Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds., Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death

Abstract

Patricia Ticineto Clough and Craig Willse, eds. Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on Governance of and Death. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2011, 389 pp. paper (978082230170) Beyond Biopolitics marks a significant contribution to flourishing field of biopolitics. Clough and Willse have assembled a collection that speaks from heart of a US radical tradition that is deeply antiracist, anticapitalist, internationalist, and (over past generation) queer positive. The volume brings concerns of this radical tradition into engagement primarily with Foucault's biopolitical work, and secondarily with Italian biopolitical tradition, specifically Agamben and Hardt and Negri. This collection marks a refreshing change from growing body of Foucauldian and post-Foucauldian work divorced from and sometimes antagonistic to critical scholarship. In common with broader body of contemporary biopolitical studies, its fifteen chapters are by turns fascinating, intellectually ambitious, and sometimes vague, as it is often not clear how authors conceptualize or life. Transdisciplinary in approach, Beyond Biopolitics takes as its problematic revision of neoliberalism since 9/11 and its relation to a of war. Tellingly, first empirical discussion (in introduction by Clough and Willse) pertains to waterboarding by US military. The collection has three thematic areas: a) governance, torture, and exception, 2) occupation, migration, and necropolitics (politically caused deaths), 3) a residual category of critical methodology and responses by artists to warfare and attacks against civilians. It remains centred on human rather than taking up any of concerns related to an ecological biopolitics. Overall collection is of a high caliber, with many excellent chapters. It would be suitable as a graduate course book in whole or part. Although this collection makes several important and original contributions to field, one of its major drawbacks concerns conflation of with governance. In preface to collection Clough and Willse (pp. 3-4) explicate their reasons for taking of and death beyond biopolitics as their theme, citing Foucault's statement about preeminence of as a power apparatus. The cited passage from Foucault's Security, Territory, Population is, however, a commentary on governmentality as preeminent power apparatus, not biopolitics. Foucault (2007:1) treats governmentality as a much broader power apparatus than biopower, latter being: the set of mechanisms through which basic biological features of human species became object of a political strategy. The effects of expanding to fill space of governance inflate its importance at expense of its specificity. Use of word is equally broad and unexamined in this edited volume. What does of life mean? Are there any social or cultural processes outside governance of life? Life occupies a key place in Foucault's formulation of biopolitics, but he (unlike Agamben) leaves it untheorized in his biopolitical work, as does this collection. Interestingly, biological concept of is theorized in Foucault's earlier work, Les Mots et les choses (The Order of Things), although few of those with a biopolitical focus have cared to read it. If biopower was first constituted in late 18th century medicine and biology, then power apparatus that has come to be known as would consist of effects of biological governance on human embodiment, politics, and ways of living. It could be expanded in an ecological sense as many scholars of are doing today. In this sense then, political branding processes in digital and mass media, focus of contributions by Clough and Willse and Parisi and Goodman, is very important and consequential research, but it would not prima facie be biopolitical. …