'Biopolitics' tag archive

Roberto Esposito, Institution (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022). 160pp., £40.00 hb., £14.99 pb., 978 1 50955 155 2 hb., 978 1 50955 156 9 pb. The Covid-19 pandemic had the curious result of simultaneously legitimising and de-legitimising discourses of the biopolitical. The longstanding claim of biopolitical theorists that politics and biological life have become inextricable within […]

Thomas Lemke, The Government of Things: Foucault and the New Materialisms (New York: New York University Press, 2021). 299pp., £80.00 hb., £25.00 pb., 978 1 47980 881 6 hb., 978 1 47982 993 4 pb. Cars that measure and signal fuel efficiency, expanding markets for weather derivatives, and ‘vital systems security’ infrastructures, among other similar […]

Interview Health without security? An interview with Mark Neocleous Mark Neocleous with Sam Kelly Health without security? An interview with Mark Neocleous health, security, biopolitics, COVID-19, immunology, medicine, liberalism, police 75 87 Mark Neocleous is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University London. He is the author of numerous books including War […]

I submit that the current situation created by the Covid-19 pandemic and its biopolitical consequences reveals something new in the ontological status of the human species which also involves an anthropological ‘revolution’. 1 This is something more than the fact that the combined tendencies called ‘globalisation’ (which, regardless of whether we assign them a recent […]

Joseph Pugliese, Biopolitics of the More-Than-Human: Forensic Ecologies of Violence (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020). 312pp., £87.00 hb., £21.99 pb., 978 1 47800 767 8 hb., 978 1 47800 802 6 pb. In 2001 the United Nations enacted an International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict (it’s on […]

Angela Mitropoulos, Pandemonium: Proliferating Borders of Capital and the Pandemic Swerve (London: Pluto Press, 2020). 132pp., £14.99 pb., 978 0 74534 330 3 ‘When every home becomes a quarantine zone, and every epidemiological map is mistaken for an accurate representation of molecular spread, the convergence of neoliberalism and fascism around an oikonomic understanding of health […]

Weaker now, we mistakenly identify ourselves as our bodies. Ilona Sagar, ‘Correspondence O’, digital video, 2017 I have had twenty-five or thirty souls, with their bodies, at once under my roof, and yet we often parted without being aware that we had come very near to one another. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854 The last […]

In the first few pages of chapter 4 of his Theological Political Treatise (1670), Spinoza defines his conception of the law. 1 In fact, he defines the law twice, first in terms of compulsion or necessity and then in terms of use. I would like to investigate here these definitions, in particular the second one, […]

Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood, eds., Against Life (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016). 277pp., £91.95 hb., £32.50 pb., 978 0 81013 213 9 hb., 978 0 81013 212 2 pb. In José Saramago’s 2005 novel, Death at Intervals, a land is stricken by a sudden uncooperative maiden of death who brings about the immortality […]

This is the text of a lecture delivered, in shortened form and in German translation, on the occasion of the award of the Adorno Prize to Judith Butler in Frankfurt on 11 September 2012. Announcement of the prize led to a campaign against awarding the prize to Butler on the grounds of her political positions […]

Thought of the outside Foucault contra Agamben marie-Christine leps It is gladly believed that a culture is more attached to its values than to its forms, that these can easily be modified, abandoned, taken up again; that only meaning is deeply rooted. This is to misunderstand … that people cling more to ways of seeing, […]

Since the beginning of 2011, student mobilizations in Chile have occupied the centre of public debate. On the one hand, most of the population, along with most of the political parties currently opposed to Sebastián Piñera’s government, agree on the crisis of secondary and higher education in a country that has been widely praised for […]

Empire and the multitude A dialogue on the new order of globalization Antonio negri and danilo zolo danilo zolo For a long time I resisted the calls, from many quarters, to publicly debate Empire, the book you co-authored with Michael Hardt, which has prompted a debate of exceptional scope and intensity on both sides of […]

Anti-Oedipus – thirty years on Éric alliez I, for my own part, made a sort of move into politics around May 1968…Gilles Deleuze, NegotiationsThis title was suggested to me some months ago by my best enemy – or my best fiend, to paraphrase Werner Herzog – who also happens to be a very good friend: […]

Refiguring the multitude From exodus to the production of norms Timothy rayner The fundamental faith of the metaphysicians is the faith in antithetical values. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §2Hardt and Negri describe Multitude (2004) as a ʻsequelʼ to Empire (2000). But for many this book will seem a strange successor. Empire, for all […]

Louis Althusser began Reading Capital with the statement, ʻWe have all certainly read and are all reading [Marxʼs] Capital.ʼ While Althusser is undoubtedly addressing here his seminar, the focus of which was precisely Marxʼs Capital, the sentence that follows elevates the act of reading this particular text to the status of the universal: the entire […]

Commentary Profit, plague and poultry The intra-active worlds of highly pathogenic avian flu Chris wilbert In 2006 we awoke, in Europe at least, to the odd situation in which twitchers – obsessive birdwatchers who spend much of their leisure time on the far-flung edges of countries – are being reinvented as the eyes and ears […]

and fleeting; the city as empty spaces, panic, insecurity, screams and rags, infrastructural parasitism, and so on. The postmodern, a fundamental category in regard to Koolhaas, which he had already inaugurated in his retroactive manifesto for Manhattan, Delirious New York, is here defined as an irreversible category and as a way of seeing the present. […]

After life De anima and unhuman politics Eugene thacker Since the 1960s, the NASA programme has supported research into the exploration of life on other planets. Currently, their astrobiology programme involves multiple institutions and research programmes, including the NASA Astrobiology Institute. Its mission statement defines astrobiology as ‘the study of the origins, evolution, distribution, and […]