against women is usually labelled "violence within close relationships" in the policies, and it is not necessarily described as a gender equality problem. While violence against women in some policy documents is clearly framed as a public health problem, such a framing is absent in others, or is transformed into a gender-neutral problem of violence within close relationships. It is not clearly articulated what the framing should lead to in terms of the healthcare sector's obligations, interventions and health promotions, apart from an ambivalent discourse on daring to ask about violence.
Written as an introduction to my Masters dissertation last year, this essay gives a comprehensive overview of the literature that addresses the particular intersection between the biopolitics of security and two overlapping bodies - the corporeal and the political. The interactions between these three concepts are violent interactions, but the question is how - as forms of violence grow ever-more immaterial, less visceral and more 'structural' - the traces of violence can be made visible. This is a task which must most urgently be aimed towards the actions of evolving biopolitical weaponry, in particular the capacity of biopolitics to distance itself from its necropolitical underbelly; its distribution of death in administrative, mundane fashion.
Towards a Pragmatic Sociology of Violence
Towards a Pragmatic Sociology of Violence, 2015
This thesis explores how a pragmatic theory of violence can be developed within Luc Boltanski’s sociology of regimes of action positioned in the overall framework of French pragmatic sociology. The thesis takes its outset in Boltanski’s approximate outline of a regime of violence presented in Love and Justice as Competences (2012) and points out a number of conceptual ambiguities in Boltanski’s regime of violence. The conceptual ambiguities are then discussed and clarified through an integration of Jan Philip Reemtsma’s phenomenological distinction between locative-, raptive-, and autotelic violence. This distinction denotes violence as a non-consensual, primarily, physical assault on another’s body (2012). Overall, the thesis combines French pragmatic sociology with German sociology of violence in order to emphasize our shared understandings and ways of evaluating forms, things and persons in violence. In this relation, the thesis introduces two basic human competences of violence: ‘the competence of evaluating force potentials’ and ‘the competence of evaluating vulnerability of the body’. Methodologically, the thesis mirrors elements of Boltanski’s methodological strategies used to develop the regime of justice and love in order to formalize the principles that can be said to structure a model of a regime of violence based on the distinction between locative-, raptive-, and autotelic violence. The thesis then centers on the important twilight between violence and justice by emphasizing an understanding of different forms, elements and zones of violence in relation to Boltanski’s theoretical model in On Justification and to the concept of the state monopoly on violence. Finally, the thesis presents four empirical case studies of violence as presented in different records of judgement from recent Danish trials, which are then “confronted” with the (extended) regime of violence, after which the “fitness” of the theory and the ambiguity of some of the concepts are discussed.
Law, Culture and the Humanities
This article seeks to challenge the prevailing view that violence is legally actionable because human bodies are capable of experiencing pain, injury, and death. Drawing on literature in the area of new materialism, this article demonstrates how pain, injury, and death are not ontological properties of the flesh-and-bone body, but rather, they are the effects of how violence is made sense-able, knowable, as part of the criminal legal process. Here, I examine four of the materializing practices through which violence becomes sense-able to us: crime scene photography, forensic pathology, legal judgments, and bodily performance. If the effects of criminal violence can be traced to the discursive practices by which we observe, measure, think, and speak about bodies, it becomes much harder to sustain the view that human violence is exceptional because the human body is special.
A Particular Kind of Violence: Swedish Social Policy Puzzles of a Multipurpose Criminal Law
Sexuality Research and Social Policy Journal of Nsrc, 2012
This article explores the policy underpinning Sweden's 1999 ban on purchases of sexual services with a focus on the social and health service sectors and their role vis-à-vis people who sell sex. It argues that the rationale behind the ban is difficult to reconcile with legislation and practices beyond the merit of criminal justice. While an understanding of prostitution as "men's violence against women" may serve symbolic functions at central policy level, it can hardly guide local implementation without conflicting with core social policy principles. The article concludes that a there is a need to address the agency of people who sell sex, since denying or minimizing such agency may be counterproductive to the policy's own objectives.
2019
Sovereign violence is a dominant issue in contemporary political theory and has attracted much attention from proponents of critical theory, biopolitics, post-structuralism, and deconstruction. While heterogeneous, these commentators are united in rejecting the classic-juridical conception emanating from Bodin, Hobbes, and Rousseau that holds sovereignty to be indivisible and orientated towards the establishment and maintenance of juridical order. I argue that this rejection has been based on three distinct logics, termed here the radical-juridical, the biopolitical, and the bio-juridical. The first, outlined through chapters on Benjamin, Schmitt, Arendt, and Deleuze and Guattari, offers a number of increasingly radical critiques of the classic-juridical conception of sovereignty, but continues to focus the inquiry around the creation/preservation/disruption of the juridical order. It is then based on a radicalization of rather than fundamental departure from the classic-juridical model. The second (biopolitical) logic, outlined through chapters on Foucault and Agamben, goes further by undermining the primacy that the classic and radical-juridical models give to law. Instead, sovereign violence is held to be concerned with the regulation of life, with this occurring through exclusion from law. The first two critical logics do, however, set up a binary opposition between law and life: the former affirming the sovereign’s connection to the former, the latter reversing this to claim that it primarily refers to the latter. The third model—called the bio-juridical—overcomes this by developing a compatibilist understanding of both. Outlining this approach through Derrida’s analysis of the death penalty, I first identify why Derrida departs from the bipolitical model, before showing that his analysis of the death penalty reveals a phantasmatic figure who regulates life through the juridical exercise of violence. Rather than a privileging of the juridical order or the regulation of life, Derrida’s bio-juridical conception holds that sovereign violence is placed between law and life, simultaneously creating and regulating each through the other.
The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (New York: Routledge, 2019)
Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of ‘violence’ itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the contention that Walter Benjamin’s famous 1921 ‘Critique of Violence’ essay inaugurated this turn to an explicit questioning of violence, this collection brings together an international array of scholars to engage with how subsequent thinkers—Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin, Butler, Castoriadis, Derrida, Fanon, Gramsci, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Schmitt—grappled with the meaning and place of violence. The aim is not to reduce these multiple responses to a singular one, but to highlight the heterogeneous ways in which the concept has been inquired into and the manifold meanings of it that have resulted. To this end, each chapter focuses on a different approach or thinker within twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy, with many of them tackling the issue through the mediation of other topics and disciplines, including biopolitics, epistemology, ethics, culture, law, politics, and psychoanalysis. As such, the volume will be an invaluable resource for those interested in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History of Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Political Theory, Psychology, and Sociology. Table of Contents The Meanings of Violence: Introduction Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala Part I: Political Myth and Social Transformation 1. Walter Benjamin and the General Strike: Non-Violence and the Archeon James Martel (San Francisco State University, USA) 2. Violence, Divine or Otherwise: Myth and Violence in the Benjamin-Schmitt Constellation Hjalmar Falk (University of Gothenburg, Sweden) 3. Violence and Civilization: Gramsci, Machiavelli, and Sorel Robert P. Jackson (Manchester Metropolitan University, England) 4. The Violence of Oblivion: Hannah Arendt and the Tragic Loss of Revolutionary Politics Liesbeth Schoonheim (KU Leuven, Belgium,) Part II: Sociality and Meaning 5. The World and the Embodied Subject: Humanism, Terror, and Violence Stephen A. Noble (Universite de Paris X (Paris—Nanterre), France) 6. Dialectics got the Upper Hand: Fanon, Violence, and the Quest[ion] of Liberation Nigel C. Gibson (Emerson College, USA) 7. Sartre’s Later Work: Towards a Notion of Institutional Violence Marieke Mueller (King’s College London, England) 8. The Original Polemos: Phenomenology and Violence in Jacques Derrida Valeria Campos-Salvaterra (Universidad Catolica de Valparaiso, Chile) Part III: From Subjectivity to Biopolitics 9. Taming the Little Screaming Monster: Castoriadis, Violence, and the Creation of the Individual Gavin Rae (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain) 10. Judith Butler: From a Formative Violence to an Ethics of Non-Violence Emma Ingala (Universidad Complutense de Madrid, Spain) 11. Biopolitics and Resistance: The Meaning of Violence in the Work of Giorgio Agamben German Primera (University of Brighton, England).
Adam Academy Social Sciences Journal, 2024
The advent of the COVİD-19 pandemic saw the declaration of a state of national disaster in many countries globally, which meant that the countries were shut down with several restrictions on socioeconomic and with it some human bodily activities. The situation has brought to the fore a revived interest in the interrogation of the nexus between state power and control of the freedom of citizens. As such, the issue has also brought into focus Foucault's analysis of power in modern and postmodern societies centring on the concept of biopower/biopolitics. Considering the centrality of citizen's constitutional right to several civil liberties including the right to bodily integrity, there is a need to explore the limits of state power in the idea of biopolitics. This essay utilises desktop methods to interrogate state's power and control of citizens' bodies during and after COVİD-19 era. Ultimately, the article is an attempt to contribute to the discourse on how political theorising incorporates human embodiment.
Blaming violent men - A challenge to the Swedish criminal law on provocation
Feminists have long criticized how provocations narrative of a woman ‘asking for it’ functions as a legal ‘abuse excuse’ for violent men and confirms their rationalizations and justifications for violence. This article aims to challenge a particular aspect of provocation in Swedish criminal law—namely, a tendency to individualize and subjectivize culpability in a way that suggests that the individual male perpetrator's specific understanding of his violence should be the perspective from which to understand and judge his violence. Criminal legal culpability is approached as an important aspect in the relationships between gender, power, and violence, and the author argues that the notion of culpability should be changed in two respects. The tendency to regard emotions as ‘factual’ should be replaced by an evaluative view on emotions and men's responsibility for their emotional responses to women should be judged by acknowledging how values and reasons intersect with power relations.