Offers a critical history of the role of pain, suffering, and compassion in democratic culture. American Dolorologies presents a theoretically sophisticated intervention into contemporary equations of subjectivity with trauma. Simon Strick argues against a universalism of pain and instead foregrounds the intimate relations of bodily affect with racial and gender politics. In concise and original readings of medical debates, abolitionist photography, Enlightenment philosophy, and contemporary representations of torture, Strick shows the crucial function that evocations of "bodies in pain" serve in the politicization of differences. This book provides a historical contextualization of contemporary ideas of suffering, sympathy, and compassion, thus establishing an embodied genealogy of the pain that is at the heart of American democratic sentiment. Simon Strick is Postdoctoral Researcher at the Center for Literary and Cultural Research Berlin in Germany.
The Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADF&G) began a wolf (Canis lupus) management planning process in 1990 following years of controversy over the issue. A planning team was organized consisting of persons with widely varied values and interests regarding wolves. They developed a set of recommendations which were the basis for a Strategic Wolf Management plan which pawned Area Specific Plans and Implementation Plans. The process in abstract was working. However, once implementation of wolf control became a reality, there was a negative response heard worldwide. This response was primarily organized by animal rights groups using tactics that were guaranteed to fuel a response. They were able to use a threatened boycott of the tourism industry in Alaska to force a political cancellation of wolf management using aircraft. The events associated with this planning process and the events that followed are documented in this paper by a member of the Alaska Board of Game, from his perspective.
This dissertation examines contemporary politics targeting people with intellectual disabilities. Since this group first emerged, under labels such as 'idiocy' and 'mental deficiency', around the turn of the 20th century, its members have been seen as lacking the capacities necessary for citizenship and full societal belonging. For the last forty years, however, liberal democracies and international organizations have set out to include the group through policies promoting citizenship, emphasising 'self-determination', 'independence', and 'autonomous decision-making' as key ambitions. As a result, institutional care has been downscaled and replaced by socially integrated living arrangements. This is often described as a shift of paradigms in disability politics. I argue that this shift means that the same ideas of humanity, as characterised by 'reason' and 'rationality', that was once used as a yardstick to define and exclude 'intellectual disability', are now being put to work to include the group. The purpose of the thesis is to provide a theoretical understanding of what happens after the introduction of this kind of politics, in the era that I call 'post-institutionalisation'. I do so by approaching the government of this group as an instance of what Foucault called 'biopolitics', which denotes the efforts of governments to manage human life, and by drawing on Judith Butler's theorising of subjectivity.The dissertation proceeds in three analytical steps. In its first part, by focusing on how 'intellectual disability' is constituted by scientific and classificatory knowledge, I argue that this diagnosis came into being and persists for purposes of government. Rather than being a biologically rooted condition that policies respond to and target, it is a political and normative category that is made to appear as biological and natural. In this way, a firm line between 'normalcy' and 'intellectual disability' is constructed. In the second part, I examine how this group today is targeted by policies aiming for inclusion and citizenship. The result of how intellectual disability is both seen as the opposite of the norm of the 'good citizen' and as the target of citizenship inclusion, is a politics that simultaneously includes and excludes intellectual disability. Thus, rather than discarding the power exercised over people with intellectual disabilities, power has transformed into a biopolitical regime that seeks to mould members of this group to become included citizens, whilst concurrently upholding their exclusion by continued constraints. Lastly, in the third part of the study, I examine the possibilities of contesting the contemporary biopolitical regime. Here, the main argument is that a productive critique of the government of intellectual disability needs to reconsider the notion that humanity is defined by its capacities of 'reason' and 'rationality'.
Major service change in healthcare - whereby the distribution of services is reconfigured at a local or regional level - is often a contested, political and poorly understood set of processes. This paper contributes to the theoretical understanding of major service change by demonstrating the utility of interpreting health service reconfiguration as a biopolitical intervention. Such an approach orients the analytical focus towards an exploration of the spatial and the population - crucial factors in major service change. Drawing on a qualitative study from 2011-12 of major service change in the English NHS combining documentary analyses of historically relevant policy papers and contemporary policy documentation (n = 125) with semi-structured interviews (n = 20) we highlight how a particular 'geography of stroke' in London was created building upon multiple types of knowledge: medical, epidemiological, economic, demographic, managerial and organisational. These informed particular spatial practices of government providing legitimation for the significant political upheaval that accompanies NHS service reconfiguration by problematizing existing variation in outcomes and making these visible. We suggest that major service change may be analysed as a 'practice of security' - a way of redefining a case, conceiving of risks and dangers, and averting potential crises in the interests of the population.
In this chapter, I examine components of technology-images through processes of a digital biopolitics, where the images of social difference are created through procedures that science, government and media forms engender. Digital biopolitics has created an image of life. But what does it mean for the political subject to be able to recognize images of herself as DNA strands, as cells in a petri dish, or as a human egg harvested and frozen? To analyze such images, I engage methods of third-wave feminist epistemology, examining the material components of such biopolitical images as mattered states of the body.
Genealogy does not pose as political motivation, let alone moral imperative. It is a tool for those already engaged in resistance-not to dictate action but to enrich ongoing processes of analyzing and strategizing. With that understanding of genealogy's role, as I have argued (McWhorter 2009) and will argue here, Foucault's method can be extremely useful for confronting racism. In particular, his concepts of normalization and biopower are crucial for understanding how racism survived the demise of the nineteenth-century science that supported it and how it persisted throughout the twentieth century despite social, political, and economic change.
In March 2004, the author attended the Inaugural International Conference on Longevity at the Sydney Exhibition and Convention Centre in Darling Harbour. As a cultural researcher interested in the interactions between demographic shifts, capitalist globalisation and changing forms of political power, the prospect of a direct encounter with the debates and practices surrounding the burgeoning field of anti-ageing medicine promised a means to observe the complex cultural dynamics of population ageing at play. This article explores the discord the atuhor witnessed; a quarrel that, despite the march of technological advance, attests the ongoing conflict in the nexus where politics meets life.
The bodies of murdered Mexican women in Roberto Bolaño's novel 2666 have been taken by critics to signify the biopolitical power of the neoliberal order. This article will contend that such readings overlook a broader crisis of bodily representation, which is apparent both in 2666 and in Bolaño's earlier novels. The extent to which the body might be 'read' as part of a signifying system is insistently challenged in Bolaño's work, where images of the human are frequently fragmented or unstable. Drawing on ideas from Levinas and Deleuze, I suggest that the difficulty of representing the human, and the political implications of that act, are particularly clear when Bolaño approaches the face. I then argue, following Jean-Luc Nancy, that the theological imagery which accrues around the body of the artist in Bolaño's work stages the deconstruction of Christian humanist aesthetics. Ultimately, Bolaño's fragmented bodies invite a mode of reading which is not uniquely concerned with representation.
This article deals with biopolitics in classical Greek thought. Its aim is to demonstrate that biopolitics is not a distinctively modern phenomenon. It is as old a phenomenon as western political thought itself. Focusing on Aristotle's Politics as well as Plato's Republic and Laws, I argue that the politico-philosophical categories of classical thought were already biopolitical categories. In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal with all the central topics of biopolitics (sexual intercourse, marriage, pregnancy, childcare, public health, education, population, and so forth) from the political point of view but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. At issue is not only a politics for which 'the idea of governing people' (Foucault 2007, 122) is the leading idea but also a politics for which the question how 'to organize life' (Polit. 307e) is the most important question. This politics is not characterized by what Foucault calls the juridicoinstitutional model of politics revolving around laws, legal subjects, contracts, liberties, obligations, rights, and duties. Platonic and Aristotelian politics concern the technologies of power over the natural life of the 'tame animals' (Leg. 6.766a) called human beings. By focusing primarily on the quantity and the quality of population (Pol. 7.1326a5-7) they aim at controlling and regulating the domain of the living (en tois zôois) (Polit. 261c-d) in ; peerReviewed
Drawing on a range of canonical and non-canonical literary, cinematic and social scientific texts produced in post-Unification Italy, Vital Subjects: Race and Biopolitics in Italy is an interdisciplinary study of how racial and colonial discourses shaped the "making" of Italians as modern political subjects in the years between its administrative unification (1861–1870) and the end of the First World War (1919). The book includes readings of texts by Italian thinkers such as Leopoldo Franchetti and Paolo Mantegazza and it offers new readings of well- and lesser-known texts by a writer who has become Italy's most infamous precursor to Mussolini: poet, novelist, and political provocateur Gabriele D'Annunzio. Vital Subjects concludes with an original analysis of an early film that figures prominently in the history of cinema: Giovanni Pastrone's 1914 silent film Cabiria— produced in the wake of the Italian invasion of Libya (1911–12) and celebrating ancient Roman imperialism.
The aim of this thesis is to develop a critical understanding of shifting definitions of life and death in contemporary society, and to situate a set of arguments in the biopolitical literature of the humanities and social sciences. I have focused, in particular, on developing a "genealogy of the vegetative subject." By vegetative subject, I do not refer simply to the contemporary medical -legal status of the brain-dead patient or "end of life" care. I refer instead to the historical permutations of assemblages that produced a human subject on a threshold of life and death as a response to ways a discourse and knowledge of human life itself, located in the neural production of mind, posed concrete bioethical, legal, medical, scientific, and even economic problems. I argue that the vegetative subject's brain and body are historical figures through which we may trace and render visible how our complicated encounter with death today is negotiated and shaped by particular technical advances, knowledges of material life, cultural production, and relations of power. At its core, this thesis develops a genealogy of the vegetative subject along three axes. The first axis recovers the historical emergence of the rationality of "life itself" that animates a knowledge and discourse of human life, primarily articulated through the brain, neuroscience, consciousness and cognition. The second axis examines how this threshold life and death, and its articulation across particular kinds of bodies, produces concrete "biopolitical struggles" that are addressed by what Foucault called strategies of "governmentality." Finally, the third axis considers the vegetative subject as a site of cultural production, one where discursive "acts of seeing" govern the recognition of a human other and one's relation to it
The article initiates by presenting the context and effects of the uses of biopolitics, a notion that Foucault frames during a period of theoretical transition, when he operates important displacements in his analytics of power. In the second section, we take 45 articles that appeared in Brazilian main journals in the field of education, during the past fifteen years, and that referred either to the notion of biopolitics or biopower. We noticed that the problems confronted by Foucault during this biopolitical interlude have undoubtedly found an echo in the angst, hopes and obstacles faced by Brazilian researchers during the post-dictatorial times. We believe this happened, among other reasons, because of the paradox they were witnessing: the first steps Brazil was walking towards democratization of relations and institutions, at the very same time neoliberal practices and reforms were introduced into the horizon.
Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regulation to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of careful readings, Robert Mitchell shows how a range of elements of modern literature, from character-systems to free indirect discourse, are closely intertwined with Romantic-era liberalism and biopolitics. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth century theorists of liberalism such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus drew upon the new sciences of population to develop a liberal biopolitics that aimed to coordinate differences among individuals by means of the culling powers of the market. Infectious Liberty focuses on such authors as Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth, who drew upon the sciences of population to develop a biopolitics beyond liberalism. These authors attempted what Roberto Esposito describes as an "affirmative" biopolitics, which rejects the principle of establishing security by distinguishing between valued and unvalued lives, seeks to support even the most abject members of a population, and proposes new ways of living in common. Infectious Liberty expands our understandings of liberalism and biopolitics—and the relationship between them—while also helping us to understand better the ways creative literature facilitates the project of reimagining what the politics of life might consist of.
Biopolitics, traditionally understood as management of the human population, has been extended to include nonhuman animal life and posthuman life. In this article, we turn to literatures that advance Foucauldian biopolitics to explore the mode of government enabled by the dog of the US presidential family – the First Dog called Bo Obama. With analytical focus on vitalisation efforts, we follow the construction of Bo in various outlets, such as the websites of the White House and an animal rights organisation. Bo's microphysical escapades and the negotiation thereof show how contemporary biopolitics, which targets the vitality of the dog population, is linked to seductive neoliberal management techniques and subjectivities. We discuss 'cuddly management' in relation to Foucauldian scholarship within organisation and management studies and propose that the construction of Bo facilitates interspecies family norms and an empathic embrace of difference circumscribed by vitalisation efforts that we pinpoint as 'doggy-biopolics'.
How can we think, imagine, and make authoritative claims about contemporary refugee politics? I believe this question must precede investigations into struggles/movements advocating rights and political voice for refugees. It is important to come to terms with the changing terrain of refugee politics, in order to (re)conceptualize it and provide some idea of how/where such struggles might be fought. Focusing on the colliding commitments to globalization and security, particularly since September 11, 2001, I argue that "paradox" is a core element of refugee politics. To some extent, this has been rehearsed elsewhere, and I point to the highlights in the existing literature. I suggest that an approach sensitive to Foucault's account of governmentality and biopolitics is particularly helpful, stressing the diffuse networks of power in refugee politics among private and public actors, the increasing role of "biotechnology," and some (re)solution to the globalization – domestic security paradox, leading to what I call the "biopoliticization of refugee politics." Examined here are the politics of asylum and refugee movements in the UK. In particular, the 2002 government White Paper on immigration and asylum – Secure Borders, Safe Haven – provides an example of the changing terrain of contemporary (post-September 11) refugee (bio)politics. ; Comment pouvons-nous arriver à penser, à formuler et à adopter des positions qui fassent autorité sur les politiques du droit d'asile aujourd'hui? Je suis d'opinion que cette question doit précéder tout examen des luttes et des mouvements qui militent pour des droits et une voix au chapitre (politique) pour les réfugiés. Il est important d'être bien au fait du paysage changeant des enjeux politiques entourant le droit d'asile, afin de pouvoir le re-conceptualiser et fournir une idée de comment et où de telles luttes doivent être menées. Me concentrant sur les objectifs opposés de la globalisation et de la sécurité, tout spécialement après le 11 septembre, je propose que le « ...
