Biopolitical Perspective Research Articles

‘We must urgently learn to live differently’: the biopolitics of ESD for 2030

Recently, the new global policy framework for implementing education for sustainable development (ESD) – ESD for 2030 – was launched officially. Drawing on Foucauldian theory, this paper explores biopolitical elements in ESD for 2030. The paper contributes to previous research on ESD policy by employing a biopolitical perspective, and by highlighting problematic aspects of the framework’s will to include and to adapt to different contexts. The analysis brings attention to the framework’s notions of life and to how different human populations are separated. Furthermore, the analysis of the framework demonstrates how notions of transformative pedagogy, community, and the individual, assume the functions of biopolitical techniques. The findings point to a biopolitical differentiation where rich and poor populations are assumed to need different educational interventions, adapted to their socio-economic contexts, in the global educational policy quest for sustainable development. Ultimately, we consider the potential of Foucauldian ethics as an affirmative alternative to the current mode of biopolitical differentiation in global ESD policy

From bioethics to biopolitics: "Playing the Nazi card" in public health ethics-the case of Israel.

While bioethicist Arthur Caplan claims that "The Nazi analogy is equivalent to dropping a nuclear bomb in ethical battles about science and medicine", we claim that such total exclusion of this analogy is equally problematic. Our analysis builds on Roberto Esposito's conceptualization of immunitas and communitas as key elements of biopolitics. Within public health theories and practices there is an inherent tension between exclusion (immunitas) and inclusion (communitas) forces. Taking the immunitas logic to the extreme, as National Socialist medicine did in the name of securing the German race, is a constant danger that needs to be taken seriously into consideration when discussing public health policies. The tension between the silencing of the Holocaust in bioethical debates on one side, and the persistent use of National Socialist medicine metaphors, on the other hand, is the focus of this paper. By delving into the meanings and the implications of this two-edged discourse, we argue that comparing post-war bioethics with pre-war medical practices from a biopolitical perspective has the potential to depict a more nuanced account of continuities and discontinuities in bioethics.

The state and biopolitics: towards the origins of interrelation

The subject of this research is the state as a biopolitical project founded on the principle of government intervention in life of the population. Leaning on the ideas and theoretical intentions of the “archeology of power”, economic and political anthropology, the author examines the genesis of the state from biopolitical perspective, proceeding from the hypothesis of the initial animalization of human presence pursuant to state power, which at breaking point, turns into biopolitical death machine, or thanatopolitics. In view of this, the author reveals the role of ancient state formations as the agents of forced “domestication” of the members of agricultural and cattle-raising societies based on the concentration of human resources and coercive labor as state-forming “technologies”, which allow producing surpluses appropriated by the power elites. The idea of pastoralist power, which emerged along with the first states, identifies subjects to a herd under wardship, treating them as a form of wealth similar to livestock. The main conclusion lies in explication of the biopolitical matrix of state administration, which identifies the subjects of the state with livestock, and the state territory with enclosed pasture. This leads to the parallels between cattle-raising and control over population, which paradigmatically determines the political modus operandi of state power that is implicit in the trajectory of its evolution up to the present day. At the threshold of “evolution” of such administrative paradigm emerge the modern radical topoi of the antihuman – the concentration camps (labor camps and death camps) organized by the model of cattle pens and slaughterhouses.

Ways of governing street life during the pandemic: discourses, technologies, and practices

Drawing on multiple sources, this article presents an analysis of a national survey implemented by Street Clinic teams in Brazil on the homeless population and the COVID-19 pandemic. Through the lens of certain ethical-political principles and methodological decisions, we focus our analysis on discourses about who lives and works on the streets during the pandemic, connecting discourse with experience. From the perspective of governmentality and biopolitics, we seek to shed light on power relations that reveal modes of government embodied at the street level - mainly related to isolation measures and social distancing - to create tensions surrounding the emergence of the notion of the homeless population in the midst of the pandemic. We conclude with a discussion of the precariousness that circumscribes life on the streets as a shared condition, and search for ways to comprehend forms of resistance and the right to exist.

Rethinking the biopolitical: Borders, refugees, mobilities…

This Symposium reflects on the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camps studies, border studies, refugee studies, and in particular in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography. The five interventions accordingly engage with questions regarding the use of biopolitics as an analytical framework, but also as a pervasive strategy and governmental tool in Western societies. Through an analysis of several empirical cases – most notably hotspots on the Greek Aegean Island, refugee’s forced hyper mobility in Europe, speech acts connected to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and the ‘voluntary return’ policies in Europe, and the paper borders created by visa systems – the authors indicate new possible fields of enquiry related to the biopolitical critically inspired by the work of authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Jasbir Puar, while also clearly restating the fundamental importance of Foucault’s original contribution to any biopolitical analytical framework today.

Precarious Sovereignty in a Post-liberal Europe: The COVID-19 Emergency in Estonia and Finland

The paper addresses a puzzle resulting from the current global state of alert: the coronavirus pandemic brought us back to the world of the allegedly sovereign nation states with borders and national governments in charge, yet in fact, this retrieved sovereignty looks very vulnerable and precarious. We explain this controversy through a triad of concepts—sovereignty, governmentality, and post-liberalism—that we apply to an analysis of a corona-imposed state of emergency in Estonia and Finland. Based on comparative case study research, we posit that sovereignty is precarious in post-liberalism due to its large dependence on the technologies of responsibilization and agency. From a biopolitical perspective, a major point in the anti-crisis management is to convince people to sacrifice personal liberties for the sake of public safety. These issues of governmentality will be dealt with based on critical discourse analysis and media analysis in Estonia and Finland.

Who Is the Citizen in Citizen Security?

This article explores the governing logics and political implications of citizen security in Puebla, Mexico, specifically, the Programa Nacional de Prevención del Delito (National Program for the Prevention of Crime, PRONAPRED). Taking a biopolitical perspective, the article centers on how citizens are produced through the application of citizen security initiatives. This production operates at two levels: the regulation of populations and the molding of subjects. First, vital statistics and risk-related variables highlight those populations that exceed the median for risk. Second, those at-risk groups are targeted for training to reduce their susceptibility to violence. Training focuses on the individual, asking citizens to identify and minimize risk in a manner that emanates from and contributes to security governance. The political ontology of citizen security is this citizen/citizenry coincident with official measures. The democratic aspirations of citizen security are consequently muted, as security governance locates citizens within the confines of state power and, at the same time, holds them separate from this power to produce citizen existence.

The Politics of ‘Bare Life’ in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People: A Biopolitical Perspective

Through the biopolitical study, this paper digs out the problems of five hundred survivors who enmeshed in the war torn Sri Lanka and Canadian sovereign power as projected in Sharon Bala’s The Boat People that dramatizes the problems of the immigrants. A large number of Tamil people escape from Sri Lanka to Canada because they were under extortion and duress in their homeland. Unlike their expectation to get a safe haven in Canada, they undergo Ariadne’s thread like unending trial for refugee status. Neither they enjoy rights at home nor abroad, which the novel dramatizes and subscribes Foucauldian biopolitics, which investigates into the effect of politics in human life. Largely in biopolitics, politics imbricates into life. The asylum seekers from Sri Lanka in Canada fall victim of power technology at home and abroad. They are subjugated to endure the hegemony of the regime that reduces them into ‘homo sacer’ whom injustice can be done with impunity and their life into bare life, life without political rights. Like a muselmann figure during the holocaust, they undergo the trial and are kept in between belonging and non-belonging, which is inclusive exclusion. They strand like the persona non grata whose significance as human is outnumbered.

Vida e poder – reflexões acerca da pandemia atual

Este artigo se divide em quatro partes. Inicialmente apresentamos a noção de biopolítica de modo introdutório, considerando a relação entre poder soberano e biopoder. Voltamo-nos para a elaboração foucaultiana do termo de modo a esclarecer, em linhas gerais, seu sentido. Essa breve análise da noção de biopolítica encaminha-nos para o conceito de tanatopolítica, que aparece, na segunda parte do texto, como epíteto da derivação funesta da biopolítica. Na terceira parte, a partir de uma perspectiva biopolítica, lançamos luz sobre a crise que enfrentamos. Trata-se de um esforço de evidenciar o sentido biopolítico da crise atual, considerando o conteúdo das reflexões de Foucault. Finalmente, na quarta parte, atualizamos o debate acerca da biopolítica por meio de uma análise da noção de imunidade formulada por Esposito, a qual fornece uma importante chave interpretativa da pandemia atual.

Sex, Drug, and HIV/AIDS: The Drug Career of an Urban Chinese Woman

This case study is based on the life history of an urban Chinese woman, Lydia, who has become an AIDS patient through injecting heroin use. Adopting theories of drug career and biopolitics, this study depicts Lydia’s drug-centered life. From the perspective of a drug career, this article vividly illustrates her experience of drug initiation, escalation, maintenance, and finally achievement of abstinence. In addition, this study also shows how drug use has penetrated all dimensions of Lydia’s life including intimate relationships, financial arrangements, and compulsory drug treatment; in the end, contracting HIV was when she finally hit rock bottom and worked to get rid of her heroin dependence. From the perspective of biopolitics, this article focuses on the institutional and social structure transformation that is reflected by Lydia’s personal experience, especially the social service, treatment, and intervention programs provided for her during an era of increasingly growing drug use and HIV-infected population.

Social work and “the social”: a biopolitical perspective

ABSTRAKT Amid the uncertainty of the current political context and an unprecedented institutional crisis in European welfare, this article offers a theoretical analysis of the problems arising from the historical reshaping of social work as a biopolitical organ of the state. It undertakes this analysis from a biopolitical perspective and asks how this framework can help us in defining the specific features of social work intervention in family life? To properly answer, the article proposes a methodological understanding which explicates a series of relations between “biopolitics – the social – social work”. To this end, supported by analyses from Foucault and Donzelot, the article shows how social work as a form of state governmentality intervenes in the lives of families to normalise behaviour and conduct. From a critical vantage point, these findings compel us to re-examine the problem of consent and consensus when working with service users and families in the midst of an increasingly more controlling authoritarian social work.

A Study on Film J upiter's Moon by Kornél Mundruczó: Focusing on Refugee Crisis in Europe and Agamben's Bio-political Perspective

Jupiter s Moon is a film by the Hungarian director Kornél Mundruczó, who tries to document the social problems of the refugees through his film. The present work analyses the film based on Giorgio Agamben s biopolitical perspective, to explain how life is controlled as a means of modern biopolitics, more specific, how modern politics produces the naked life like the refugees. Agameben refers to Michel Foucault s biopolitical theory and associates it with the concept of state of emergency . He focuses the problems of others on the state of emergency, that is, homo sacer , which modern politics establishes through control. Agamben defines the concentration camp as the extreme form of modern biopolitics. It is the example of bio-power that perfectly represents the state of emergency. The film Jupiter s Moon shows the refugee crisis in Hungary, where millions of people, especially from Syria, escape terror. The story of a hovering refugee, the young Syrian Arian Dashini, is a relentlessly accusing comment on the current situation in politically degenerate Hungary, where ruthlessness, corruption and selfishness dominate society. In the hospital department of the refugee camp Dr. Gaber Stern treats the injured boy, Aryan but wants to use the wonderful skills Aryan for his own purposes. The Story goes on about escaping from the two people. The article shows that the film emphasizes the need for a new category for the notion of nation and nationality and to redefine the refugees human rights.

Procreation and Cooperation. On Futurist Reproduction Postulates

The article constitutes an attempt at analysing futurist pronatalist discourse, on the basis of the manifestos and artistic praxis of the Futurists. The reproduction postulates, prevalent in the works of the Polish Futurists and usually placed in the context of vitalism, characteristic of the 1920s, are shown from a biopolitical perspective, emphasizing the intersection of the biological with the political and social horizons. The author attempts to trace especially the political entanglements of the “population project” of the Polish Futurists, which turns out be marked by numerous paradoxes, situating itself between the pronatalist rhetoric typical of nationalistdiscourse (on the one hand, the discourse promoted by F.T. Marinetti, and on the other, the one formulated in Poland directly after regaining independence) and thinking in terms of a community which starts from the material functions of the body. In this second context, the reproduction postulates are not only an attack on bourgeois morality, but are closely connected with the futurist critique of all social institutions and the state apparatus with its biopolitical dispositions.

Population Policy as a Means for Bio-Politics: The Cases of Romania and China

After the discovery of “population” in modern society, domination over the body has been enacted by a set of interventions which are called regulatory control, or bio-politics by Michel Foucault. From the eighteenth century onwards, bio-politics has involved any kind of intervention which acts as means for forming the population according to the wills of those with power. This has led to an era of bio-politics in which fertility in particular has become regulated in accordance with political economy. Hence the body, especially the female body, has been reduced to an economic object by detaching her identity, personal aspirations and desires. In turn, sexuality becomes a subject of economic interventions through pronatalist and/or antinatalist politics. In either way, those interventions should be methodologically regarded as instruments of bio-politics. This paper specifically focuses on pronatalist and antinatalist politics as bio-political instruments in the well-known Romanian case and the Chinese case by drawing upon the Foucauldian perspective of bio-politics.

“They say it's more aggressive in black women”: Biosociality, breast cancer, and becoming a population “at risk”

Recent geographical scholarship has drawn attention to the ways in which the practice of public health constructs particular bodies and populations as “risky.” From a biopolitical perspective, this status of being “at risk” offers the basis for an emergent biosociality, groups brought together by a shared vulnerability to disease, which then forms the basis for both state‐led public health interventions and community‐driven advocacy and support. Critics, however, suggest a focus on biosociality can act to obscure other dimensions of individual and community identity, dimensions that can play a key role in determining both health status and the success of healthcare interventions. This paper draws together insights from geography, anthropology, and sociology with empirical evidence from focus groups collected as part of an evaluation of a breast cancer awareness DVD distributed in the London borough of Hackney. We explore the extent to which the DVD, by defining a specific group (black women aged 25–50) as being at increased risk of developing more severe forms of breast cancer at a younger age, led to the formation of a biosocial community. Themes emerging from the analysis of focus group transcripts present a complex picture. At times our participants clearly aligned themselves with this biosocial collective, drawing on a shared Black political identity, assumptions of a common African genetic heritage, experiences of diaspora, and perceived similarities in lifestyles and bodily norms. At other times, however, this shared sense of belonging fragmented in light of perceived differences in culture, lifestyle, and community which nuanced both participants’ sense of being “at risk” and how they might (or might not) seek to manage that risk. Our findings suggest that biosociality is a fragile and heterogeneous accomplishment, with implications for the way we practise medical and social science research, design community‐targeted public health interventions and conceptualise risk.

The Democratic Biopolitics of PrEP

PrEP (Pre-Exposure Prophylaxis) is a relatively new drug-based HIV prevention technique and an important means to lower the HIV risk of gay men who are especially vulnerable to HIV. From the perspective of biopolitics, PrEP inscribes itself in a larger trend of medicalization and the rise of pharmapower. This article reconstructs and evaluates contemporary literature on biopolitical theory as it applies to PrEP, by bringing it in a dialogue with a mapping of the political debate on PrEP. As PrEP changes sexual norms and subjectification, for example condom use and its meaning for gay subjectivity, it is highly contested. The article shows that the debate on PrEP can be best described with the concepts ‘sexual-somatic ethics’ and ‘democratic biopolitics’, which I develop based on the biopolitical approach of Nikolas Rose and Paul Rabinow. In contrast, interpretations of PrEP which are following governmentality studies or Italian Theory amount to either farfetched or trivial positions on PrEP, when seen in light of the political debate. Furthermore, the article is a contribution to the scholarship on gay subjectivity, highlighting how homophobia and homonormativity haunts gay sex even in liberal environments, and how PrEP can serve as an entry point for the destigmatization of gay sexuality and transformation of gay subjectivity. ‘Biopolitical democratization’ entails making explicit how medical technology and health care relates to sexual subjectification and ethics, to strengthen the voice of (potential) PrEP users in health politics, and to renegotiate the profit and power of Big Pharma.

토마스 모어의 『유토피아』에 나타난 사목 권력과 통치성 : 미셸 푸코의 철학과 비교연구

The primary purpose of this essay is to analyze Thomas More’s Utopia in terms of biopolitics and governmentality that Michel Foucault theorized in his lectures at College de France. More’s story of an imaginary commonwealth is an illustration of early modern pastoral power that foreshadows the rise of (early) modern “governmentality.” Pastoral power as a sort of governing technology claimed that people should be governed just as Christ as an ideal pastor governs his flock (Christian subjects), and its economic ideology is the core of what St. Paul called oikonomia. Yet this religious governmentality began to be secularized from the sixteenth century and formed secular governmental rationality, and I would argue that More’s Utopia is a discussion of this governing technology developed from this pastoral power. This essay, in this light, has a dual purpose. First this article surveys and analyzes pastoralism and governmentality that operate as biopower in More’s work. Utopia has been read as a discussion of ideal state and a society based on proto-communism, but seen from a different angle it is a representation of Renaissance England’s governmentality. Nonetheless, a more important project of this essay is to critically anatomize the paradox of Foucault’s notion of biopolitics by surveying Utopia from a biopolitical perspective. Foucault was not able to properly answer why a power that “make[s] live and let[s] die” uncannily transforms into thanato-political and sovereign power that “take[s] life or let[s] live.” Reading More’s discussion of an ideal commonwealth allows us to grasp that a society aiming at utmost security based on biopolitics uncannily transforms into an extremely controlled society ruled by thanato-politics.

Biopolityczna bestiaryzacja Rozważania o zezwierzęceniu w polityce

The article explores the phenomenon of violence from the biopolitical perspective. Agamben’s theory is the main methodological framework of the analysis. The main aim of the article is to show that different forms of evil in politics, such as atrocities, genocide and holocaust,be described in a philosophically relevant way by using the categories of bios/dzoé. Thus, at the beginning, author reconstructs Agamben’s main ideas (sections 1 and 2). Then, the ideas are supplemented by the classical understanding of dzōé/bios (section 3). The author can thus create a typology of bestiality. Finally, he focuses on the victims of the anthropo-political machine and their perpetrators (section 4). This makes it possible to point out some flaws in Agamben’s reasoning and reach more general conclusions concerning human nature (section 5).

Martwe życie Biopolityczna analiza kultury zombie

The aim of the article is to show the phenomenon of dead life present in the zombie culture as a radical form of political nihilism, lack of trust and rebellion against the political and economic strategies of training, appropriation, formation, and the inclusion and exclusion of life. Achieving this goal requires the adoption of a biopolitical perspective. In other words, it requires the presentation of the mechanisms of modern bio-power, its legal, organisational and economic strategies focused on manipulating and transforming the lives of the organised mass of human bodies. Then, the feedback relations between bare life and modern bio-power are shown in the context of Agamben’s political deprivation of the properties of life. Lastly, the close relationship between the biopolitical transformations of the organisational culture of the West and the emergence and function of a zombie culture focused around dead life are shown.

From an Ethic of Hospitality: Reflections on Democracy, Citizenship and Migrations

The article focuses on a reflection about hospitality, thought from inhospitable experiences and aimed at critically rethinking the reactions to the underprivileged, the pilgrim, the migrant, from the assessment of host actions, the ethics of care and the irruption of otherness. It proposes going beyond the observation of data: migratory flows, xenophobic reactions or associated criminal forms and interpreting them from a constructive approach to conflicts, the demands of an inclusive citizenship and the rethinking of the axes of democratic life. Based on the thinking of D. Innerarity, the article associates the ethics of hospitality with the ethics of care, solidarity and life and poses it as a useful tool for dealing with the migratory flows of the Mediterranean and Latin American Space. From an approach of vulnerability situations associated with migrations, the possibilities of empathy, prudential reason and the demands of effectiveness from a bioethical and biopolitical perspective that emphasizes the priorities of action before life at risk are addressed.Keywords: Ethic of Ospitality, Democracy, Citizenships, Migrations.