The Biopolitical Turn, Marxism and the Radicalization of Social Theory

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of biopolitics has gained remarkable acceptance in the social sciences and humanities. The study of biopolitics has been developed in a wide range of disciplines, including philosophy, economics, aesthetics, law, history, and biomedicine, which gives biopolitics a broad interdisciplinary orientation. It has resulted in a general biopolitical turn in the social sciences and humanities. It becomes an urgent and necessary task that how to identify this turn. Therefore, the goal of this paper is to grasp the basic threads, the main methods, the essential contents and the political effects of the biopolitics turn. It is worth noting that only by placing the biopolitics in the context of social-critical theory can we truly gain insight into its inner meaning. In this regard, it must be dissected in terms of Marxist methodology in order to grasp its connotation and political position, rather than accepting the premise of the biopolitics without exception. It argues that the biopolitical turn has reversed the path of traditional political research, defined a new type of political horizon, and put the conditions of measuring knowledge into the study of political context and even the whole humanities and social sciences. The conclusions are as follows: first, the radical social theory based on the “biopolitical turn” provides a new possibility for political imagination of the left. Its pan-politicized preference, however, challenges the theoretical commitments put forward by the left and their abilities to deliver. Second, in this movement, the Marxist critique of capitalism becomes an intrinsic motivation for biopolitical theory, while at the same time Marxism becomes a tradition that is constantly attempted to be transcended and replaced in the new conditions of the times. Third, in the competition for the right to interpret Marx, and in the competition between biopolitical theories, biopolitics increasingly exhausts its most central critical power against capitalism in a theoretical boom, and eventually dwindles into a resource that specific disciplines compete to appropriate.