Biopolitical Paradigm Research Articles

Bio-politics of Protest: Student Protests in Serbia and Bulgaria as a Mechanism of Security for a Social System

The research-based ethnographic study presented in the paper aims at explaining why the extensive student protests of the last decades in Serbia and Bulgaria do not facilitate the post-socialist transformation. Along with a high occurrence of political upheavals that commonly evoke images of mass unrest and swift social reconfigurations of power, no significant change in politics towards more democratic regime has taken place. Despite the presence of multiple liberal semantics in the public debate, the Balkan discourse on democracy seems fairly remote from the political and social practice. All the well-established theories of protest and social movements remain inconclusive in answering this query. In search of an explanation, the concept of security and the bio-political paradigm of Michel Foucault have been adopted. The distinctive conceptual framework helps to explain how protests became a kind of security mechanism preventing an unstable social system from radical changes. Based on that concept the anthropological investigation allowed to identify some systemic milestones, or structural dimensions, bringing some counterintuitive results when it comes to the assessment of key social functions of protest, and a rather expected disclosure of deep authoritarian settings of governing institutions. Finally, the article discusses some similarities between the contentious events in Serbia and Bulgaria, and how the private stories recorded during in-depth interviews conducted between 2014 and 2017 in Belgrade and Sofia combine into one legitimate public narration on the Balkan political issues

Post-Auschwitz Dramaturgy: Toward the Later Edward Bond

Although British playwright Edward Bond is well known for his early plays during the 1960s–80s, his later works, from the late 1990s onward, have been relatively overlooked and underexplored. In this article, I aim to bridge these two phases and propose a theoretical framework to approach Bond’s evolution as a playwright. I will first examine Bond’s critical engagement with Brecht, and then I will proceed to analyse Bond’s evolving dramaturgy of the Holocaust, which will help to demonstrate how Bond has developed what we might call his post-Auschwitz dramaturgy. While criticizing Brecht’s theatre for being the “Theatre of Auschwitz,” Bond bases his post-Brechtian dramaturgy on his specific understanding of the infamous Nazi concentration camp. Bond regards Auschwitz as not only a localized historical event but also a trans-historical structure of biopolitics, manifested in both the camp and an ensuing neoliberal capitalist system. By drawing on two pivotal passages of the Palermo improvisation (which took place in 1983) and the Russian guard’s story, both of which Bond describes in “Commentary on The War Plays” (1991), I will elucidate how these examples herald a “post-Auschwitz” dramaturgical model that can be understood through Emmanuel Levinas’s ethics and Giorgio Agamben’s biopolitics. Building on this analysis, I will analyse Bond’s plays The Crime of the Twenty-First Century (1999) and Born (2006) to argue that it is the dissonance between the biopolitical paradigm exemplified in Auschwitz and the human subject’s fundamental creativity that defines Bond’s later works.

Биополитическая революция: pro et contra

The establishment of the biopolitical paradigm of state governance, which views its main task in the implementation of ambitious socioeconomic and military-political projects in close connection with the control over individuals and even care for their living, has produced a fundamentally new type of social contract that puts the authorities and the population who they patronize into mutual dependence. The balance of interests manifests itself in the form of a welfare state that embodies the positive side of biopolitical governance and provides the public with numerous benefits associated with the admission to participation in the economic and political life. Based on the analysis of the processes unfolding in the recent years, the authors come to the conclusion that the consensus reached during the “great biopolitical game” is not unshakable. The long journey to include the population into the economy and politics in the interests of the authorities resulted in an unintended long-term consequence for the latter — a progressive decline in the productivity of the investment into the population within the established status quo. The effectiveness of such investments is almost exhausted. The growing demands of the population, who expects greater care from the authorities, reflect the trend towards a consumer revolution from below. However, these demands may turn out to be overwhelming for the biopower that could in the blink of an eye reverse the costly policy that stopped being beneficial, which creates a tendency towards the counter-revolution from above. Against this background, the authorities could regress to the forms of government that deny the people the living standards that they became used to.

Do Age-Friendly Community Initiatives Form a Biopolitical Paradigm?

Biopolitical paradigms are frameworks that specify how concerns about health and the body are made the simultaneous focus of biomedicine and state policy (Foucault 1984; Rose 2007). As aging and urbanization trends converge, developing “age-friendly community initiatives” (AFCIs) has become a global movement and important policy area. To prompt critical questioning, situational analysis was used as a theory-methods package to compare AFCI conceptual frames with perspectives of thirteen AFCI experts and seventeen older San Franciscans. Preliminary analysis suggests AFCIs form a biopolitical paradigm because they not only seek to rework boundaries between bodies and environments, they operate as modes of individual and population governance for the sake of health; yet, struggle to find ways to preserve the inclusion of older people in the ongoing social system. Understanding how AFCIs place social and physical environments squarely in view within the biomedical arena of the gerontological gaze has theoretical and policy implications.

Исключение и правило. Политэкономические аргументы Н.И. Зибера против маржинализма до его триумфа

The article proposes an analysis of the critical arguments expressed by N.I. Sieber regarding the concept of value, which is accepted by economists of the subjective school. Sieber made these critical arguments in his dissertation, published in 1871. However, they remain valid for Marginalism, the principles of which basically continue the line of the subjective school (Leon Walras was among the authors cited by Sieber). In the analysis of Sieberʼs position, not only logic was taken into account, but also the rhetoric of his argumentation, which makes it possible to identify a broader context within which this position remains relevant. Sieber criticizes the views of economists of the subjective school from the standpoint of the classical school. The latter, as the basis for the constitution of value, considers the average, typical state of economic life, while the former is based on the consideration of an isolated, exceptional moment – that is, the moment when a radical change in the parameters of economic activity takes place. To describe this «exceptional moment», Sieber uses a number of metaphorical images, such as state of siege, threats to life and health, the situation of immigrants, etc. Sieberʼs use of these images allows us to compare his arguments with a number of the most important positions of political theorists of the 20th century (K. Schmitt, W. Benjamin, M. Foucault, G. Agamben) associated with such concepts as «sovereignty», «state of exception», «bare life». As a result, Sieberʼs perspective can be viewed as an anticipation of the modern criticism of neoliberalism – an ideology in which the marginalist understanding of the economy is used as an essential resource for the formation of a biopolitical paradigm for managing peopleʼs lives.

Da Filologia Cósmica

Presenciamos, atualmente, algo de um momento crítico para o pensamento, que se expressa de maneira análoga em diversas áreas do conhecimento. Na filologia, é experienciada a exaustão de um predomínio do modelo mimético auerbachiano, conforme a noção do Real lacaniano toma conta da sensibilidade literária ocidental. Tal assunção levou o pensamento moderno a um paradigma mórbido da existência, expresso nos trabalhos de Heidegger, Lacan e Agamben, e numa posterior leitura contemporânea algo desbalanceada do paradigma biopolítico foucaultiano, “fazer viver e deixar morrer”, que enxerga no encontro com a Coisa o fundamento e o horizonte da tanatopolítica. O presente ensaio visa propor alternativas para a localização de uma arquifilologia no domínio da vida frente ao Real, ao recusar o antropocentrismo do campo literário. Explorando a teoria gravitacional do físico teórico holandês Erik Verlinde, que sugere que a gravidade seria uma qualidade emergente da informação a dividir o espaço físico emergido e um segundo espaço por vir, a inorganicidade da literatura diagnosticada na máxima batailleana seria levada a um Outro lugar. O desejo de expressar imageticamente um mundo por vir não estaria sob monopólio humano, mas sim expresso em um funcionamento cósmico desde sempre indiferente a ruína da tradição mimética.

Biopolitical art and the struggle for Sovereignty in Putin’s Russia

ABSTRACTThis article addresses the public appeal of political actionism in today’s Russia through analysis of the political art of Pyotr Pavlensky. The research uses the methodological paradigm of biopower and biopolitics, as outlined by Michel Foucault and further critically developed by Giorgio Agamben, since it helps to better understand both the oppressive nature of the Russian state, and the protest art of Pavlensky. The article seeks to unpack the struggle for the human body that has started in Russia in recent years, with the state imposing its normalizing and regulatory mechanisms upon private lives and corporeal practices of individuals, and people’s responses by re-claiming their bodies, from an open public discussion of sexuality, domestic violence and gender equality, to the radical exposure of the body by artists like Pavlensky. As the argument goes, the centerpiece of political controversy is not just the battle for the human body, but a battle for sovereignty, defining the limits of state intervention, the borders of the political community and the rights of the individual. The article asks a number of questions: how Pavlensky’s performances can be explained within the framework of the biopolitical regime of Putin’s rule? Whether Pavlensky’s use of his own body for political purposes (a “biopolitical art’ of sorts) is a response to the increased biopolitical intervention of the Russian state that has marked Putin’s third term in office? Why did political protest become corporeal? How does the individual body turn into a tool for political contestation and how does it embody collective meanings? How the politicization of the body transpires, and how an individual body can incarnate a collective body of nation?

Living After Auschwitz: Memory, Culture and Biopolitics in the Work of Bernard Stiegler and Giorgio Agamben

The problem with remembering Auschwitz is that the neoliberal paradigm of economic utility, demotic happiness, and programmed consumption has tended to erase its facticity from public consciousness. Technoscientific capitalism functions as a regime of amnesic performance that prevents a ‘working through’ of the Nazi genocide. I argue that Agamben’s work on the implicit violence of the biopolitical paradigm gives a crucial insight into the fate of humanity in the time of global capitalism. However, I contend that the idea of testimony he presents in Remnants of Auschwitz recapitulates a Heideggerian ontology of experience that is enacted outside of the technological dynamics of trauma and memory. I employ Stiegler’s concept of epiphylogenetic memory, first, to explore the economy of fascisms that has emerged within the networks of global capitalism (hyper-nationalisms, religious fundamentalisms, technological transhumanisms) and, second, to examine the material affects through which Auschwitz returns to the scene of this economy.

Біополітична парадигма як основа формування політологічного контексту моделі мовної політики України.

The biopolitical paradigm is studied as the basis for the formation of the political context of the model of language policy. It is noted that the biopolitical paradigm is based on such concepts as behaviorism, neobechhevorizm and postbiheviorizm, which are used to study the behavior of subjects of language policy, understanding of language policy as a problem, its analysis and evaluation of the language and political situation that is positively or negatively affects the formation of the linguistic environment, the community, its development and the state as a whole. It is stated that the biopolitical approach made it possible to focus on the political culture and symbolic behavior of politicians who develop linguistic bills, programs, complex measures, make suggestions during their discussion and make the necessary decisions that one way or another influence the implementation of language policy, quality of life and community behavior. An attempt has been made to prove that behavioral, non-ihivorous and post-bayhevorist theories are the basis of the formation of a biopolitical which allows us to plunge into the essence of language policy as a model, to analyze its essence, content, meaning and development. It is argued that the biopolitical paradigm is based on a behavioral research method that reflects inter-governmental relations, the relationship between Russian and Ukrainian authorities, as well as between them and the Ukrainian community. The definition of the concept of paradigm, which the author understands as a set of cognitive principles and techniques that reflect the linguistic-political reality and language-political problem, which, in our understanding, is the political context of language policy as a model that is investigated with the help of post-bestialism, that is, , behavioral direction. It analyzes the behavior of the Russian authorities, which interferes in Ukraine's internal affairs, and pro-Russian-minded politicians, which it uses to implement its plans and protect its own interests.

Dijaloški odnos bioetike i biopolitike

The paper seeks to establish a relationship between bioethics and biopolitics in the context of elderly people. Although aging itself is not a phenomenon, the attitude towards elderly people is highlighted as a phenomenon. Given that they often lose their psychophysical abilities and are faced with personal limitations, they inevitably face both the value system and the treatment of society. In this sense, biopolitics is manifested as the force and power whose instruments allow it to transform and shape a new culture, however, not by independent work, but relying on the help of bioethics, whose main concern is the attitude towards human dignity, life and health. Contrary to the culture of materialism and consumerism, bioethics has the task to reawaken in the modern society the meaning and value of human nature as the basis of ethics and healthy biopolitics in order to raise awareness of virtues as part of the nature of the human person. This aims to highlight the ethics of virtues as a new paradigm of biopolitics because it corresponds to that original and primordial human.

Adolfo Bioy Casares: la ficción biopolítica

ABSTRACTMost academic works on Adolfo Bioy Casares can be put into two categories: those that stress Bioy Casares's political ideas and those that emphasize his mastery of the fantastic genre as if he were two different writers at once. Can we read a politics of the fantastic in his works? Beyond the Peronist polemics in which Casares's books are framed, if we take into consideration the existential logic that runs through his novels—always in the boundaries between life and death, dream and reality, body and spirit, etc.—we note an exploration of the body and living, of the human and the animal. This exploration is informed by scientific laws that progressively invade the spheres of subjectivity, citizenship, and politics in his works, beginning in particular with El sueño de los héroes (1954), which leaps from the technical imagination to the biopolitical paradigm that will appear fictionalized in Diario de la guerra del cerdo (1969) and Dormir al sol (1973).

Book Review: The Use of Bodies

The Use of Bodies. By Giorgio Agamben. Translated by Adam Kotsko. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2015. xxii + 291 pp. $85.00 (cloth); $25.95 (paper).With English publication of The Use of Bodies, we now have final volume of Giorgio Agamben s remarkable series of investigations into ontological foundations of Western politics. Beginning with eponymous volume in 1995, nine entries of Homo Sacer series attempt an elucidation of deepest philosophical and theological foundations of contemporary Western politics. As Agamben specifies his project, he is after the very originary structure of politics, in order to try to bring to light arcanum imperii that in some way constituted its foundation and that had remained at same time fully exposed and tenaciously hidden in (p. 263).In book Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1998), Agamben famously claimed that Western politics is based on aporiatic exception, where natural life (zoe) was distinguished from a political life (bios). We see this distinction most acutely in Roman legal figure of homo sacer or sacred man. The homo sacer is paradoxical because it is a life that can be killed (because it has been stripped of its political meaning), yet not sacrificed (also because it has been stripped of its political meaning). Precisely because of its (former) life in political order, figure of homo sacer has been stripped of its political being and exists merely as bare life (zoe). It is included in political order only, paradoxically, by exclusion.Through an intricate analysis of both ontological and theological themes, Agamben claims this divlsio is fundamentally constitutive of Western political order. Politics, then, is founded on a specific definition and attendant understanding of life. In so doing, West produces a politics that brings natural life, or very fact of living, into question. Moving beyond Foucault and Arendt, Agamben controversially names concentration camp as bio-political paradigm of Western modernity, place where sovereignty can both produce and have absolute power over bare life. The paradigma of camp is representative instance of bio-political control that sovereign power wants to achieve; not then as an aberration of modern West, but rather its truest expression.In The Use of Bodies, Agamben returns to series' origin and takes up again topic of life, giving us perhaps most complete genealogy of philosophical concept of life ever to appear. In particular, Agamben wants to think a conception of life that cannot be separated from its form, a life that cannot be rendered bare. Herein, we are finally treated with Agamben's full conception of form-of-life, long awaited in his work. …

Neoliberal deregulation as biopolitical paradigm of contemporary capitalist society

The main task of this paper consists in the analysis of neoliberal deregulation as biopolitical paradigm of contemporary capitalist society. The paper starts from the premise that the political strategy of deregulation clearly can be unmasked as a change of direction and the domain of government intervention or as some kind of re-regulation which implies a shift from state interventionism towards management that enables market. The neoliberal premise of deregulation does not imply a lack of government intervention in general, but rather a lack of government intervention in the economy while providing the same (market) economy to prosper. However, this is not (just) the result of actually existing neoliberalism, which would in practice of its implementation significantly departed from what could be called a postulates of neoliberal theory.Following the arguments of Michel Foucault, it becomes clear that neoliberalism is already in its theoretical and conceptual core a new technology of government, given that significantly departs from the political principles of the release of the market to operate as a self-regulatory mechanism, or the liberal premise of laissez-faire. This shift does not imply a change just in the economy of liberalism as much as in the liberalism as art of governing or governmentality doctrine. At the same time, the paper stresses that, despite the erosion of national sovereignty, biopolitical organization of power over life in the era of neoliberalism is not disappeared, but has taken on a new global and hegemonic form. It is not more biopolitics of single population, which has a clearly delimited border. It is now the overall organization of power over life, one that govern ?without government?, because it is handled by human aspirations, wishes, happiness, fears, etc., internalizing as a global common sense, unquestionable modus vivendi and the global regime of truth.

Notes on the Biopolitical State of Nature

Foucault's notion of biopower and his reflections on barbarism and savagery in ‘Society Must Be Defended’ are part of Western philosophy's theorization of the state of nature. In order to show the implications of this epistemic constellation, the article concentrates on the semantic history of primitivism, providing an alternative genealogy for the biopolitical paradigm and ‘Italian Theory's’ engagement with life and nature. From this perspective, Leopardi stands out as a precursor to contemporary ‘Italian Theory’. Leopardi's fascination with Rousseau's ethnographic exoticism and his meditations on the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality can be seen as a critique of the colonial foundations of European modern philosophy and an attempt to envision another state of nature, beyond the tenets of the social contract tradition.

Werewolves in the Immunitary Paradigm

I. IntroductionThe biopolitical perspective initiated by Michel Foucault highlights the limitations of traditional categories of political philosophy to explicate power relations. As Foucault notes, power things, it induces pleasure, forms knowledge, produces discourses. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression.1 Power is a vast technology that crosses all social relations; it can produce both subjects and subjectivities.Based on this point, we will consider monstrosity as a political category2 that allows us to conceive the way in which biopower produces subjectivities. Monstrosity can be understood in two ways: in the negative sense it can be taken as subjectivities that are the negative converse of the useful and docile3 bodies. Consequently, monstrosity becomes an objective of biopower that aims to neutral ize and eliminate it. However, monstrosity can also be taken in a positive sense as subjectivities that resist appropriation by biopower and create in common.4The category of monstrosity reveals a semantic ambiguity as it consists of an inherent tension between the negative and positive meanings. These are related by the exercise of power in a specific direction. For the negative orientation, we can use the expression over monstrosity-stressing over-and of monstrosity-stressing of-for the positive direction.In this article we are going to focus on politics over monstrosity, that is, on the subjectivities that are constituted as monsters by power because they cannot be integrated into (captured by) the logic of normalization, whose aim is homogenization, or subsumed under classifications in binary oppositions-such as, male/female and capitalist/worker.5 These subjectivities can be seen as a way of life, a negative way of life, which can be observed in the expressions life unworthy of being lived outlined by Giorgio Agamben or the life without grievability according to Judith Butler,6 for example.We would like to refer to an old metaphor which allows us to understand the inherent relation between State and monstrosity, when monstrosity is introduced in the State. That is, the werewolf metaphor, which summarizes the meaning of a sentence used by Thomas Hobbes:7 homo homini lupus, man is a wolf to man. We will thereby focus on the monstrosity that the human being represents, and not on the Leviathan, which is usually recognized as a political monster.8Even though is hostile to the use of metaphors in sciences,9 he uses them extensively. As Robert Stillman argues, Hobbes is fond of metaphors of the monstrous, and his employment of them, especially in crucial accounts of his own vocational ambitions, is recurrent and revealing.10 However, this should not be seen as a contradiction in his thought, but rather as a rhetorical strategy.11 In this respect, we note that only refers to the Leviathan three times in the voluminous book that takes this name. In a similar way, although the sentence homo homini lupus is used only once by Hobbes, this idea imbued his anthropological conception.Hobbes's thought is relevant from a biopolitical perspective as he was the first philosopher to demonstrate the direct relation between and politics.12 Politics is perceived as a protection against violent death, which is the cause of fear among men. It is out of fear of being murdered, which can be interpreted as political existentialism, that men create the State. In this sense, politics is understood as conservatio vitae, a preservation of against the constant threat of death in the state of nature.In this paper, we do not intend to analyze Hobbes's political theory but rather to look at the werewolf figure, which allows us to understand monstrosity from a biopolitical paradigm. This figure has traditionally been conceived as a mix of species, a combination of human and beast and, as Jeffrey Cohen indicates, the werewolf can express the radical difference between men and beasts or a hesitation during which, what is supposed to be contrastive remains coexistent, indifferent. …

Hydra wielości i komunizm commonersów w dobie biopolitycznego kapitalizmu

The article is an attempt to situate the main Peter Linebaugh's works in the context of modern theories of the common, especially in juxtaposition with Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt's biopolitical paradigm. American historian's oeuvre is still not well known in Poland, although his works in the field of social history, labour history, colonial Atlantic or global enclosures can inspire not only historians, but social theory as well. Linebaugh in his research on subaltern groups in the eve of capitalism introduces new ways, in which concepts such as working class, class struggle, commoning or the commons can be regarded and he draws ambitious, transmodern genealogy of global capitalism. The article tries to show the actuality of Linebaugh's research perspective in the era of biopolitical capitalism.

Foucault’s Affirmative Biopolitics: Cynic Parrhesia and the Biopower of the Powerless

While Foucault’s work on biopolitics continues to inspire diverse studies in a variety of disciplines, it has largely been missing from the debates on the possibility of “affirmative biopolitics” which have been primarily influenced by the work of Agamben and Esposito. This article restores Foucault’s work to these debates, proposing that his final lecture course at the Collège de France in 1983–1984 developed a paradigm of affirmative biopolitics in the reading of the Cynic practice of truth-telling ( parrhesia). The Cynic problematization of the relation between truth and life and their transvaluation of conventional truths by relocating them to the domain of bare life not only seeks to transform one’s life in accordance with the truth but also, through the confrontation with the existing conventions and norms, to transform the world as such. Cynic parrhesia is thus biopolitical, insofar as it reclaims the power of one’s life from the social order and its rationalities of government and applies it to oneself, investing one’s existence with truth. Since Foucault developed this reading of Cynicism in the context of his political engagement on behalf on East European dissidents, the article proceeds to analyse the resonances between parrhesia and Václav Havel’s idea of “living within the truth,” elaborating the biopolitical significance of both practices. We conclude by addressing the implications of our interpretation for Foucault scholarship and the wider debates on biopolitics.

Giorgio Agamben’s Analysis of the Mechanism of Exclusion or the Logic of Sovereign Power

In Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Giorgio Agamben extends Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics to include life, stripped bare, that is placed completely at the mercy of the powers that be. For him, the biopolitical paradigm is no longer the asylum but the concentration camp. Agamben drew the inspiration for this shift from Walter Benjamin, who decades ago had observed that the state of exception favored by the Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt had become the rule. Certain strata of the population, in this case the Jewish citizens in Germany, were abandoned by the law while continuing to fall under its control. Agamben examines the extent to which Aristotle gave support to this murderous logic with his considerations on “potentiality to be” and “potentiality not to be.” It is by suspending its “potentiality not to be” (that is, all elements that thwart its selfaffirmation) that absolute Being founds itself. In addition, Agamben dwells on Pompeius Festus’s definition of the outlaw (homo sacer): the one who cannot be sacrificed but who can be killed with impunity. The article concludes with a sketch of the figure of the Messiah (equally borrowed from Benjamin) who is expected to reverse the logic of the law.

Climate Insecurity in (Post)Conflict Areas: The Biopolitics of United Nations Vulnerability Assessments

Within the United Nations, the United Nations Development Programme, United Nations Environment Programme and Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs have all highlighted climate risks as relevant to their work in areas affected by conflict, endorsing human security approaches as valid for mapping the relationships between climate stresses and conflict-related harm. While this policy interest has limited operational presence, I discuss salient assessments of climate vulnerability in (post)conflict areas, arguing that these agencies have applied a natural disaster rather than conflict regulation inflection of humanitarian reason. The former entails a biopolitical paradigm of disaster risk reduction, prescribing technical-managerial measures to build the resilience of vulnerable populations. This framing supports a depoliticised stance reflecting UN norms of neutrality and impartiality. I claim that this position nevertheless disregards its own geopolitical conditions and effects, which dilute the scope for international humanitarian law to assign responsibility for conflict-related harm.

The 2008 Effect

Since 2008, the inaugural year of an ongoing ‘crisis’, globalization has strongly emerged as an economic, rather than cultural, reality in the making – principally through a conflict between capital and labour. As feminism tackles the gendered division of labour, what kind of context does ‘the 2008 effect’ illuminate for the struggle to end gender and sex-based oppression, and how are feminist narratives of art contributing to this struggle? With the aim of encouraging a feminist dialogue on this urgent question, three lines of feminist opposition are identified that can be practised in the art world: a) resistance to the historicization of feminism, as feminist knowledge is indispensible for subverting globalization as crisis; b) a commitment to a biopolitical paradigm implying a shift of emphasis from the partiality of the ‘body’ to the more rounded concept of ‘life’; c) an exploration of the potential offered by feminist collectivism and a practice of seeking alliances rather than advocating insular, and separatist, feminist platforms.