What is life worth? Exploring biomedical interventions, survival, and the politics of life (original) (raw)
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Biocultures: A Critical Approach to Mundane Biomedical Governance
Culture, Theory & Critique, 2021
How are we to understand and navigate the ways that biomedicine extends beyond the formal institutions of the clinic, the hospital, and lab, and is incorporated into broader social practices, from intimate embodied knowledges of the self to biosecurity rationales? We propose a return to Lennard Davis’s call (2006) for biocultural studies, but with sharpened focus on the way biomedical logics circulate in everyday life under late liberalism. In this essay, we lay out the arena of biocultural studies as particular terrains where health and life are biopolitically governed through the lens of biomedicine and public health. We consider how this governance is inextricable from neoliberal rationalities and imperatives that demand, produce, and affirm only certain forms of subjectivity and life. Additionally, drawing on concrete illustrations from our recent work, we explore the methodology of biocultural studies that involves intertextual analysis of various kinds of cultural products, knowledges, and practices; advances collaborative cross-disciplinary approaches that attend to the stratified and mundane layers of biomedical governance; promotes scalar thinking about health policies and practices, from the individual to population-level administration; and, finally, scrutinizes the structural violence of biomedicine and deadly inequities produced through life-making practices.
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 .
The burden of choosing wisely: biopolitics at the beginning of life
Recent transformations in French maternal health care demonstrate how the government of the beginning of life encompasses an individual woman's desires and aspirations for the uses of her own body. Women are increasingly solicited by the French health care system to express their feelings, their wishes, and their distress to a medical professional for whom the solicitation of such narratives has become a professional specificity. This essay focuses on transformations of governmental power in the realm of reproduction articulated within French maternal health care policy, professional midwifery journals, and women's health activist literature. Crucially, the regulation of reproduction in France no longer takes place primarily through sanction or prohibition, but rather through what sociologist Dominique Memmi claims is the solicitation of narratives about one's own desires and hopes for the fate of one's body, a 'delegated biopolitics' of reproductive control. This essay suggests that the contemporary government of reproduction entrusts individuals with little more and no less than the imperative to 'choose wisely.'
The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 2020
In his seminal work The Foundations of Bioethics (1986, 1996), former senior editor of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy H. Tristram Engelhardt (1941-2018) radically reassessed the nature and scope of bioethics, as well as the possibilities for this still young field that he had helped found, in light of the then-prevailing (and still-prevailing) socio-historical context, which he argued had insufficiently been taken into account by bioethical theorists. This issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy provides a snapshot of how contemporary bioethics is developing in the wake of Engelhardt's critique. The papers in it concern issues such as the relation between rule of law and U.S. health care policy, the relation between autonomy and consent, the role of rights in bioethical discourse, the debate between naturalism and normativism in the theory of disease, and the question of when human individuals begin to exist. Though no single theme explicitly unites them, all of the papers in this issue were produced within and are fruitfully read in terms of the aforementioned socio-historical context, which Engelhardt influentially characterized as a morally pluralistic postmodernity subsisting amidst the ruins of tradition. After explicating Engelhardt's analysis of contemporary bioethics in context, and using it to illuminate the significance for contemporary bioethics of the papers in this issue, in the conclusion I introduce a further wrinkle into this Engelhardtian picture-namely, the looming danger of a more general epistemological pluralism that new reality-altering technologies, such as Deepfakes, threaten to bring about.
Introduction to the politics of life: A biopolitical mess
European Journal of Social Theory, 2019
This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our bio-political era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these bio-political entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis?
Biopolitics (in Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics, Springer, 2015)
Henk ten Have (ed.), Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics, Springer, 2015
The notion of biopolitics is being harnessed by many pioneering empirical and theoretical research today. Apart from describing its basic characters and its relation to bioethics, this article reviews the canonical contexts and uses of this term which are rooted in the field of contemporary moral, political, and social philosophy and theory.