Notion Of Biopolitics Research Articles

“Abiding there Unliving”

Abstract Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer proposes that the public display of power over life and death that Foucault restricts to the 18th century were not displaced by the new disciplinary structures associated with the hospital and the asylum, but remained contemporary with them. This notion of the simultaneity of surveillance and spectacle can be helpful in thinking about Beckett’s novel The Unnamable. Agamben’s work can also demonstrate the centrality of the character of Worm. In this way the broader notion of biopolitics can usefully illuminate the historical and political contexts of the book.

Giorgio Agamben’s Critique of the Covid-19 Response has Little to Do with Biopolitics

ABSTRACT Giorgio Agamben claims that the aggressive coronavirus response in Italy turned the nation’s entire population into formless bare life, which was cast out from meaningful human existence through a sovereign exception. This widely criticised argument appears to stem from Agamben’s radical reinterpretation of biopolitics, a concept popularised by Michel Foucault. Although Agamben is often considered as the second most famous authority on the topic, some have begun to question whether his reinterpretation can operate within the framework set by his predecessor who defines the notion primarily through its life affirming and optimising effects. This has led to an unclear and contested definition of biopolitics, which hinders the notion’s usage as an analytical tool. Agamben’s statements on the pandemic must face similar scrutiny. According to him, life was not optimised during the pandemic. Therefore, Agamben’s critique on the coronavirus response has little to do with the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics, which offers a much sounder way of analysing the Covid crisis.

Ventilator and the Vaccine

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the fat body was caught up in a complicated logics of life and death in the North American context, where “obesity” was regarded as an “underlying condition” for greater risk of severe disease and death from Covid. As such, bodies with high BMIs were refused ICU ventilator care in certain jurisdictions, which fat activists classified as eugenics. At the same time, some vaccination campaigns prioritized people with higher BMIs for scarcely available Covid vaccinations, also on the basis of fat bodies’ higher risk status for Covid death. This paper explores the seeming tension between two articulations of fat during the Covid pandemic, whereby fat bodies were simultaneously worthy of life and of death in the same moment. Using MBembe’s conceptualization of necropolitics, which draws out and expands upon Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, I argue that the two perspectives on fatness operated in tandem, within an overall temporal shift in classification of obesity; from that of a risk factor for eventual death to that of an emergent threat. Such a temporal shift, I argue, relied on well-worn eugenic patterns in Canada, through which “normative” white bodies were prioritized for life through a complex necropolitical practice by which fat bodies were both made live and let die.

The British East India Company and the Great Bengal Famine of 1770: Towards a Corporate Colonial Biopolitics

ABSTRACT The Great Bengal Famine of 1770 took 10 million lives. The British East India Company’s (EIC) extraction of resources and imposition of brutal tax policies in Bengal exacerbated the disaster. By exploring the intersections of corporate interests, colonialism, and biopolitics, this paper provides a new perspective on the Bengal famine of 1770 by introducing and visualizing it through a unique theoretical framework—corporate colonial biopolitics. Adopting Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, my focus is primarily on the corporate colonial biopolitical strategies enforced by the Company, which led to dispossession, violence, and resource extraction exploiting Bengal’s landscape and impeding the region’s progress and development. The essay unveils the racist policies and profit-driven principles of the EIC and how they prioritized generating revenues, financing its military, and exporting food grain even at the peak of the famine. I point out how the EIC systematically dismantled the Indian agricultural system, fueling deindustrialization in India and ultimately making the region vulnerable to famines. The Bengal famine of 1770 remains unexplored by geographers despite being the first colonial famine in India. One of the primary objectives of this paper is to bridge this gap by shedding light on the geographical dimensions of this pivotal historical catastrophe.

Doing isolation – Caring Citizens. A cross-country comparative analysis of patient experiences with isolation practices during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic

The aim of this article is to investigate isolation experiences of individuals affected by Covid-19 and explore how care practices were enacted or upheld under the particular policies of the pandemic. Conceptually we draw upon Foucault's notion of biopolitics and scholarship on ‘care practices’ and ‘carescapes’. We are interested in how theoretical ideas such as ‘containing the virus’ or ‘flattening the curve,’ as part of policies of ‘pandemic management,’ shaped lived realities and influenced practices and understandings of care. We reviewed qualitative interviews with individuals who were ill with Covid-19 in 2020/2021 from seven countries that we analyzed comparatively across emerging themes with a Foucauldian lens on biopolitics.The idea of ‘carescapes,’ suggests that ‘care’ and ‘policy’ intermingle, which allow us to bring to the fore what is silenced through the biopolitics of Covid-19. Carescapes are the embodied places of care where policies and regulations traverse from public into private spaces, effectively re-configuring the latter. To ‘do’ isolation in the context of Covid-19, carescapes were assembled with the help of material things such as, masks, disinfectants, doors and schedules; these served as boundaries that had to be sustained and navigated. ‘Doing isolation’ therefore presents a form of biopolitics that relies on individual citizenship and complex care practices required to chart the terrain created by the polices of the pandemic. Doing isolation was especially challenging because policies about safe spaces and safe practices were regularly changed as governments struggled to devise policies to contain the pandemic.

FOTOGRAFIAS QUE NARRAM HISTÓRIAS

Through a critical reading of the artistic procedures in contact-contagions and the relationship between body, photography and discourse in the Cuban photographic series Diecisiete (2009-2010), by Eduardo Rawdríguez, we analyze the aesthetic procedures and the overflows between the literary and the photographic, based on Freund (1976), Sontag (1983), Brizuela (2014) and Butler (2015). Then, we discuss sexuality as a central issue for the debate around the notion of biopolitics (FOUCAULT, 1988) and the control of sexualities and bodies as it emerges in the project. Thus, we discuss policies and practices that censor subjectivities, such as the abjection of bodies (BUTLER, 2000, 2002; GIORGI, 2014), since the photographic project presents the problematic about subjectivities, violence and power in a certain Cuban context of the last decades.

Specters of comfort women: Biopolitical colonial warfare, questions of humanity, and the haunted future

The memories of “comfort women” have been discursively represented primarily within the dynamic discussions that define narratives regarding the universal human rights of women. In this article, I attempt to re-read the history of the comfort women system against the paradigmatic human rights narratives of gender-based violence while contextualizing its history within the legacy of colonial racism. The understanding of the comfort women system as colonial violence that I put forward thus challenges the basic assumptions of current debates on contested memories in East Asia. For this, I draw on haunting aspects of Zainichi Korean documentary filmmaker Soonam Park’s archivization of human suffering during the colonial period and on Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics. I further discuss the contrasting implications of W. E. B. Du Bois’s visits to Japan and to the ruins of the Warsaw Ghetto in light of Michael Rothberg’s reading of Du Bois and of his conceptual reflections on “marking caesuras.” In this regard, I characterize Imperial Japan as the absent empire of postcolonial grammatology, underscoring thereby the manner in which Eurocentrism, binary thinking, and habitual orientation around the color line inhabit and determine much of the work carried out under the banner of postcolonial studies. “Enter the ghost, exit the ghost, re-enter the ghost.” – Hamlet.

Panoptic Life in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four

This article discusses panopticon as a controlling mechanism that moulds the conduct of Winston Smith and Julia in George Orwell's political novel 1984. It aims at examining the government tactics; panopticon, that exerts power for controlling and constructing the subjectivity. Taking the reclose to Jeremy Bentham’s penal theory of panopticon, Michel Foucault appropriates his notion of biopolitics to remap how power constitutes the subjectivity of the population. This article probes into the state paradigms that indoctrinates and makes people docile via panopticon in 1984 to subject Julia and Smith to power and their rendering of self-subjection as the political outcasts. Finally, the surveillance telescreen of the Big Brother instantiates to fortify absolute regime leading it to institutionalized punishment and outlawry of Smith and other in Orwellian novel.

Immunity and SymBiopolitics

The notion of immunity, as it was defined in biology in the middle of the 20th century, draws a boundary between the “self” and the “nonself”. In this respect the notion of immunity is the perfect metaphor for biopolitical government: similar to the immune system, which fights everything that it sees as “nonself”, biopolitical power discriminates against what it sees as “different” or “other”. However, if we examine immunity not as a metaphor but as a phenomenon viewed from the perspective of contemporary biology, we have to admit that immunity comprises not only a defensive reaction toward an external, contagious element, but also a positive reaction or so-called “tolerance”. Thus, the defensive model of immunity should be complemented by a positive one, interpreting immunity as being entangled in its milieu. Alfred I. Tauber suggested that immunity should be seen as an ecological system which not simply reacts toward the external element but opens the negotiations between the “self” and “nonself” within the system. This model of ecological immunology is also a good methodological tool to rethink the notion of biopolitics: instead of seeing biopolitics as the opposition between a sovereign power and an oppressed individual, we can interpret it as a network of sympoietic interactions between individuals, technologies, and nonhuman others.

Biopolitics and speculative objects in Chilean health projects.

'Biopolitics' is a much-used concept in recent academic literature. One of its main fields of application is in the analysis of public health projects. This article analyses the national Explicit Health Guarantees project in Chile from that perspective. However, we criticize the standard invocation of 'biopolitics' by observing that such public health projects require technoscientific operations that establish truths and regimes of obligation for the groups involved -understanding regime both as a set of imposed orders and a set of regulated processes. Specifically, the Explicit Health Guarantees project defines what we call 'speculative objects'. These have two characteristics: (a) They relate highly diverse entities into integrated wholes that are and involve objects of knowledge and uncertainty, and (b) this integration creates regimes of obligation considered as scientific truths on many different groups. We conclude by proposing new questions about the notion of biopolitics and its relationship with uncertainty and speculation.

Biolegality: How Biology and Law Redefine Sociality

As an empirical concept, biolegality emerged at the height of biotechnological advances in Euro-American societies when rapid changes in the life sciences (including molecular biology, immunology, and the neurosciences) and their attendant techniques (including reproductive technologies and gene editing) started to challenge ethical norms, legal decisions, and legal forms. As a theoretical concept, biolegality deepens the Foucauldian notion of biopolitics with an operation of legality that emphasizes how biology and its attendant technologies alter legal form, knowledge, practice, and experience. These empirical and theoretical developments affect how we understand sociality. While public discourse remains preoccupied with the call for more regulation—thereby underscoring law's lag in its dealings with technology—the social science scholarship describes instead how bioscience and biotechnology are fragmenting and rearranging legal knowledge about property, personhood, parenthood, and collective identity. As it opens broader anthropological debates around exchange, self, kinship, and community, the study of biolegality brings a novel currency to the discipline, addressing how biology and law inform new ways of relating and knowing.

Refugees as a key representation of vulnerability: politics and biopolitics

PurposeThis article aims at the sociological inquiry seeking to identify meanings ascribed to the term of vulnerability by official spokespersons, to explore a novel public health policy with reference to vulnerable populations and to trace its enactment with particular attention to vulnerable populations in Greece; finally a case of contest among the state and the civil society over refugees' rights will be located against public health politics and biopolitics in the context of the pandemic Covid-19.Design/methodology/approachThe interpretivist perspective towards analysis of textual data is adopted. Discourse analysis and content analysis are applied to analyze four sets of data.FindingsThe main findings show: (1) ambiguity over the terminology, (2) insufficient policy design and policy enactment towards the protection of vulnerable populations' health, (3) an illuminative case of contest among civil society and the state against infringement of refugees' human rights which may interpreted in terms of a tradition of solidarity.Originality/valueThe Foucauldian notion of biopolitics provides the grounds to understanding how market prevails over life at the expense of those in greater need, and how the state, serving homo economicus, intensifies instead of alleviating health vulnerabilities.

PERFORMATIVITY, SENSOGRAPHY AND MUSIC: LEARNING AND TEACHING THE ‘OTHER’ HOLOCAUST AT A JEWISH INN

The article reflects on my teaching experiences and the increased difficulty of teaching notions such as biopolitics and death politics to anthropology students. Such notions sound quite abstract and difficult to grasp. Nevertheless, they are essential in understanding the Holocaust, the Nazis’ mass production of death and the control of the human body and mind by this fascist-bureaucratic regime. Presenting the Shoah to anthropology students via lectures seems quite partial; apart from describing it from a macro-perspective, it would be more enlightening to introduce students to the sensual and bodily aspects of the topic. Thus, it would be easier to approach notions such as affect/affectivity and embodiment that lie at the centre of contemporary anthropological thinking. The anthropology of performance, theatre and drama could provide the anthropologist with experimental methods of teaching and learning and could be used as loci of reflection and critique. Such a performance may have a more significant impact on academic and non-academic audiences. Benssoussan Han, an old Jewish inn at the centre of Thessaloniki built at the end of the 19th century, seems the ideal place to combine learning and teaching through performance. Several experimental performances have taken place there in recent years. After presenting some of them, I will briefly discuss a teaching scenario, a performative experiment in progress. The proposed pedagogical scenario deals with dystopic memories emotional and sensual silences. It is an attempt to understand the “other” Holocaust, unquestionably the less studied aspects of this regime, including the music produced in the Terezin camp, and to reflect on notions of biopolitics and death politics. The project will be a joint one: bodies, movement, music, logos and a video projection about life in Terezin. As Dorita Hannah and others argue, it might prove an opportunity to 'make space speak' and for the audience to reflect and interact.

Social Immunology: Application in Research on Migration

The COVID-19 pandemic has been challenging the world for many months, drawing the public’s attention to the field of epidemiology. Governments around the globe urgently call on the scientific community to provide guidelines for the treatment and prevention of coronavirus infections. Immunity protection (natu-ral or man-made) is at the epicentre of state policies and public discussions. It is less known that the epi-demiological discourse had been used beyond natural sciences in the domain of philosophy and social research. This paper introduces the concept of social immunology developed by Italian philosopher Rob-erto Esposito at the turn of the 20th century as part of the discussion of the notion of biopolitics. I re-read one of my previous research projects through the lens of Esposito’s theory to show the potential of his theoretical constructs in studies on migration and integration.

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

The Politics of Rightful Killing: Civil Society, Gender, and Sexuality in Weblogistan

Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus

The article focuses on emergence of panoply of genres of quarantine noticed by author Joshua Clover in a blog post and mentions notion of biopolitics mentioned by philosopher Michael Foucault Topics discussed include concept of biopolitics to address the coronavirus pandemic, issue for political decision-making to be addressed by the government and city disciplinarization with inhabitants during plague pandemic

Noopolitics and political action in Maurizio Lazzarato: contributions for a political collective psychology in control societies

In this review of the concept of noopolitics, I offer a follow-up of the way Maurizio Lazzarato proposes deriving it from the notion of biopolitics in Michel Foucault. In this exercise I expose the bridges that Lazzarato is establishing between the approaches coming from a political philosophy, particularly the work of Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, and the sociology of Gabriel Tarde, to ad-dress a collective phenomenon that would characterize for him the current societies of control: the net. The net would be the field in which a particular agonistic would be deployed for the ex-ercise of power and for contemporary political action. With noopolitics Lazzarato contributes to an understanding of this form of exercise of power and the potential of collective political action. In this sense, their contribution becomes relevant for areas of psychology that have these prob-lems as an object, such as collective psychology and political psychology.

Biopolítica, precariedade e educação

Este ensaio teórico busca apresentar as noções de biopolítica e precariedade mobilizadas pelos teóricos pós-estruturalistas Michel Foucault e Judith Butler. Foucault constrói sua noção de biopolítica pensando-a como a transformação das formas de poder desde o século XVIII, produzindo formas específicas de subjetividades instadas cada vez mais a uma racionalidade neoliberal. Judith Butler apresenta sua noção de precariedade - ou de vidas precárias - partindo da problematização do luto e da violência, percebendo-os como operadores de poder, produzindo formas de vidas danificadas, não passíveis de luto. Ambas as noções pensadas junto ao campo da educação evidenciam como práticas biopolíticas em tempos neoliberais produzem, inclusive na educação, formas diversas de precariedade, corpos que não importam. As contribuições desses teóricos neste ensaio, pensadas junto à educação, podem articular novos problemas ao pensamento, mobilizando, a partir de suas noções, contra-produções que incitam novas possibilidades de habitar o presente e viver uma vida vivível.

Biopolitics of migration: An assemblage approach

Critical research on migration, borders and camps has used the notion of biopolitics to interrogate how sovereign power or the state differentiate and govern the life of mobile populations. Yet despite its popularity, biopolitical theory is not without limitations, particularly when used as an analytic lens for empirical research. Many theorists of biopolitics are concerned with grand historical shifts and binary oppositions between life and death, inclusion and exclusion, bare life and political rights. Such binaries have been challenged by recent research that points to complex and nuanced differentiations of belonging and citizenship, to the ambiguity of power relations, and that prioritizes the agency and experience of individuals over structuralist conceptions of oppression. Against this background, I suggest that assemblage thinking and the works of Deleuze and Guattari offer terms and concepts that can be made useful to reconsider biopolitics as an analytic approach. Assemblage thinking challenges traditional oppositions between the individual and the collective, structure and agency, oppression and resistance and may thus be more sensitive to the complexity of power relations that integrate the life of migrants. In particular, I examine how revised conceptions of power, life, difference and population challenge the assumption of a central origin of power and an understanding of biopolitics as spatially or historically confined. By considering biopolitics as multiple and becoming, analysis can become more sensitive to the biopolitical experience of migrants, and to the formation of alternative collectives and subjectivities that challenge the violent biopolitics of contemporary migration regimes.

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.