Technology takes an unprecedented position in contemporary society. In particular, it has become part and parcel of governmental attempts to manufacture life in new ways. Such ideas concerning the governance of life organize around the same contention: that technology and life are, in fact, highly interconnectable. This is surprising because if one enters the sites of techno-scientific experimentation, those visions turn out to be much frailer and by no means “in place” yet. Rather, they afford or enforce constant interfacing work, (...) a particular mode of manufacturing life, rendering disparate, sturdy, and often surprisingly incompatible things available for one another. Here, we contend that both of those aspects, pervasive rationalities of interconnectability and practices of interfacing mark the cornerstones of what we call a new techno-bio-politics of life. In order to grasp the government of life under the technological condition, we must understand how both human and non-human entities are being rendered interconnectable and re-worked through practices of interfacing. We take neuro-technology and care robotics as two illustrative cases. Our analysis shows that the contemporary government of life is not primarily concerned with life itself in its biological re-constitution but rather with life as it is interfaced with and through technology. (shrink)

The present work means to analyze the relation between politics and life throughout Michael Foucault’s and Agamben’s critical-conceptual articulations. That way, we try to explain the following question: to what extent and under which arguments is it possible to reflect upon the politics over the biological human life taking as reference Foucault’s and Agamben’s thesis and even finding a connection between both? We hypothesize that: it is possible to acknowledge the discovery of politics over life back at (...) the Greco-Roman world, linking the bio politics to the Western political structure; while having its spectrum projected in the Age of Antiquity, bio-politics blossomed within the Modern history, since the appearance of medico-social categories and the realizations around the human life potentiality. To inspect the underlying theme of the question, our text is organized in three different moments: first, we go through Foucault’s perception of bio-politics and its connections to the human life; next, we observe how Agamben proposes his thesis and which arguments he makes use of to sustain his statements; and lastly, we present a liaison between both thesis, putting forward how they connected themselves within a research hypothesis. (shrink)

This paper sets Scott’s original film Blade Runner (1982) and Villeneuve’s Blade Runner 2049 (2017) in a ‘disjunctive synthesis’ in order to provide critical analyses of both films with respect to some complex configurations of the body along two axes: bio-politics and the spectacle. We offer a reading of these configurations by focusing on the relationships between the human (organic), the non-human (android) and the immaterial (holographic); the eye (optics), the hand (haptics), and aesthetics; slavery, instrumental labour and free-play; (...) the politics of bodies and of memories; the potentialities of revolution and the transmission of ‘tradition of the oppressed’. In this, we foreground two seemingly marginal characters – J. F. Sebastian and Ana Stelline. These ‘little people’ embody and inhabit the convolutions of Blade Runner’s ‘more human than human’ world through ‘free use’ of the body and playfulness which, superficially innocent, nevertheless bear within them the promise of radical political change. (shrink)

The article presents a theoretical discussion and sociological analysis about the tensions in the building of social sex/gender relationships that are at the basis of the exclusion of women within the political field. It shows contents in dispute in the production of politics, considering the weight that categories play in the relations at a global level and in the school, the attributions inside the system sex/gender, the significations in politics, and the modes in which it is subjectified, resisted (...) and confront different logics to understand life and politics, considering the conceptual distinctions between Bíos and Zoé. This discussion allows the analysis of the imaginary institution within systematic difficulties and obstacles of political and legal kind during the post dictatorship in Chile, where based on arguments about the sex/gender system, the exclusion of women from the political field is established, limiting the development of politics that valorizes cultural diversity and human rights, accentuating discrimination and social exclusion. These shape the discussion over the modes in which the political field for women is configured, recovering the possibilities of conflict as an opening of that horizon. El artículo presenta una discusión teórica y análisis sociológico acerca de las tensiones en la construcción social de las relaciones sexo/género, que fundamentan la exclusión del campo político de las mujeres. Se distinguen los contenidos en disputa en la producción de la política, considerando el peso que tienen las categorías en juego en las relaciones a nivel global y en el espacio de la escuela, las atribuciones dentro del sistema sexo/género, las significaciones de la política, y los modos en que se subjetivan, se resisten y se confrontan diferentes lógicas para entender la vida y la política, teniendo como base las distinciones conceptuales entre Bios y Zoé. Esta discusión permite analizar la institución del imaginario en el marco de las dificultades sistemáticas y obstáculos de tipo político y legal durante la post dictadura en Chile, donde sobre la base de argumentos propios del sistema sexo/género, se establece la exclusión del campo político de las mujeres, limitando el desarrollo de políticas que pongan en valor la diversidad cultural y los derechos humanos, acentuando la discriminación y la exclusión social. Estos dan forma a la discusión sobre el modo en que se configura el campo de lo político para las mujeres, recuperando las posibilidades del conflicto como apertura de este horizonte. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s modes of power have dominated both our understanding of power and norm. It is pretty impossible to think of the organisation of life outside his thinking. Here I argue that the idea and practice of mutual aid, articulated by Peter Kropotkin in his 1902 book Mutual Aid stirs us towards a different understanding of the management of life, bereft of hierarchies and bestowed with co-operation and care. Moreover, as I argue, the existence of mutual aid groups and practices (...) challenges the very idea of the norm. This has become even more apparent during the Covid19 pandemic with the surfacing of mutual aid groups globally. It is therefore rather misleading to understand our present as generator of the ‘new normal’; such claims are mere rhetorical devices aiming at keeping us in our place. (shrink)

This volume rethinks the relations between form and forms of communication, calling for a new logic of representation; it examines the manner in which ...

Michel Foucault's concept of bio-politics entails the management and regulation of life processes within the population as a whole. This administration of the biological was perhaps most manifest in the German state under National Socialism. Indeed, Foucault remarks that there was no other state of the period in which "the biological was so tightly, so insistently regulated." However while the Nazi regime evinced this bio-political concern with the management of life, it also released an unprecedented murderous potential. It is (...) this paradox, that the care of life can become the administration of death, or what Foucault deemed the transition from bio-politics to thanato-politics, that I wish to investigate through an examination of the construction of the Jewish subject through Nazi medical discourse. This paper will examine how medico-political discourse facilitated the construction of medically authorized norms that constructed the Jew as both a biological and social threat to the body politic, and how this discursively produced "Other" informed the transition from bio-politics to thanato-politics within the confines of the German medical establishment. (shrink)

Bioethical and bio‐political questions are increasingly tackled by committees, councils, and other advisory boards that work on different and often interrelated levels. Research ethics committees work on an institutional or clinical level; local advisory boards deal with biomedical topics on the level of particular political regions; national and international political advisory boards try to answer questions about morally problematic political decisions in medical research and practice. In accordance with the increasing number and importance of committees, the quality of their work (...) and their functional status are being subjected to more and more scrutiny. Besides overall criticism regarding the quality of their work, particular committees giving political advice are often suspected of being incompatible with democratic values, such as respect for affected parties, representation of diverse values and transparency in the decision‐making processes. Based on the example of the German National Ethics Council, whose inauguration caused a still ongoing debate on the aims and scopes of committees in general, this paper discusses: (1) the requirements of modern democratic societies in dealing with complex scientific‐technical problems; (2) the composition and organisation of committees working as political advisory boards; and (3) the appointment procedures and roles of laymen and experts, and here in particular of ethicists, who may legitimately be taken on by a committee. I will argue that bioethics committees do not necessarily endanger democratic values, but can considerably improve their realisation in democratic decision‐making procedures – if, and only if, they do not act as substitutes for parliamentarian processes, but help prepare parliamentarian processes to be organised as rationally as possible. (shrink)

This paper examines the proposition that movement offers new insight into the relationship between human and non-human animals, a relationship that is important to understanding contemporar...

This introduction situates key themesfound in papers given at a recent workshop on thechanging material practices, meanings, and regulationof US organic food production. The context is theemergence of an international bio-politics ofagriculture and food and, more particularly in the US,the contradictions of sustainable agriculturemovements catalyzed by the rapid scaling up of organicagriculture from a niche activity to nascentindustry.

Even a superficial look at the classical ideas and practices of government of populations makes it immediately apparent that there is a peculiarity in Foucault’s genealogy of western bio-politics and governmentality. According to Foucault, western governmental rationality can be traced back to the Judeo-Christian tradition in general and to the Christian ideology and practice of the pastorate in particular. In this article, my purpose is to show that Christianity was not the prelude to what Foucault calls governmentality but rather (...) marked a rupture in the development that started in classical Greece and Rome and continued in early modern Europe. With the rise of Christianity, the majority of these classical practices, including negative eugenics and even family policies, either faded into the background or they were rejected outright. (shrink)

Biochemists investigating the problem of the vitamins in the early years of the twentieth century were working without an object, as such. Although they had developed a fairly elaborate idea of the character of the ‘vitamine’ and its role in metabolism, vitamins were not yet biochemical objects, but rather ‘functional ascriptions’ and ‘explanatory devices’. I suggest that an early instance of the changing status of the object of the ‘vitamins’ can be found in their stabilization, through the course of World (...) War I, as bio-political objects for the British and Allied war effort. Vitamins emerged as players, active agents, in Britain’s wartime bio-political problems of food distribution and population health and because of this they became increasingly real as bio-political objects, even prior to their isolation as bio-chemical molecules. I suggest that the materiality of our biology has agency in the development of political regimes and schemes. (shrink)

Rumors were afoot at the Sixth Comintern Congress that there were political differences between Bukharin and Stalin. Except for Ch'ü Ch'iu-pai's comments on the Comintern Theses, other Chinese delegates seem to have expressed no public disagreement with Bukharin. The following speech, made by one "Tschang-Bio" (Chang Kuo-t'ao?) at the fourteenth session, may serve to illustrate this tactful attitude.

Introduction: the neuroscientific turn in political science The observation that brains and political orders are interdependent is almost trivial. Obviously, political orders require brain processes in order to emerge and to remain in place, as these processes enable action and cognition. Conversely, every since Aristotle coined man as “by nature a political animal” (Aristotle, Pol.: 1252a 3; cf. Eth. Nic.: 1097b 11), this also suggests that the political engagements of this animal has likely consequences for its natural development, including the (...) development of its psychological functions. Given these mutual interdependencies, it is remarkable that only since the 1960s, the more general domain of ‘biopolitics’ has attracted attention though first particularly in the form of behavioral politics (Alford and Hibbing). Since then biopolitics has gained in interest, so much so that different subdomains can be identified. Indeed, a 2008 review of the field of biopolitics identified five ‘headings’ of it: “(1) the case for a ‘more biologically oriented political science’, (2) ‘biologically related’ public policy issues, (3) physiological measures of political attitudes and behaviour, (4) the influence of physiological factors on actual political behaviour, and (5) the manner in which our species’ evolutionary history has left homo sapiens genetically endowed with certain social and political behavioural tendencies” (Somit and Peterson 43). Striking is how the relation between biology and politics is taken here in a rather unidirectional way, emphasizing particularly the decisive power of biology upon politics. The reverse relation is not mentioned specifically, reflecting the field of biopolitics, perhaps until quite recently. This absence of studies of political influences on our biology may have to do with the difficulty in investigating such influences. Empirical studies in biopolitics have two foci, broadly speaking: genetics and the brain, both of which have turned out to be complex and dynamic phenomena (Alford and Hibbing). Yet the studies of genetics and brain processes have made much progress in the last few decades, thanks to the development of research instruments - like fMRI brain scanners and TMS brain stimulation instruments - and of computational tools for data analysis and the simulation of explanatory models. For the field of biopolitics it is particularly relevant that within cognitive neuroscience the study of social and political issues has witnessed an increasing interest of researchers even more recently. Indeed, aware of the enabling and mediating role of the brain regarding those issues, a truly ‘neuroscientific turn’ can be observed in the social sciences, testified for example by the emergence of the field of ‘neuropolitics’ (Connolly; Vandervalk). Developing a systematic neuropolitics or biopolitics in general is a difficult challenge because of the wealth of causal influences on and interdependencies between biological, brain, cognitive and socio-political factors. Taking a somewhat more abstract perspective, this paper focuses on the process of emerging complexity in adaptive systems, enabling those to conduct ever more complex processes. Yet, parallel to that development can be observed that such systems, or organisms, are also capable in reducing the complexity of the information they are to process. Once they’re capable of developing and adjusting such compressed and complex representations of information, those systems or organisms can handle more information faster and more efficient and adaptive, yielding important benefits to the organism in navigating its environment (Halford, Wilson and Phillips). Before focusing on the role of narrative as a cognitive strategy for such a reduction of informational complexity, I will discuss the development of stable structures and increasing complexity in dynamic systems. Such a more general perspective prepares our discussion of the structures of both narratives and politics and in doing so contributes to the explanation of their interaction. (shrink)

The sociobiological and socio-political aspects of human existence have been the subject of techno-rationalistic control and manipulation. The investigation of the mutual complementarity of anthropological and ontological paradigms under these circumstances is the main purpose of present publication. The comparative conceptual analysis of the bio-power and bio-politics in the mentality of the modern technological civilization is a main method of the research. The methodological and philosophical analogy of biological and social engineering allows combining them in the nature and social (...) implications as part of a High Hume technologies class. As result of the transformation of somatic foundations of the human being and his behavior, stereotypes in the object of control and management the technogenic risk reached the existential level. The rapidly growing status of biopower and biopolitics in the conceptual field of contemporary political science becomes by phenomenological expression of these processes. (shrink)

The purpose of this study is to present how ancient and modern thinkers describe politics and to discuss reasons for differences seen in these definitions. In the ancient period, the identification of human being as a political entity by nature caused politics to be seen as the most supreme of all human activities. For the ancient thinkers, politics is conceptualized as a pluralist area in which the common issues are discussed by equals and also which excludes inequality. (...) Ancient thinker Aristotle says that the purpose of politics is “good life”. However, modern political thought which began with Machiavelli identified politics with the concepts of force, power and violence. Politics is defined by Machiavelli and his successors as the legitimate organization of physical violence, the distribution of power, value and resources by authority. While in the Ancient Greece violence is excluded from the public-political sphere, It has become one of the central concepts defining the political society in the modern world. While the human being was defined as a political entity (zoon politikon) in the ancient period, it is usually seen as an economic entity (homo economicus) in the modern period. For the ancients good life means a life that is dedicated to politics; nevertheless, it has been often associated with econo- mic activity by the moderns. This study argues that the main difference between the political definitions of ancients and moderns stem from differences between their perspectives about the aim of human and human life. (shrink)

This book is about the use of legal scholarship by judges. It discusses the possibility that legal scholarship may function as a genuine source of law in modern municipal legal systems. The book advances a number of claims, some conceptual, some empirical, some normative. The major conceptual claims are found in Chapters 2 and 3, where a general account of the notion of a source of law is provided. Roughly, sources of law are documents or practices (e.g. statutes, judicial decisions, (...) official customs) from which norms can be derived that function as sources of content-independent reasons for judges to decide legal cases one way or another. The relevant notion of content-independence is derived (with qualifications) from H.L.A. Hart's jurisprudence. Indeed, the book's analysis of the concept of a source of law relies at various points on Hartian insights about law and legal reasoning. Chapter 4 argues that legal scholarship - or, more precisely, a particular type of legal scholarship that might be described as standard or doctrinal - can be, and indeed is, used as a source of law in modern legal systems. The conclusion that legal scholarship is used as a source of law (and thus as a source of content-independent reasons for action) may come as a surprise to those who associate judicial recourse to legal scholarship with judicial activism. This association is discussed and criticized in Chapters 5 and 6. It is argued that, in spite of a relatively common opinion to the contrary, legal scholarship can be used to mitigate discretion. In fact, it is precisely because it can be used in this way that judges sometimes refer to scholarship deceptively and suggest that it limits discretion in situations in which it really does not. The concluding chapter addresses potential objections not explicitly discussed in earlier chapters.. (shrink)

The personal and the political, the local and the global—divergent perspectives are synthesized in this visionary examination of globalization and how it affects individual lives. Personal stories of urban and rural living reveal the many varieties of experience and how Western culture has created both immense wealth and poverty. Discussions of primary production, neoclassical economics, and international trade agreements accompany writing about nature and how rural life is deeply connected to land.

This article explores the category of biopolitics through the use Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben make of two Greek words, bios and ōē. In particular, I argue that the separation of bios and ōē as introduced in Homo Sacer has no "natural" nor "lingual" relevance. The exposition of such a fabulous antinomy simply ruins the historical matter of Agamben's discourse on biopolitics. Here, Esposito's research could be read as an attempt to found the category of biopolitics anew without repeating the (...) fiction of a bifurcation between ōē and bios. However, Esposito, in his own celebration of biopower, undermines the very power of language and, thus, ignores the variation of the invariant that is history. Esposito's and Agamben's difficulties lead us back to the possible ambition of all politics to absorb all life, as it was already expressed by Aristotle. In this sense, "modern biopolitics" becomes a case study for the totalitarian temptation of political order. (shrink)

Questions concerning moral problems caused by the lifesciences and concerning the adequate methods and instruments to solve these are timely and urgent; especially in the face of intense debates on the acceptability of research on human embryonic stem cells and preimplantation diagnostics, to name only two applications developed from research in the life-sciences. Unfortunately, the constant and accusing demand that life-scientists must behave morally does not give us a clue on how ethics may help in establishing guidelines for moral behaviour. (...) In this heated situation the foundation of ethics-committees seems to be the motto of the day. But instead of functioning as necessary and fruitful scientific advisory boards, these committees run the risk of being misused as a fashionable (and soon forgotten) weapon in the battle for political opinion-leadership. In the following article, the view is defended that ethics is a scientific enterprise and has an important role to play in political decision making on lifesciences issues. Content Type Journal Article Pages 29-31 Authors Felix Thiele, Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler GmbH, Wilhelmstrasse 56, D-53474 Bad Neuenahr-Ahrweiler, Germany Journal Human Reproduction & Genetic Ethics Online ISSN 2043-0469 Print ISSN 1028-7825 Journal Volume Volume 8 Journal Issue Volume 8, Number 2 / 2002. (shrink)

Angelaki, Volume 16, Issue 3, Page 101-115, September 2011.

In this essay I consider whether the political perspective of third wave science studies – ‘elective modernism’ – offers a suitable framework for understanding the policy-making contributions that (bio)ethical experts might make. The question arises as a consequence of the fact that I have taken inspiration from the third wave in order to develop an account of (bio)ethical expertise. I offer a précis of this work and a brief summary of elective modernism before considering their relation. The view I set (...) out suggests that elective modernism is a political philosophy and that although its use in relation to the use of scientific expertise in political and policy-making process has implications for the role of (bio)ethical expertise it does not, in the final analysis, provide an account that is appropriate for this latter form of specialist expertise. Nevertheless, it is an informative perspective, and one that can help us make sense of the political uses of (bio)ethical expertise. (shrink)

For Hannah Arendt, spontaneous, ‘initiatory’ human action and interaction are suppressed by the normalizing pressures of society once ‘life’ - that is, sheer life - becomes the primary concern of politics, as it does, she finds, in the modern age. Arendt’s concept of the social is indebted to Martin Heidegger’s analysis of everyday Dasein in Being and Time , and contemporary political philosophers inspired by Heidegger, such as Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben, tend to reproduce her account (...) of the withdrawal of the political in modernity. In this article, I complicate Arendt’s theory by turning to Michel Foucault’s parallel but diverging understanding of the nature of power in modern society to show, surprisingly, that Foucault’s narrative of the emergence of modern power pictures a society that is more, not less, politicized. Key Words: Hannah Arendt • bio-power • Michel Foucault • Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe • modernity • Jean-Luc Nancy • pastoral power • the social • rulership. (shrink)

A wave of interest in Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault as bio-political thinkers was initiated by publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer. The intellectual connection of these two figures is, however, broader than their bio-political considerations. Arendt and Foucault both offer detailed accounts of an ethico-political self. Both Arendt’s and Foucault’s later work explores the meaning of living ethically and politically. By examining the relationship between self, ethics and politics, I suggest there are two general points of convergence in (...) Arendt and Foucault regarding the ethico-political self: (1) a shared suspicion of ethical or political systems presented as universally applicable; (2) the attempt to undermine prescriptive moral and political models by fostering a dynamic and critical self-relationship. In the shared attempt to develop a dynamic ethico-political attitude Arendt and Foucault present their respective alternatives to universally applicable moral and political structures, which both consider to be potentially dangerous. (shrink)

Translator's introduction -- Preface -- Part I: The aesthetics of politics -- Ten theses on politics -- Does democracy mean something? -- Who is the subject of the rights of man? -- Communism : from actuality to inactuality -- The people or the multitudes -- Bio-politics or politics -- September 11 and afterwards : a rupture in the symbolic order -- Of war as the supreme form of advanced plutocratic consensus -- Part II: The politics (...) of aesthetics -- The aesthetic revolution and its outcomes -- The paradoxes of political art -- The politics of literature -- The monument and its confidences or Deleuze and Art's capacity for resistance -- The ethical turn of aesthetics and politics -- Part III: Response to critics -- The usage of distinctions. (shrink)

ABSTRACTJurgen Moltmann is one of the most important theologians in the XXth century who intended to leave aside a rigid and impassible notion of God. However, although Moltmann opens new ways to consider God’s life by stressing God’s passivity and relationality, the concepts of activity and self-sufficiency are still structuring the whole theological argument. I intend to show how our understanding of life has been shaped by a bio-theo-political paradigm of autarchy that defines life by the use of the Greek (...) prefix ‘autos,’ and how this paradigm is still working on Moltmann’s theology, who is not able yet to overcome the metaphysical impassible God. I claim that only a radical deconstruction of this paradigm and the construction of a new way of defining life by the use of the Greek prefix ‘syn’ could enable to think seriously on God’s relationality and love. (shrink)

Roberto Esposito, Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy, with an intro. and trans. Timothy Campbell. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008; Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007.

Abstract[I] want to single out one phenomenon that could be called the ‘politics of sources’. It points to the extent to which the histories that both scientists and historians can write are artifacts of the available sources. The Rockefeller Foundation not only opened its archives very early on for historical work but also invested a lot in making the archives readily available for historical exploration. During the 1980s, many young historians took advantage of this opportunity. Thus, in a relatively (...) early phase of the professional historiography of molecular biology, one could have gained the impression that the development of the new biology as a whole was a bio‐politically directed enterprise of the Rockefeller Foundation sustained by the vision that social processes could ultimately be controlled by biological processes. (shrink)

Drawing on case studies from the modern era of pharmaceutical regulation in the UK, US and Europe, I examine how the extent and distribution of trust between regulators, the pharmaceutical industry, and the medical profession about drug testing and monitoring influences knowledge and regulatory judgements about the efficacy and safety of prescription drugs. Introducing the concepts of ‘acquiescent’ and ‘investigative’ norms of regulatory trust, I demonstrate how investigative norms of regulatory trust—which deter pharmaceutical companies from assuming that their data analyses (...) will be accepted without independent de-construction—drive up bioethical and regulatory standards of drug assessment in the interests of health. By contrast, acquiescent norms of regulatory trust, which are associated with industrial capture and professional closure of interests, promote permissive standards allowing patients to take pharmaceuticals with greater risks to health and less evidence of therapeutic efficacy. (shrink)

In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben criticizes Michel Foucault's distinction between 'productive' bio-power and 'deductive' sovereign power, emphasizing that it is not possible to distinguish between these two. In his view, the production of what he calls 'bare life' is the original, although concealed, activity of sovereign power. In this article, Agamben's conclusions are called into question. (1) The notion of 'bare life', distinguished from the 'form of life', belongs exclusively to the order of sovereignty, being incompatible with the modern bio-political (...) notion of life, that is univocal and immanent to itself. In the era of bio-politics, life is already a bios that is only its own zoe ('form-of-life'). (2) Violence is not hidden in the foundation of bio-politics; the 'hidden' foundation of bio-politics is love (agape) and care (cura), 'care for individual life'. (3) Bio-politics is not absolutised in the Third Reich; the only thing that the Third Reich absolutises is the sovereignty of power (Aryan race) and the nakedness of life (the Jews). (4) St Paul's 'messianic revolution' does not endow us with the means of breaking away from the closure of bio-political rationality; on the contrary, Paul's 'messianic revolution' is a historical precondition for the deployment of modern bio-politics. (5) Instead of homo sacer, who is permitted to kill without committing homicide, the paradigmatic figure of the bio-political society can be seen, for example, in the middle-class Swedish social-democrat. (shrink)

In recent years, theorists and activists championing the ‘commons’ have propounded a socio-centric idea of democratic resistance and renewal with a global address. This conception holds that the making of new social relations and practices here and now should be the main pillar of activity aiming at wide-ranging social reconstruction. The present paper complicates and qualifies this thesis. Socio-economic and technological breakthroughs can effectively serve as a catalyst for democratic change if they are adequately politicised, that is, deliberately oriented and (...) embedded in a broader counter-hegemonic project. As a first step, the paper reviews socio-centrism and brings out its limits. But the main part is a critical inquiry into alternative cooperative enterprises set up in recent years in the northern city of Thessaloniki, Greece: a cooperative bookstore and publishing house (‘Akyvernites Politeies’), a self-organised factory (‘Vio.Me’), and a consumer cooperative (‘Bios Coop’). The three ventures are construed as ‘alter-political’ economic initiatives to highlight their distinctive political self-construction. The case study corroborates the theoretical argument by indicating that socio-economic enterprises aspiring to radical democratisation are deliberately political from the outset. Second, such social innovation needs to be integrated into, and bolstered by, expansive counter-hegemonic politics and movements, as their actors themselves point out. (shrink)

Critical Theories and the Budapest Schoolbrings together new perspectives on the Budapest School in the context of contemporary developments in critical theory. Engaging with the work of the prominent group of figures associated with Georg Lukács, this book sheds new light on the unique and nuanced critiques of modernity offered by this school, informed as its members' insights have been by first-hand experiences of Nazism, Soviet-type societies, and the liberal-democratic West. With studies of topics central to contemporary critical theory, such (...) as the political and historical consciousness of modernity, the importance of bio-politics, the complexity of the human condition, and the relevance of comedy and friendship to developing critical perspectives, the authors draw on the works of Ágnes Heller, Maria Márkus, György Márkus, and Ferenc Fehér, demonstrating their enduring relevance to critical theory today and the ways in which these philosophers can inform new perspectives on culture and politics. An innovative reassessment of the Budapest School and the importance of its legacy, this book opens a much-needed and neglected dialogue with other schools and traditions of critical theorizing that will be of interest to scholars of sociology, philosophy, and social theory. n inform new perspectives on culture and politics. An innovative reassessment of the Budapest School and the importance of its legacy, this book opens a much-needed and neglected dialogue with other schools and traditions of critical theorizing that will be of interest to scholars of sociology, philosophy, and social theory. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that commodity consumption is to the regime of political capitalism at the turn of this century what Michel Foucault claimed for discourses of sexuality in the bio-political state. If I am right, then understanding contemporary subjectivities requires granting greater political credence to practices of commodity consumption than they generally receive and a correlative paradigm shift in our notion of desire - from discourses of sexuality to erotics of appetite. But whatever 'ethical substance' we focus upon (...) when we analyze our contemporary situation I think we must give greater consideration to practices of individual conduct. We must grant due attention to the uses to which our bodies, skills and resources are put, and to our active as well as passive participation in that usage, because our everyday conduct may be the missing link between our professed convictions and our actual political prospects. Key Words: capitalism • commodity consumption • conduct • democracy • ethics • Michel Foucault • freedom • politics • sexuality. (shrink)

La biopolítica ha devenido, sin duda, una de las categorías centrales para la reflexión política contemporánea. Dada su importancia, resulta imperioso avanzar sobre algunas operaciones teóricas que no logran dar cuenta de su especificidad, en tanto que administración de la vida como forma de dominación. Al respecto, y con la intención de rehabilitar la conceptualización de la política, nos interesa demostrar cómo la aparente dicotomía entre zoé y bíos que pretende discutir Agamben no encuentra respaldo en los textos que él (...) mismo utiliza (fundamentalmente, Aristóteles y Foucault), ni tampoco en la cristalización de tales categorías en prácticas sociopolíticas (por ejemplo, la disciplina moderna con sus raíces en el monasterio cristiano). Precisamente, la identificación de la zoé ya como forma de vida es lo que nos permite comprender el interés biopolítico por gestionar la vida biológica. Así, solamente habiendo clarificado estas categorías, podrá rehabilitarse un pensamiento político sobre la política. (shrink)

This article gives a critical account of Agamben's contention that the camp is the paradigm of 'bio-politics' in the west. It analyses the deficiencies of this paradigm by means of comparison with other approaches to juridical topics and political theory (e.g., the treatments of the topics of force and state power in liberalism and Foucault). First, I ask about the features Agamben ascribes to the camp space and in what respects they support his contention that the camp has general (...) significance. Second, I question the reasons he gives for his view that the camp situation discloses the general tendencies of legal codes and practices in the West. In particular, I ask whether, as Agamben contends, his approach allows tendencies in the West that would otherwise be obscure to be identifiable, or whether his approach is too speculative to be useful as political theory. (shrink)

This paper explores how Pope Francis’ critique of “the technocratic paradigm” in Laudato Si’ can contribute to an environmental ethics governed by asymmetries of power and agency. The technocratic paradigm is here theorized as linked to forms of anthropocentrism that together engender a dangerous alliance between the powers of technology and technologies of power. The meaning and import of this view become clearer when the background of these ideas gets excavated in the works of Romano Guardini. The contemporary manifestation of (...) Guardini’s warnings appears in the form of myriad environmental injustices wrought by structures of power linked to technology. To counter such injustices, we must discern which types of technologies to develop and how to limit technocratic approaches for the sake of other values. The integral ecological outlook favored by Francis may be interpreted as a kind of eco-politics, or even, controversially, an eco-technology, with the cultivation of technologies of contemplation. Applying Peter Sloterdijk’s conceptions of anthropotechnics and monogeism to the Ignatian Exercises animating the Jesuit Francis’ work, we can see how such technologies hold potential for Catholicism to collaborate better with secular strategies in relating to Earth’s agency in a new eco-politics. Such an eco-politics could furnish an alternative to bio-politics, especially if governed by aspects of the Franciscan form-of-life identified by Giorgio Agamben. Such a project ultimately moves us beyond Laudato Si’ and the work of Romano Guardini, pointing up the limitations of Laudato Si’ in engaging the agency of the Earth. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics and Politics in Tagore, Coetzee, and Certain Scenes of TeachingGayatri Chakravorty Spivak (bio)It is practically persuasive that the eruption of the ethical interrupts and postpones the epistemological—the undertaking to construct the other as object of knowledge, an undertaking never to be given up. Lévinas is the generic name associated with such a position. A beautiful passage from Otherwise than Being lays it out, although neither interruption nor (...) postponement is mentioned. That connection is made by Derrida [Adieu 51-59].Here, then, is Lévinas, for whom Kant's critical perspectivization of the subject and the rigorous limits of pure theoretical reason seem to have been displaced by the structuralist hermeneutics of suspicion. For Lévinas, structuralism did not attend to what in Kant was the mechanism that interrupted the constrained and rigorous workings of pure reason: "The interests that Kant discovered in theoretical reason itself, he subordinated to practical reason, become mere reason. It is just these interests that are contested by structuralism, which is perhaps to be defined by the primacy of theoretical reason" [Otherwise than Being 58; trans. modified].The relationship between the postponement of the epistemological in Lévinas and the subordination of pure reason in Kant is a rich theme, beyond the scope of this essay. Let us return to what Lévinas will perceive as a general contemporary hermeneutics of suspicion, related to the primacy of theoretical reason: "The suspicions engendered by psychoanalysis, sociology and politics weigh on human identity such that we never know to whom we are speaking and what we are dealing with when we build our ideas on the basis of the human fact."1 The political calculus thematizes this suspicion into an entire code of strategy defined as varieties of game theory and rational choice. This can be verified across cultural difference, backwards through history, and in today's global academic discourse. Over against this Lévinas posits the ethical with astonishing humility: "but we do not need this knowledge in the relationship in which the other is the one next to me [le prochain]" [Otherwise 59].Kant thought that the ethical commonality of being (gemeines Wesen—repeatedly mistranslated as "the ethical state") cannot form the basis of a state. Surprisingly, there is a clear line from the face-to-face of the ethical to the state in Lévinas.2 It has long [End Page 17] been my habit to scavenge and tinker in the field of practical philosophy. I will conserve from Kant the discontinuity between the ethical and the political, from Lévinas the discontinuity between the ethical and the epistemological. I will suggest that the discontinuities between the ethical and the epistemological and political fields are tamed in the nestling of logic and rhetoric in fiction.3Enabled by such a suggestion, I can move to another bit of prose on that page in Lévinas: "for reasons not at all transcendental but purely logical, the object-man must figure at the beginning of all knowing."The figure of the "I" as object: this representation of the holy man in Lévinas does not match our colloquial and literal expectations. My general suggestion, that the protocol of fiction gives us a practical simulacrum of the graver discontinuities inhabiting (and operating?) the ethico-epistemic and the ethico-political, can, however, take such a figure on board. I will continue to want to say that fiction offers us an experience of the discontinuities that remain in place "in real life." That would be a description of fiction as an event—an indeterminate "sharing" between writer and reader, where the effort of reading is to taste the impossible status of being figured as object in the web of the other. Reading, in this special sense, is sacred.In this essay I consider not only fiction as event but also fiction as task. I locate in Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) and J. M. Coetzee (1940-) representations of what may be read as versions of the "I" figured as object and weave the representations together as a warning text for postcolonial political ambitions.4 I am obviously using "text" as "web," coming from Latin texere—"to... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Politics Is a Mushroom: Worldly Sources of Rule and Exception in Carl Schmitt and Walter BenjaminKam Shapiro (bio)Life is not a mushroom growing out of death.—Carl Schmitt, The Visibility of the ChurchTo isolate death from life, not leaving the one intimately woven in the other, and each one entering into the other’s midst—this is what one must never do.—Jean-Luc Nancy, L’intrus1Carl Schmitt’s theory of the exception was bound (...) up with a thoroughgoing critique of philosophies of immanence, materialism, and “atheism,” which he treated as interchangeable. In his early writings, he adopted the Christian perspective according to which postlapsarian nature cannot by itself yield a juridical order, or in his poetic phrase, “life is not a mushroom growing out of death.” Yet—in accord with Catholic doctrine—he also found sources of life, or law, in this world. While he repudiated theories of collective self-legislation, he embraced a popular sovereign empowered to impose form on a chaotic society. In Political Theology (1922), he compared the form-giving power of the sovereign to an act of divine intervention. Law, he argued, can only function in a lawful or “normal” situation that precedes formalization, and the sovereign “produces and guarantees the situation in its totality” [13]. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923) Schmitt retained his theological terms: “A scientific study of democracy must begin with a particular aspect that I have called political theology” [32]. In the modern age, democratic constituent power (pouvoir constituant) replaces the will of God as the transcendent source of a substantial order, namely democratic homogeneity. Democratic will-formation thereby becomes an act prior to its subject, or as Schmitt wrote, “[...] only political power, which should come from the people’s will, can form the people’s will in the first place” [Crisis 28]. A variety of democratic theorists dwell on the paradoxical character of democratic sovereignty, sometimes tracing it back to Rousseau’s well-known formulations [see esp. Connolly and Honig]. They highlight the gap between a transcendent (ideal or fictive) will in whose name political power acts, and the bounded, material consensus it forms, ostensibly rendering the latter vulnerable to challenge. As I argue, however, a closer look at Rousseau’s discussion of democratic founding in On the Social Contract reveals instead a dynamic relay between dispersed substantial or immanent sources of affiliation, on the one hand, and various agents and techniques of political power that draw on and combine them in a collective will, on the other, or what I call the virtual and the virtuosic.2 After briefly exploring this dynamic in Rousseau’s [End Page 121] On the Social Contract, I will highlight similar dynamics at work in Schmitt’s Weimar writings, examining three instances: the complexio oppositorum (1923), national myth (1923), and the polemical opposition of friend and enemy (1927), focusing especially on the first. Contrary to familiar readings of Schmitt’s metaphysical “exceptionalism,” I argue that for Schmitt, as for Rousseau, political power does not create a normative order from a vacuum, and the apparent transcendence of sovereign authority has a variety of worldly sources.3 Finally, I consider what I call “democratic virtuosity,” or virtuosity from below, focusing on Walter Benjamin’s repudiation of sovereign acts of lawmaking or law preserving in favor of ongoing collective habit-formation. As I argue, Benjamin returns spiritual force to the material world not only to shatter human authorities, but also to democratize creation.Rousseau—Anticipating the PeopleIn the Social Contract, Rousseau formulated the paradox of democratic founding to which so many, including Schmitt, would return. “In order for an emerging people to appreciate the healthy maxims of politics, and follow the fundamental rules of statecraft, the effect would have to become the cause; the social spirit, which should be the result of the institution, would have to preside over the founding of the institution itself; and men would have to be prior to laws what they ought to become by means of laws” [Rousseau 69]. As Rousseau argues, a constitution can form a general will only if it commands the loyalty of the people, that is, if there is... (shrink)