Contemporary Biopolitics Research Articles

Bionationalism, stem cells, BSE, and Web 2.0 in South Korea: toward the reconfiguration of biopolitics

We argue that at the core of contemporary biopolitics in South Korea there is a politics of identity built around the gradual transformation of ethnic nationalism based primarily on ethnicity, blood, and membership to a new kind of nationalism in which ethnicity is biologically and scientifically reconfigured. The emerging Korean bionationalism goes beyond traditional ethnic nationalism by combining a focus on ethnicity and race with a belief in the deeply transformative potentials of modern science, and in particular medical and life sciences for Korean bodies and the economic future of the nation. At the same time, there also seems to be a tendency in Korean bionationalism not only to optimize the population through novel, technoscientific strategies, but also to “defend” the nation against biological menace from the outside, such as bioterrorism, and epidemics such as severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), or Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease. This bionationalism with its focus on the South Korean population combines a strong belief in using biomedical technoscience in the optimization of the population with a politically aggressive gesture of defending the Korean nation against “attack” from the outside. We argue that this constellation indicates the emergence of a new biopolitical constellation, which is also characterized by the broad utilization of Web 2.0 tools for the purpose of political mobilization.

The Biopolitical Imaginary of Species-being

This article revises Foucault's account of biopolitics in the light of the impact of the molecular and digital revolutions on `the politics of life itself'. The confluence of the molecular and digital revolutions informationalizes life, providing an account of what it is to be a living thing in terms of complex adaptive and continuously emergent, informationally constituted, systems. Also revisiting Foucault's The Order of Things and its interrogation of the modern analytics of finitude, the article argues that our contemporary politics of life is therefore distinguished by the quasi-transcendentals that now distinguish informationalized life: circulation, connectivity and complexity. Here, too, the article argues, the figure of Man, which once united the quasi-transcendentals of life, labour and language, is replaced by the contingency that now unites circulation, connectivity and complexity. Observing that a life of continuous emergence is also one in which production is continuously allied with destruction, such a life is lived as the continuous emergency of its own emergence. This account of contemporary biopolitics, together with its emergency of emergence, contrasts, in particular, with that offered by Agamben in his appropriation of Schmitt.

RETHINKING CONTEMPORARY BIOPOLITICS

RETHINKING CONTEMPORARY BIOPOLITICS

Molecular Biopolitics, Somatic Ethics and the Spirit of Biocapital

In this contribution, I decribe some of the key mutations occuring in contemporary biopolitics, suggesting they are linked to changes in the styles of thought, objects, forms of organization and technologies of the contemporary life sciences, and to their intense capitlization. I name these molecularization, optimization, subjectification, expertise, and bioeconomics. I suggest that these are giving rise to a new molecular ontology of life, a ‘flattened’ biomedical epistemology, and circuits of vitality, in which the elements of life are accorded a new mobility. Vitality can now be decomposed, stabilized, frozen, banked, stored, commoditized, accumulated, exchanged, traded across time, across space, across organs and species, across diverse contexts and enterprises in the service of both health and wealth. I suggest that we have seen the birth of a new ‘somatic’ sense of ourselves, which extends to self and identity itself – hence we are becoming ‘neurochemical selves’. Our corporeal existence has gained unrival salience in our conduct of our lives – our ‘Lebensfuhrung’ is now shaped by what I term a somatic ethic. In conclusion, I argue that there is an ‘elective affinity’ between this somatic ethic and the ‘spirit of biocapital’.

From the Immune Community to the Communitarian Immunity: On the Recent Reflections of Roberto Esposito

In this survey of Roberto Esposito's thought, Bonito Oliva reflects upon the stakes of reading biopolitics in an immunitary key. After sketching the features of a "fundamental crisis in the sense of coexistence," the author, moving from ancient to modern philosophy, emphasizes the centrality of fear in Esposito's understanding of the origins of community. The importance of fear explains in part the intrinsic relation community has to immunity for Esposito, in which immunity is figured primarily as a negative form of community. In the essay's closing pages, the author shows how deeply immunity informs Esposito's understanding of contemporary biopolitics. She goes on to note Esposito's indebtedness to Hegel, especially with regard to the negative, and echoes Esposito's and Deleuze's own calls for the construction of "an immanent norm of life."

Compassion and Repression: The Moral Economy of Immigration Policies in France

Immigration policies in Europe in the last three decades have become increasingly restrictive. During the 1990s, political asylum lost much of its legitimacy, as new criteria based on humanitarian claims became more common in appeals for immigration. Asylum seekers were increasingly identified as illegal immigrants and therefore candidates for expulsion, unless humanitarian reasons could be found to requalify them as victims deserving sympathy. This substitution of a right to asylum by an obligation in terms of charity leads to a reconsideration of Giorgio Agamben's separation of the humanitarian and the political, suggesting instead a humanitarianization of policies. Sangatte Center, often referred to as a transit camp, became a symbol of this ambiguous European treatment of the “misery of the world” and serves here as an analytical thread revealing the tensions between repression and compassion as well as the moral economy of contemporary biopolitics.

Regenerating movements: embryonic stem cells and the politics of potentiality.

This paper develops a theoretical frame for analysing social movements in/and biomedicine. Drawing from work in social movement theory and science and technology studies, the paper describes the field of biotechnology as the material/imagined space of contemporary biopolitics in the contemporary United States. Interviews with activists from four social movements, websites and written material are examined, and two processes of knowledge construction were found to be central in constituting the field of biotechnology. These processes open up multiple sites for citizen participation in the construction of scientific knowledge.

EL BAÑO DEL MINISTRO Y EL EMBAJADOR: FRAGA Y DUKE EN PALOMARES, 1966

This essayʼs thesis concerns the transformation of Franco’s regime from the beginnings of the 1960ʼs towards a form of governmentality premised on contemporary biopolitics. This transformation finds its most precise articulation in the emerging importance of the Ministry of Information and Tourism under Manuel Fraga Iribarne, and its partial substitution and relegation of the General Secretary of the Movement. The Palomares episode is crucial to understand the biopolitical function of the new ministry. This essays pays suitable attention to one of its protagonists, US Ambassador Duke.

The Politics of Life Itself

This article explores contemporary biopolitics in the light of Michel Foucault's oft quoted suggestion that contemporary politics calls `life itself' into question. It suggests that recent developments in the life sciences, biomedicine and biotechnology can usefully be analysed along three dimensions. The first concerns logics of control - for contemporary biopolitics is risk politics. The second concerns the regime of truth in the life sciences - for contemporary biopolitics is molecular politics. The third concerns technologies of the self - for contemporary biopolitics is ethopolitics. The article suggests that, in these events, human beings have become `somatic individuals': personhood is increasingly being defined in terms of corporeality, and new and direct relations are established between our biology and our conduct. At the same time, this somatic and corporeal individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation and so to a politics of `life itself'.

Ecología, ciencia natural y biopolítica

On the basis of Foucault, this essay outlines a critical perspective for understanding the political and scientific conceptualization of the environment that emerges in contemporary concern with the environmental crisis. Current interest in environmental problems is a manifestation of what Foucault defined as the biopolitics of population. This new government rationality is linked to the extension and instilutionalizalion of new spheres of scientific knowledge, expressed in the ecology of modern systems. It also considers Foucault's characterization of the natural sciences and, on the basis of this, analyzes the significance of this type of sciences in contemporary biopolitics.