Biopolitical Perspective Research Articles

Biopolitics in "The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil", by George Saunders

In this article, I analyze George Saunders’s novella The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil (2005) from the perspective of biopolitics, following the theoretical frameworks established by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Frédéric Lordon. I focus on two aspects of biopolitics: one linked to the extermination of the enemy, and the other to the manipulation of the passions of the governed. Regarding the first aspect, I discuss the strategies that Phil, the sovereign dictator in the story, uses to kill or displace the Other. In the second aspect, I study the use of desire and affect as biopolitical technologies that contribute to maintaining and reinforcing power. Finally, I examine the critical position of various characters in relation to Phil’s biopolitical regime and the political dimension of the novella itself.

The governance of teachers’ time allocation and data usage through a learning management system: a biopolitical perspective

ABSTRACT This paper examines the intricate relationship between state ambitions and institutional disciplining in the context of managers and teachers’ time allocation and data usage. Using a specific learning management system (LMS) as a case study in Danish public elementary schools and drawing on Foucault’s theory, we examine how governance through the LMS, constituted as disciplinary power and surveillance techniques, shapes time allocation and data usage in schools. Our study is based on an analysis of policy documents and qualitative interviews, identifying discourses about educational ambitions and intentions with the LMS. Our analysis has three perspectives. First, we argue that the Danish state’s educational ambitions are characterized as biopolitics grounded in economic imperatives and the need for a well-educated population. Second, we argue that the enactment of a mandatory LMS in schools manifests as governance to secure state ambitions. Finally, we argue that the disciplinary power and surveillance techniques embedded in the design of the LMS shape teachers’ time allocation and data usage in accordance with state ambitions. Thus, our analysis contributes a theoretical perspective to develop a critical understanding of how state ambitions for governance through digital tools shape possibilities for practice among actors within the educational field.

A biopolitical perspective on national belonging in the early Turkish Republic

ABSTRACT This article explores the degree to which citizenship in the early Turkish Republic was informed by a biopolitical logic of the administration of population as a social body. How this larger biopolitical logic is connected to understandings of the national project being ‘modern’ and/or ‘scientific’ is also explored, as well as how this approach is preferable to an account based on the perspective of Agamben. Furthermore, this analysis examines how limits to belonging were understood in the period, especially in relation to minority populations, and how they were categorized.

Reflection on Gene Editing from the Perspective of Biopolitics

The study examines the creation of gene-edited infants from the perspective of biopolitics. Through an analysis at the level of “body-power”, we show that the infants are a product of an advanced stage of biopolitics. On the other hand, considering the level of “space-power”, we indicate that the mechanism of space deepens the governance of population through biopower, leading to real conflicts between past and future in the present. The infants can be seen as “heterotopias of mirrors”, where super-reality replaces the reality, culminating in a rational dilemma. We must also consider how to maintain our self-contemplation and naturalness when faced with the physical nature of humans and how to ensure that the state is fulfilling its role in regulating the use of gene-editing technology. Ultimately, we need to engage in a deeper rethinking and criticism of modernity to safeguard our values from being lost in the tide of modernization.

Rescuing Precarious Bodies: Biopolitics and Haitian Health in Edwidge Danticat’s Diasporic Writing

ABSTRACT Centering on the precarious bodies that are diseased or faced with health problems in Danticat’s oeuvre, this article from a biopolitical perspective examines how the malfunction of power exacerbates the health condition of individuals, and how those precarious bodies both expose the existing problems in Haiti’s health management and provide enlightenment to its improvement. This article argues that external causes of the diseased or health-threatened bodies in Danticat’s writing can be attributed to the abuse, misuse, or absence of authoritative power in health management, including the state’s inefficiency in managing people’s health and security, the neglect in environmental protection, and the authorities’ abuse of medical power, which demonstrate Danticat’s denunciation of the Haitian authoritative power’s inaction in health management and her appeals for urgent measures to be taken to improve people’s health. This article contributes to the discussions surrounding the disease narrative and health issues in Danticat’s writing, enhances people’s understanding of Haitian health issues from a non-Euro-American-centric lens, and enriches the research on biopolitical theories of health.

Maria Eichhorn’s 5 Weeks, 25 Days, 175 Hours (2016): Subjectivity and Time in Post-Fordist Labor

In this essay, Maria Eichhorn’s 2016 intervention at Chisenhale Gallery 5 weeks, 25 days, 175 hours serves as a foundation to examine the figure of the artistic worker in the Post-Fordist context. Departing from an art-historical analysis of Eichhorn’s gesture of closing the gallery and giving the staff free time, I explore the new subjectivity of the worker from a bio-political perspective, dwelling on the notion of self-precarization. An analysis of Eichhorn’s work shows how the neoliberal worker has been revealed as a subject who takes responsibility for her job insecurity and allows work to penetrate her private life. I argue that Eichhorn’s gesture acts as a reminder of how, as a consequence of the development of the new model of labor, every aspect of life is occupied by the imperative of productivity, complicating traditional ways of resistance.

Constructing Nuda Vita in Sophocles’ Antigone and Behn's Oroonoko: A Biopolitical Perspective on the Concept of Life

The paper aims to offer a biopolitical interpretation of Sophocles’ Antigone and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko by exploring the role of power in constituting the characters’ bare life. It argues that Oroonoko's relationship with Imoinda and Antigone's burial of Polynices reduce them to slavery and also shows that their captive killing epitomizes their outlawed life (zoé). To elucidate their outlawry brewed by the sovereign’s power, the paper looks into Antigone and Oroonoko’s socio-politically excluded vulnerable life. Their precarious life manifested in legal exclusion appeals Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer, an outcast who can be killed without incurring homicide. Departing from Michel Foucault’s notion of life fostering biopower that supplants the sovereign power, Agamben discusses that modern power exercise encompasses sovereign power that inherits the right of taking life or letting it live in Homo Sacer. Tuning with Agamben's bare life, this paper critically analyzes Antigone and Oroonoko’s life to slavery and death which suggest their production of biopolitical body. It infers that the state violence witnessed by Antigone and Oroonoko substantiates the killability of homo sacer.

Peace and War in Our Bodies and Minds: Public Subversion vs. Mass Totalization

This article explores the political impact of street art and symbolic creativity in challenging official hegemony. It focuses on the Russian case of social conflict around the 2022 war, specifically analyzing their pro-war “Z” propaganda and anti-war resistance in various cities. Using post-structuralist and visual biopolitical perspectives, the article examines the meaning and effects of “Z-ification” and the underground resistance to it. It argues that visual biopolitics reveals hidden aspects of political agency in a conformist society, and that Glynos and Howarth’s explanatory logics approach highlights the nature of popular protests. The research is based on an analysis of visual material from both oppositional and pro-government Telegram channels.

Den liberala demokratins konstkritiska protest

Claims that liberal democracy is in crisis need to reckon with the fact that it is a social system historically premised on crisis and criticality. Protest and protesting can, from this standpoint, be viewed as constitutive boundary phenomena of liberal democracy. By considering liberal democracy as a critical life form from a biopolitical perspective, the aim of the article is to suggest how liberal democracy itself can protest art-critically and that this indicates a crisis of its critical life form that is rarely acknowledged. The article argues that the crisis of liberal democracy in Sweden is made visible in the racial aspects of art-critical protests. The claim is also that these art-critical protests, in their turn, must be understood through an analysis of the relationship between, on the one hand, art criticism and citizenship and, on the other, the class relation and capital accumulation. In the article, this is demonstrated through an account of the biopolitical function of the aesthetic culture of the critical tradition, followed by two recent examples of the art-critical protest of liberal democracy. Whereas one of these examples represents a liberal critique of identity politics in art, the other demonstrates a transgression of the liberal principle of arm’s length distance in culture policy. The article concludes that the aesthetic culture of the critical tradition, strategically taken over by the Social Democrats at the dawn of liberal democracy, enabled a continuous reformation of how politics in liberal democracy is organically developed, and that the art-critical protest of liberal democracy today challenges this critical life form.

Changing Numbers, Living Conditions, Unchanging Biopolitical Problematic: Syrian Refugees in Turkey

Five years ago, the study titled “Biopolitical Problematic: Syrians Refugees in Turkey” was the second chapter of the book, “Turkey’s Syrians, today and Tomorrow” published and its argument was found remarkable and got good feedback. This study aims to update the recent statistics belonging to the Syrian refugees and revise the new developments in connection with the discussed biopolitical perspectives. It is obvious that with its nationalist character, Turkey continues to give its citizens some moral and respectable codes to save and to defend, which also defines civil types of human behavior and relations, which are all the time culturally and politically approved but put a kind of fear inside people. Therefore, nothing has changed on the theoretical ground, but the reader can find out new references problematizing the integration issue. Syrians' noticeable presence in almost every region and mostly negative narratives of the locals, their integration strategies, and the government's policies have been supported by recent literature and, recently most of the reaction appears because of the thought that “they are not actually guests.” However, rising of such a belief is not enough to change the theoretical framework constructed for the previous study: Agamben’s concepts of the camp, bare life, and state of exception, Foucault’s opinions on the relationship between security, territory, and population as associated with the socio-political practices, and Furedi’s culture of fear is still the key concepts of the theoretical process.

Trazos de sangre y fuego: bionecropolítica y juvenicidio en América Latina

"Capital comes into the world dripping blood and mud from every pore, from head to toe" (Marx 2014, 646) and reproduces itself, according to Valenzuela, with traces of blood and fire. This book is in line with a critique of capitalism as an economic model that resorts to necropolitics in order to reproduce itself. Specifically, it is a model that develops strategies that produce life and death, that determine who should or deserves to die. During the 123 pages of his book, Valenzuela tells us about precarious lives, lives that can be sacrificed, disposable lives, lives that are expendable, lives on the edge, young lives exposed on the verge of juvenicide, death, corruption, unimaginable pain; all of these are destructive features of capitalism and the globalised condition of the world. Traces of blood and mud, juvenicide, classism and inequality, biopolitics, necropolitics, snuff torture and bioresistances are some of the concepts that the author brings to the discussion and which serve to define and analyse current social problems in Latin America which, although they may seem alien to us Europeans, are correlated with the moment of multiple crises in which we find ourselves and where the death of young people is not physical, but moral. In this line, Valenzuela mentions Carles Feiza (2015) who, from the set of strategies of social exclusion, economic juvenicide (destruction of youth employment) and symbolic juvenicide (media and cultural stigmatisation of young people), gives content to what he himself calls moral juvenicide. In order to cover such a complex subject, the author appeals to cases of crime, violence and also the resistance of young people in Latin America; scenarios that have occurred in recent decades and which are presented in this book as references that make explicit current phenomena to be problematised by the academy. The aim is to study the past in order to explain the present and to understand how power relations function from the perspective of biopolitics (control/resistance of the body) and bioproxaemia (symbolic dimension of the body-space/territory relationship). Finally, the author ends by calling for the struggle for freedom as a commitment to life in the face of the strategies of death that neoliberal capitalism systematically reproduces.José Manuel Valenzuela Arce, a sociology graduate, is currently a professor and researcher in the Department of Cultural Studies at El Colegio de la Frontera Norte. His work has been of great importance for the understanding of the socio-cultural processes that define the border between Mexico and the United States, as well as for explaining youth movements in both countries, a field in which he is an expert. He stands out mainly for his great ability to create and apply concepts, filling them with content that helps us to describe and understand current phenomena. &nbsp

Hidden Oppression and “Narrative” as Resistance: A Biopolitical Reading of Never Let Me Go

Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which depicts the unfortunate prospect of a group of clones in a dystopian way, has a central theme of power and oppression. From a biopolitical perspective, it may be called “an Agambenian novel.” The clones who seem to live a “normal” life but eventually have to face their unusual destiny, resemble what Agamben has elaborated as “homo sacer”. This essay argues how the sovereign power turns the clones into “bare life” by means of spatial isolation, leaving them trapped in a state of exception—in which legality and legal needs are suspended, and finally deprives them of their lives in a “legal” way. With an analysis of the reminiscent narrator, the essay continues to argue that Ishiguro’s “narrative,” with its potential for resistance and protest, functions to uncover the hidden oppression in daily life and negate any political violence in a society.

Biopower, Biopolitics and Pandemic Vulnerabilities: Reading the Covid Chronicles Comics

This essay examines Covid Chronicles: A Comics Anthology from the perspective of biopower and biopolitics. It contends that, on the one hand, the comics capture individual suffering and collective trauma of the pandemic; on the other hand, these comics draw attention to the role the state plays in regulating bodies to be monitored, governed and, in some cases, deemed disposable.

Biopolitics During COVID-19 Pandemic: Migration Movements and Border Practices in Europe

In the domain of migration management, border practices constitute the subject of a basic laboratory. This is because the border practices might demonstrate flexibility and diverse policies during extraordinary periods/occasions. Currently, worldwide COVID-19 as a relatively new outbreak is being investigated especially from a biopolitical perspective by some researchers. The main purpose of the paper is understanding how some of the EU members cope with the regular migrants within the framework of Foucauldian biopolitics in such an extraordinary time. This research period extends January-December 2020. Four European countries were selected since practices concerning migrants and fair geographical distribution. As a conclusion, one can state that the decisions in crisis situations can be reconsidered for disadvantaged groups. In times of crisis the permeability of borders may be subjected to change. Some groups should be exempted from general decisions. Despite of all the restrictions, borders should be more permeable for effective bodies.

Appropriating Canaanism: Ruth Patir’s Reanimation of Judean Pillar Figurines

This article addresses a body of works by the video artist Ruth Patir, in which Israeli womanhood in the 2020s is interrogated through Iron Age female statuettes, known as Judean Pillar Figurines. By means of motion capture technology and 3D animation, Patir features contemporary Israeli women uncannily moving and speaking through the bodies of millennium-old female figurines, whose history and function are still under debate. In Petah Tikva (2020), Patir situates these hybrid figures in a modern IVF clinic, offering a biopolitical perspective on Israeli society’s compelling maternal impulse. Marry Fuck Kill (2019), in turn, ponders Israeli women’s legitimation of their femininity, across the generational gap between the artist and her mother, here cast in the role of an imposing Iron Age figurine. The paper addresses Patir’s work in both biopolitical and phenomenological terms, arguing that the sensual appeal of the archaeological objects often undermines the videos’ political critique.

Representing quarantine on film: fearing the monster inside

ABSTRACT Fictional representations of contagion, that is epidemic or pandemic in film, mainly fall within the genres of fantasy, horror, or science fiction, while their narratives focus on fear and panic, on disturbance of the social equilibrium. Approaching the film interpretations of the subject from the perspective of biopolitics as it is understood by Giorgio Agamben, this paper explores how media products of the postmodern era, created several decades apart and originating from different productions and geopolitical circumstances, interpret the idea of isolation in quarantine as a means of questioning the nature of humanity. Variola Vera, a Yugoslav film from the 80s, produced in Eastern Europe at the peak of postmodernism is juxtaposed against the most recent To the Lake, a TV show produced in Russia and distributed on Netflix. As fictional representations of epidemics, they demonstrate a clear and consistent pattern in the portrayal of disease and quarantine, deploying tropes of the outbreak narrative in constructing the texts and relating it to the postmodern horror film. Before all, theyask the question “If one is not a human being, what is one?” when the social management of contagion is conceived spatially: as quarantine, as isolation.”

The biopolitics of Arctic tourism development and sustainability

In recent years, the concept of Arctification has been used to describe how spatial simplifications and strategic essentialisation of Northern Europe have been used for branding in tourism. This article deconstructs the Arctification phenomenon into three main dimensions, (I) exogenous tourism development, (II) territorialisation, and (III) consumptive ethics of planetary care. The article claims, from a biopolitical perspective, that arctified visions of tourism and sustainable tourism in the Arctic can be understood as the production of heterotopic spaces. By engaging with Foucault’s concept of heterotopia as spaces of exception based on deviation (alterity) and compensation (sustainability), the article further claims that it provides a valuable framework for analysing contemporary challenges and paradoxes of sustainability and tourism growth strategies in the Arctic. The article illustrates its main arguments by drawing examples of Arctification from Finnish Lapland.

The Biopolitical Economy of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the Possibilities for an Affirmative Biopolitics

ABSTRACT The purpose of this article is in threefold. First, it focuses on the workings and operations of the biopolitical economy. Second, it explores how the pandemic has exposed the thanatopolitical tendency of neoliberal capitalism, particularly in the form of herd immunity. Herd immunity deploys death as one of the instruments, making plain that the valuation of life is based on its sacrificability to capital. The final part engages with Roberto Esposito’s affirmative biopolitical perspective that strives to avoid the thanatopolitical tendency Agamben (over-)emphasized. I claim that while Esposito’s affirmative biopolitical perspective puts pressure on the thanatopolitical position, it could nevertheless be invoked for the reconstitution or reconceptualization of the future commons.

Analysis of the Construction of "Resilient City" in China from the Perspective of Foucault's Biopolitics

The COVID-19 pandemic has promoted the theoretical exploration of building "resilient cities" in China according to Foucault's theory of positive biopolitics. From the perspective of constructive biopolitics, China's anti-epidemic measures with a top priority on the protection of human life have achieved good results. Its measures against COVID-19 lead to effective epidemic prevention activities through constructive biopolitics, and discipline individual behavior to deal with exceptional states with the political effects of medical science. In the construction of social responsibility and ethical care for "resilient cities" in the epidemic and even post-epidemic era, China not only needs enough respect for life and health, carries out microscopic governance with cities as the unit to standardize individual behavior and social order, but also promotes the modernization of national governance capacity and governance system as a whole with sustainable development as the value goal.

Religion, Gender, and Bodies: Women’s Polyvalent Roles and Experiences in the Biopolitics of Taiwan’s Presbyterian Missions

The Presbyterian missions and medical missions in 19th-century Taiwan were successful enterprises that over time developed into the Presbyterian Church in Taiwan, which stands today as the largest Christian minority church in this country. Through a Foucauldian biopolitical perspective, this paper analyzes the roles of female missionaries in the management of bodies and the subjective experiences of both foreign and Native women in the missions. Going beyond descriptive narratives and control-versus-agency reductionist frames, the paper points the polyvalent semantics of such roles and experiences. It also explores the complex relations between the women’s biopolitical functions, the PCT’s industrial type of biopolitical apparatus, and the biopolitical regimes of the late Qing dynasty and the Japanese colonial government in the early 20th century. The conclusions remark on the analytical relevance of biopolitical perspectives in the study of gender and body-related phenomena in Christian missions and Christian religions beyond Western societies.