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Western theories of biopolitics focus on its liberal and fascist rationalities. In opposition to this, Stalinism was oriented more towards transforming life in accordance with the communist ideal, and less towards protecting it. Sergei Prozorov reconstructs this rationality in the early Stalinist project of the Great Break (1928–32) and its subsequent modifications during High Stalinism. He then relocates the question of biopolitics down to the level of the subject, tracing the way the 'new Soviet person' was to be produced in governmental practices and the role that violence and terror would play in this construction. ; Peer reviewed

While Foucault's work on biopolitics continues to inspire diverse studies in a variety of disciplines, it has largely been missing from the debates on the possibility of "affirmative biopolitics" which have been primarily influenced by the work of Agamben and Esposito. This article restores Foucault's work to these debates, proposing that his final lecture course at the Collège de France in 1983–1984 developed a paradigm of affirmative biopolitics in the reading of the Cynic practice of truth-telling ( parrhesia). The Cynic problematization of the relation between truth and life and their transvaluation of conventional truths by relocating them to the domain of bare life not only seeks to transform one's life in accordance with the truth but also, through the confrontation with the existing conventions and norms, to transform the world as such. Cynic parrhesia is thus biopolitical, insofar as it reclaims the power of one's life from the social order and its rationalities of government and applies it to oneself, investing one's existence with truth. Since Foucault developed this reading of Cynicism in the context of his political engagement on behalf on East European dissidents, the article proceeds to analyse the resonances between parrhesia and Václav Havel's idea of "living within the truth," elaborating the biopolitical significance of both practices. We conclude by addressing the implications of our interpretation for Foucault scholarship and the wider debates on biopolitics.

El artículo emprende una crítica de la lógica de la "otredad temporal" en la teoría contemporánea de las Relaciones Internacionales (RRII). Originalmente articulada en el ámbito de la integración europea, esta lógica presupone la posibilidad de una comunidad política de constituir su identidad sin alguna delimitación espacial, mediante la designación del Otro como su propio pasado, buscando evitar su repetición en el futuro. Mientras que la imagen de la Europa contemporánea, alterizando su propio pasado, ha sido sometida a la crítica empírica, este artículo propone un argumento conceptual para la indisociabilidad de los aspectos temporales y espaciales en cualquier acto de otredad. Basándome en la interpretación de Hegel de Alexandre Kojève, sostengo que cualquier acción histórica es necesariamente espacio-temporal, combinando la abstracción de la negación temporal con la actualidad concreta de un ser espacial negado. Las alternativas a la lógica de la territorialidad soberana, por lo tanto, no deben ser buscadas en el aspecto temporal de la otredad, sino en la búsqueda de la posibilidad de auto-constitución en la ausencia de cualquier acción negativa. El artículo concluye con un esbozo de dicho ethos alternativo, desarrollado sobre la base de la reconstrucción que hizo Giorgio Agamben de la problemática hegeliana-kojeviana del fin de la historia y su teoría del sujeto.

The article addresses the attempts of contemporary continental philosophy to develop a politics that would move beyond the Hobbesian logic of the constitution of political community. In their readings of Hobbes, Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben emphasize the nihilistic character of Hobbes's approach to community. For Esposito, Hobbes's commonwealth is legitimized by a prior negation of the originary human community in the construction of the state of nature as the state of war. Yet, as Agamben shows, this negative state of nature is never fully transcended by the commonwealth, which persistently reproduces it in the state of exception. These critiques emphasize the complex relation between nature and artifice in Hobbes's thought, which have profound implications for the attempts to arrive at a 'post-Hobbesian' mode of political community. Neither a facile search for a truer, more fundamental state of nature nor an affirmation of artifice and denaturation as constitutive of human community are sufficient to evade the Hobbesian constellation. A genuine move beyond Hobbes would rather consist in thoroughly deactivating the very relation between nature and artifice whereby they become indistinct and no longer negate each other.

The article addresses the attempts of contemporary continental philosophy to develop a politics that would move beyond the Hobbesian logic of the constitution of political community. In their readings of Hobbes, Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben emphasize the nihilistic character of Hobbes's approach to community. For Esposito, Hobbes's commonwealth is legitimized by a prior negation of the originary human community in the construction of the state of nature as the state of war. Yet, as Agamben shows, this negative state of nature is never fully transcended by the commonwealth, which persistently reproduces it in the state of exception. These critiques emphasize the complex relation between nature and artifice in Hobbes's thought, which have profound implications for the attempts to arrive at a 'post-Hobbesian' mode of political community. Neither a facile search for a truer, more fundamental state of nature nor an affirmation of artifice and denaturation as constitutive of human community are sufficient to evade the Hobbesian constellation. A genuine move beyond Hobbes would rather consist in thoroughly deactivating the very relation between nature and artifice whereby they become indistinct and no longer negate each other. ; Peer reviewed

The article ventures a critique of the logic of 'temporal othering' in contemporary International Relations (IR) theory. Originally articulated in the field of European integration, this logic presupposes a possibility for a political community to constitute its identity without any spatial delimitation by means of casting as Other its own past, whose repetition in the future it seeks to avoid. While the image of contemporary Europe as 'othering' its own past has been subjected to empirical criticism, this article makes a conceptual argument for the indissociability of temporal and spatial aspects in any act of othering. Drawing on Alexandre Kojève's reading of Hegel, I argue that any historical action is necessarily spatiotemporal, combining the abstraction of temporal negation with the concrete actuality of a negated spatial being. Alternatives to the logic of sovereign territoriality are therefore not to be sought in the temporal aspect of othering, but rather by pursuing the possibility of self-constitution in the absence of any negating action whatsoever. The article concludes with an outline of such an alternative ethos, developed on the basis of Giorgio Agamben's reconstruction of the Hegelian-Kojèvian problematic of the end of history and his theory of the subject. ; El artículo emprende una crítica de la lógica de la "otredad temporal" en la teoría contemporánea de las Relaciones Internacionales (RRII). Originalmente articulada en el ámbito de la integración europea, esta lógica presupone la posibilidad de una comunidad política de constituir su identidad sin alguna delimitación espacial, mediante la designación del Otro como su propio pasado, buscando evitar su repetición en el futuro. Mientras que la imagen de la Europa contemporánea, alterizando su propio pasado, ha sido sometida a la crítica empírica, este artículo propone un argumento conceptual para la indisociabilidad de los aspectos temporales y espaciales en cualquier acto de otredad. Basándome en la interpretación de Hegel de Alexandre Kojève, sostengo que cualquier acción histórica es necesariamente espacio-temporal, combinando la abstracción de la negación temporal con la actualidad concreta de un ser espacial negado. Las alternativas a la lógica de la territorialidad soberana, por lo tanto, no deben ser buscadas en el aspecto temporal de la otredad, sino en la búsqueda de la posibilidad de auto-constitución en la ausencia de cualquier acción negativa. El artículo concluye con un esbozo de dicho ethos alternativo, desarrollado sobre la base de la reconstrucción que hizo Giorgio Agamben de la problemática hegeliana-kojeviana del fin de la historia y su teoría del sujeto.

The article addresses the performances of the Russian feminist-punk band Pussy Riot as a paradigm of the politics of profanation developed in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben. Drawing on Agamben's genealogies of the concepts of parody, blasphemy and profanation, the article challenges the depoliticising interpretation of Pussy Riot's scandalous performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in February 2012 as a blasphemous parody of religious rituals. Instead, we argue that their 'punk prayer' exemplifies the logic of profanation that reclaims the performative force of prayer by wresting it away from the conventions and rituals governing its possible use. While not conforming to J. L. Austin's conventional 'felicity conditions' of the performative act, practices of profanation resonate with the experience of performativity as 'veridiction', analysed by Michel Foucault with reference to the ancient Greek parrhesia and by Agamben in the context of Pauline messianism. The article concludes with the discussion of implications of this profanatory performativity for political subjectivation and wider social transformation. ; Peer reviewed

The article addresses the performances of the Russian feminist-punk band Pussy Riot as a paradigm of the politics of profanation developed in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben. Drawing on Agamben's genealogies of the concepts of parody, blasphemy and profanation, the article challenges the depoliticising interpretation of Pussy Riot's scandalous performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in February 2012 as a blasphemous parody of religious rituals. Instead, we argue that their 'punk prayer' exemplifies the logic of profanation that reclaims the performative force of prayer by wresting it away from the conventions and rituals governing its possible use. While not conforming to J. L. Austin's conventional 'felicity conditions' of the performative act, practices of profanation resonate with the experience of performativity as 'veridiction', analysed by Michel Foucault with reference to the ancient Greek parrhesia and by Agamben in the context of Pauline messianism. The article concludes with the discussion of implications of this profanatory performativity for political subjectivation and wider social transformation. Adapted from the source document.

The paper addresses Alain Badiou's attempts to overcome the biopolitical tendency in contemporary Western societies by redefining politics as a 'truth procedure', transcending the mere existence of human beings and exposing them to the dimension of eternal truths. I argue that Badiou's account of the formation of the 'body of truth' fails to break with the biopolitical logic and instead corresponds to Agamben's definition of biopolitics in terms of the inclusive exclusion of bare life from the political order of 'good life'. While Badiou's claims to overcome biopolitics are problematic, his politics of truth nonetheless exemplifies a genuine alternative to the 'democratic-materialist' biopolitics that he criticizes. Through a reading of Badiou's account of the generation of truths I demonstrate that the content of truths is neither arbitrary nor transcendent in relation to the bodies of human beings but rather affirms their ontological equality against every form of hierarchy or exclusion. Badiou's 'body of truth' is thus nothing other than the living bodies themselves, plus the truth of their equality. Insofar as in this figure 'good life' and 'mere life' become indistinct, Badiou's politics of truth accords with Agamben's idea of affirmative biopolitics of a life inseparable from its form. ; Peer reviewed

The article addresses the puzzling silence of the Foucaldian studies of biopolitics about Soviet socialism by revisiting Foucault's own account of socialism in his 1970s work, particularly his 1975–6 course 'Society Must Be Defended'. Foucault repeatedly denied the existence of an autonomous governmentality in socialism, demonstrating its dependence on the techniques of government developed in 19th-century western Europe. For Foucault Soviet socialism was fundamentally identical to its ideological antagonist in its biopolitical rationality, which he defined in terms of racism. This article challenges Foucault's reading, demonstrating that his notion of racism is ill-suited to describe the governmental rationalities of Soviet socialism during both the formation and the consolidation of the Stalinist regime. While the Soviet project was paradigmatically biopolitical in its ambition to transform the forms of life of the population in line with the communist ideology, its biopolitics was fundamentally different from the security-oriented logic of racism, focusing instead on the exposure of the population to the violent transformation of their forms of life. Revisiting Foucault's genealogy of racism, we argue that the point of descent of this biopolitics lies in the 19th-century split of the 'counter-historical' discourse of the struggle of the races into the discourses of state racism and class struggle. While Foucault's genealogy focuses on the development of the former into liberal and totalitarian biopolitics as we know them, it leaves class struggle out of the history of biopolitics and is therefore unable to account for the biopolitical specificity of the Soviet project. ; Peer reviewed

Aside from casual references to Soviet biopolitics in the work of Foucault, Agamben, and Esposito, the theoretical literature on biopolitics has largely ignored the Soviet experience, while empirical research in Russian studies has rarely addressed biopolitics. The article examines the experience of Stalinism as an important case for the study of biopolitics that helps resolve a problem preoccupying scholars from Foucault onward: the proximity of biopolitics to its opposite, the thanatopolitics of the mass production of death. How is it that a mode of power presenting itself in terms of care, augmentation, and intensification of life so frequently end up negating life itself? The article addresses this question in the context of the confluence of two political rationalities in the project of Soviet socialism, the revolutionary transcendence of the old order and the biopolitical immanentism of the construction of new forms of life. Focusing on the catastrophic policies of the Great Break (1928–1932), it argues that this combination is ultimately aporetic, leading to the violent destruction of the very lives that were to be transformed. The conclusion considers the contemporary relevance of the lessons to be learnt from Stalinist biopolitics.

The article addresses the performances of the Russian feminist-punk band Pussy Riot as a paradigm of the politics of profanation developed in the recent work of Giorgio Agamben. Drawing on Agamben's genealogies of the concepts of parody, blasphemy and profanation, the article challenges the depoliticising interpretation of Pussy Riot's scandalous performance at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in Moscow in February 2012 as a blasphemous parody of religious rituals. Instead, we argue that their 'punk prayer' exemplifies the logic of profanation that reclaims the performative force of prayer by wresting it away from the conventions and rituals governing its possible use. While not conforming to J. L. Austin's conventional 'felicity conditions' of the performative act, practices of profanation resonate with the experience of performativity as 'veridiction', analysed by Michel Foucault with reference to the ancient Greek parrhesia and by Agamben in the context of Pauline messianism. The article concludes with the discussion of implications of this profanatory performativity for political subjectivation and wider social transformation.

Ontology and World Politics presents a new approach to political universalism, grounded in the reinterpretation of world politics from an ontological perspective. In the discipline of International Relations the concept of world politics remains ambivalent, functioning both as a synonym of international relations and their antonym, denoting the aspirations for the overcoming of interstate pluralism in favour of a universalist politics of the global community or the world state. Rather than distinguish 'world politics' from 'international politics' by its site, level or issues, Prozorov interprets it as another kind of politics. Drawing on Martin Heidegger's account of world disclosure and Alain Badiou's phenomenology of worlds, this book posits world politics as a practice of the affirmation of universal axioms across an infinite plurality of limited and particular situations or 'worlds'. Prozorov reinterprets the familiar principles of community, equality and freedom in ontological terms as attributes of pure being, subtracted from all positive determinations, and presents them as axioms of universalist politics valid in any world whatsoever. This approach to world politics serves as the groundwork for a comprehensive reconsideration of the central themes of political and international relations theory. ; Peer reviewed