Sergei Prozorov challenges the assumption that the biopolitical governance means the end of democracy, arguing for a positive synthesis of biopolitics and democracy. He develops a vision of democratic biopolitics where diverse forms of life can coexist on the basis of their reciprocal recognition as free, equal and in common.

COVID-19 is not only a health emergency but also a strategic challenge for any politics of resistance, struggle and transformation. Understanding the social and political dynamics associated with morbidity and mortality and the many ‘ecologies of disease’ associated with the pandemic is necessary if we want to think beyond the limits of the lockdown strategy. It is here that the possibility of a democratic biopolitics emerges as part of a broader strategy for communism.

This article addresses the relationship between ontology and politics in Jean-Luc Nancy’s theory of democracy by probing the implications of his latest ontological innovation, the concept of struction. We argue that Nancy’s democracy is a mode of politics that makes the radical pluralism of struction legitimate, opening and guarding a political space for the coexistence of the incommensurable. From this perspective, and despite Nancy’s own skepticism about the concept of biopolitics, the notion of struction opens a pathway for theorizing (...) democracy in a biopolitical key as the regime of coexistence of radically incommensurable forms of life in the absence of any coordinating principle. We nonetheless take issue with Nancy’s prescription for democracy to remain devoid of any political affirmation of its own. Instead, we suggest that the prescriptive content of democracy consists in the affirmation of the contingency of all the forms of life that coexist in it, which implies their freedom, equality, and comm... (shrink)

The publication of The Use of Bodies, the final volume in Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer series, makes it possible to take stock of Agamben’s project as a whole. Having started with a powerful critique of the biopolitical sovereignty as the essence of modern politics, Agamben concludes his project with an affirmative vision of inoperative politics of form-of-life, in which life is not negated or sacrificed to the privileged form it must attain, but rather remains inseparable from the form that does (...) nothing but express it. The article begins by reconstituting the non-relational logic that Agamben develops in order to render inoperative the existing apparatuses of ontology, ethics and politics. We then address the dimension of lifestyle as a new key domain of Agamben’s work, in which biopolitics may be recast in an affirmative key of form-of-life. While Agamben is better known for sceptical and scornful statements about contemporary liberal democracies, we shall argue that his affirmative biopolitics, characterized by destituent power, resonates with Claude Lefort’s understanding of democracy as structured around the ontological void and epistemic indeterminacy. In the conclusion we question the viability of this biopolitical democracy, focusing on Agamben’s example of the Nocturnal Council in Plato’s Laws. (shrink)

A literary, historical and philosophical discussion of attitudes to blindness by the sighted, and what the blind 'see'.

Constellations, Volume 28, Issue 4, Page 555-569, December 2021.

A principal challenge facing the progressive bioethics project is the crafting of a consistent message on biopolitical issues that divide progressives. -/- The regulation of enhancement technologies is one of the issues central to this emerging biopolitics, pitting progressive defenders of enhancement, “technoprogressives,” against progressive critics. This essay [PDF] will argue that technoprogressive biopolitics express the consistent application of the core progressive values of the Enlightenment: the right of individuals to control their own bodies, brains and reproduction according (...) to their own conscience, under democratic states that work for the public good. -/- Insofar as left bioconservatives want to ensure the safety of therapies and their equitable distribution, these concerns can be addressed by thorough and independent regulation and a universal health care system, and a progressive bioethics of enhancement can unite both enthusiasts and skeptics. Insofar as bioconservative concerns are motivated by deeper hostility to the Enlightenment project however, by assertion of pre-modern reverence for human uniqueness for instance, then a common program is unlikely. -/- imageAfter briefly reviewing the political history and contemporary landscape of biopolitical debates about enhancement, the essay outlines three meta-policy contexts that will impact future biopolicy: the pressure to establish a universal, cost-effective health insurance system, the aging of industrial societies, and globalization. Technoprogressive appeals are outlined that can appeal to key constituencies, and build a majority coalition in support of progressive change. Finally, some guiding principles for a technoprogressive approach to biopolicy are offered. (shrink)

This article examines attempts to reconcile biopolitics and Critical Theory, by drawing on Miguel Vatter’s The Republic of the Living. Vatter contends that modern neoliberal government has become biopolitical by incorporating biological life into the calculations of political rationality. To counteract its “normalising” impacts, he recommends an “affirmative politics” of the living, one that escapes the techniques envisaged to administer and govern life. Only a dual approach, he suggests, that fuses both democratic and critical political and economic arguments, (...) can contest neoliberalism. Vatter asserts that the basis of such a critique was first established by the Critical Theory tradition. However, for a biopolitical critique to become effective today, it is crucial to enhance the descriptive and normative understanding of the concept of Zoë or species life within the critical theoretical discourse. This shift in emphasis, however, raises several interpretative tensions with the fundamental perspectives and values of Critical Theory that are not fully acknowledged in Vatter’s proposed reconciliation of biopolitics and Critical Theory. (shrink)

The general idea of this investigation is to emphasize the elusiveness of the concept of terrorism and the pitfalls of the so-called “War on Terror” by way of confronting, roughly, the reflections made in the immediate following of 9/11 by Habermas and Derrida on the legacy of Enlightenment, globalization and tolerance, with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics seen as the modern political paradigm and Agamben’s understanding of “the state of exception” in the context of liberal democratic governments. The main (...) argument will state that the modern Western individual and the modern terrorist are in a way linked together as products of the same biopolitical network. So I shall argue that religious fundamentalism and international terrorism are not external factors to the Western civilization, nor even some radical late forms of ‘Counter-Enlightenment’ threatening the Western ‘way of life,’ but phenomena revealing what we could call, borrowing J. Derrida’s biological metaphor, a “crisis of autoimmunization” of Western neo-liberal democracies. The only long-term solution to the threat of global terrorism would have to involve the “deconstruction” of our common notion of tolerance and the experience of an unconditional hospitality that is actually the inversion of the terrorist action that is threatening us “from within,” according to Derrida. But we cannot reasonably hope for this radical change in our relationship to others unless we aren’t really trying to modify the relationship to the self that is prevalent in contemporary Western societies: a vision of us as self-encapsulated monads or ‘nuclear’ selves, for whom genuine community life is, at the most, only a nostalgic evocation of a past long gone, and the respect for the others, a strategic name for moral indifference. (shrink)

In this essay, I attempt to show that the “war on terror” intensifies the use of biopolitical techniques. One such example, which I take as a point of departure, is Guantánamo Bay. We must place this camp in its proper genealogy with the many camps of the twentieth century. However, this genealogy is not a genealogy of the extremes of political space during and after the twentieth century; it is a genealogy of the transformation of political space itself. I will (...) attempt to show this in three steps: first, a description and critique of the biopolitical in both Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, who I take as exemplary in their analyses; second, an analysis of contemporary biopolitical techniques (including the camp), which enables us to avoid the liberal-democratic ideological misunderstanding of the war on terror; and third, a discussion regarding resistance to biopolitical techniques. (shrink)

This paper develops a political ontology of hospitality from the philosophies of Arendt, Derrida and Levinas, paying particular attention to the gendered, temporal, and corporeal dimensions of hospitality. Arendt's claim, that central to the human condition and democratic plurality is the welcome of ‘natality’, is used to argue that the more that this hospitality becomes conditional under conservative political forces, the more that the time that it takes is given by women without acknowledgement or support. Women's bodies are thus (...) caught within the dual poles of conservative government: regulation of the unpredictable expressions of ‘natality’ in the ‘home’ and management of the uniformity and ‘security’ of the nation. The limitations in Arendt's political ontology of hospitality are addressed by adding consideration of the operation of biopolitics and of the body as bios. (shrink)

In The Republic of the Living, Miguel Vatter argues that, at the end of the 1970s, Michel Foucault did not convert to but criticized neoliberalism from a republican point of view. Neoliberal governmentality allegedly represses the capacity of human collectives to democratically govern themselves. The potential for republican self- government would then constitute the basis for an affirmative variant of biopolitics. I argue that this creative reformulation of Foucault’s oeuvre does not work as an interpretation of Foucault nor as (...) a valid critique of neoliberalism. Using the influ- ence of Georges Canguilhem on Foucault, I propose to locate the potential for affirmative biopolitics not in the collective capacity for self-government, but in the fragility of living beings in their interaction with their milieu. Because life is con- stitutively dependent on infrastructural conditions to flourish, we need a biopolitics that establishes institutions which support the sustenance of life. (shrink)

In 1974, the Liberal government of Pierre Trudeau released a “green paper” known as the Lalonde Report, after the health minister at that time. The report formulated perspectives on health and the main concepts and ideas developed in it, particularly the concept of “lifestyle,” which became the foundation of public health policies in many different European countries and the United States. The concept of “lifestyle” connected personal behaviour and habits to the individual health condition; people were not dying due to (...) a lack of access to medical care but because they lived a life prone to personal risk taking. Furthermore, what is seldom discussed is that this report not only propagated the (neo)liberal view of citizens as autonomous rational actors (homo oeconomicus), with personal responsibility for their health, but it was a first step in the transformation of Medicare and went far beyond the question of health promotion. Health was no longer something that happened to a person but was created through personal choice and, therefore, one had to assume responsibility for one's behaviour. Using Foucault's definition of government as the “conduct of conduct,” we will demonstrate that the Lalonde report must be understood as a specific “technology of government” and contributed to a neoliberal transformation of health care despite the fact that the Canadian system of Medicare was based on the idea of universality, meaning citizens had equal access to health care independent of their socio‐economic situation. As we will demonstrate, the Lalonde report undermined this foundation and initiated a profound reorientation, not only of the healthcare system, but even more importantly, it radically changed the way we think about our behaviour around health‐related issues. We will also discuss how the making of the report contributed to the redefinition of politics and demonstrated a lack of concern with liberal‐democratic decision‐making processes. (shrink)

This article starts with a brief overview of well-known criticisms of modern democracy in order to suggest a different approach: reflecting on the principles of Western democracy in the basic horizon of the problematic of the self and wondering if the ‘multiple’ self should not be conceived as the single subjective correlate that is adequate to democratic pluralism and also as the only chance of curing ourselves of ‘fundamentalism’. I try to highlight the Derridian radical view of democracy as (...) “always still to come”, placing it in the generic framework of ‘postmodern ethics’. I distinguish between two trends in postmodern ethics and also between three kinds or models of relationship to the self, in order to argue that the ‘multiple’ self, that is the self conceived as an irreducible multiplicity of voices, positions, tendencies, vocabularies, and characters, might claim the status of an ideal that needs to be fully embraced and understood in all its consequences – some of them profoundly disturbing for the old ‘images of the self’ consecrated by our tradition, on the one side Greek and Latin, on the other, Judeo-Christian –, if we want that democracy actually become a social and political reality. I conclude this paper with a plea for resistance to biopolitical normalization. (shrink)

Inspired by Paul B. Preciado’s work of autotheory, Testo Junkie, and the various processes of self-shaping that circulate through his corpus, this visual piece and its accompanying personal essay draw upon the artist’s familial and ancestral knowledge of their grandmother’s confinement in an asylum. Developing a visual methodology based on the holographic philosophy of Nondual Śaiva Tantra, Techno-Tantrik Embodiment seeks to offer analogous holistic technologies that harness the power of the repressed and the taboo, to transform mind, body and environment. (...) The piece questions how technological scale sets conditions for relations, feelings, democratic processes and infrastructures, and it provides a mixed-reality approach to consciousness, asking: what types of engagement with image-based systems can subvert and transform our worldview? Utilizing a queer framework that eschews respectability or a quest for ‘positive’ counternarratives, it explores the possible synergies between Tantrik and digital technologies, to build meaningful connections with ourselves and alterity. (shrink)

Photo by Thought Catalog on Unsplash INTRODUCTION The coronavirus pandemic is a challenge to educators, policy makers, and ordinary people. In facing the threat from COVID-19, school systems and global institutions need “to address the essential matter of each human being and how they are interacting with, and affected by, a much wider set of biological and technical conditions.”[1] Educators must grapple with the societal issues that come with the intent of ensuring the safety of the public. To some, “these (...) are actually as important as the biological concerns of people.”[2] The current global crisis shows that “scientifically, socially, and politically the economy and technosphere are not just related, they are integral to a comprehensive response to major challenges.”[3] In developing these responses, scientists, government leaders, and policy makers need to consider the vulnerabilities of people, especially those in “thrown away” groups.[4] Jerome Ravetz explains that “microscopic viral predators cull our populations, as ever, but with a selection that is not natural but social and political.”[5] Educators must address the underlying vulnerabilities and evaluate the virus as a threat to academic experiences and access to a fair education. ANALYSIS • Critical Pedagogy By definition, the critical approach to teaching is about the problem-posing method of education developed by Paolo Freire. In his Pedagogy of the Oppressed, he proposed a paradigm shift away from the banking method of learning wherein teachers deposit knowledge into the minds of students. Critical pedagogy is an educational approach that challenges students to develop the ability to recognize and criticize dominating theories and evaluate them in their social context. Teachers press students to recognize oppression and try to remedy oppression in their culture.[6] Despite the lack of in-person interaction between the teacher and the students, the effort to use innovative teaching techniques like critical pedagogy should continue. Online learning is not just about the use of technology, although the internet is crucial in the delivery of content. Since human beings are creators of value, they determine the meaning and purpose of technology. In this way, the set of values people have will influence online learning. Teachers cannot be more concerned about outcomes than about the process itself. The process is crucial since the ability of the student to think critically is developed in the exchange between the student and the teacher. The teacher cannot simply dump loads of information (deposit knowledge) but must pose problems to test the analytical and critical skills of students.[7] Education is about how people humanize the world. Policy makers miss the point when they focus on the delivery but do not pay attention to the substantive aspect of learning, which is human empowerment. Education is meant to expand the freedom of people. Education should be seen as an integrative activity. Learning is a formative process that aims to develop the human person. Without the face-to-face encounter between teacher and students, the challenge is finding ways to make learning an effective means to mold the values of young people. • Online Critical Pedagogy & the Role of Technology Physical distance appears to be an impediment in realizing the ideals of learning. The lack of contact between the teacher and the students may prevent a more meaningful interaction since online instruction is impersonal. It can be argued that there is no alternative to some classroom activities, especially laboratory experiments in science courses. The total classroom environment naturally influences the behavior of students when it comes to academic work: the look in the eyes of the professor, the caring ways of a teacher, or the pressure while taking exams contribute to an experience that only a classroom setting can provide. If implemented properly, technology can facilitate the personal relationships between teachers and students while providing meaningful experiences. With the current need for online learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, gadgets are indispensable. Some would even consider gadgets an extension of the human body. A mobile phone is not just any instrument; it has evolved into a novel way of being in the world. Our gadgets are a means of seeing how the outside world unfolds. Modern technological tools allow the interface of people in many fields of experience in a globalized environment. Computers and other digital devices extend the meaning and value of human freedom. For example, a laptop provided to a poor child can redefine the meaning of and what the future might hold for that child. The device is crucial to the whole learning process. Modern tools are critical to self-discovery and greater freedom. The values that people embrace will matter in the new normal. The internet has provided a new democratic space that empowers groups and individuals to express themselves and to understand the world.[8] In an online class, students and teachers alike need to analyze big picture questions and layers of information. For example, the student in an ethics or philosophy class can reflect on the realities of life. With the proper guidance, online education should help define the meaning of moral commitment and human responsibility. CONCLUSION Before the pandemic, policy makers had been pursuing the goals of a globalized economy. They had been fashioning and promoting programs that cater to the interests of a consumer-driven world that has deprived the poor of opportunity. When the pandemic struck, globalization suddenly came to a halt and people realized the things that truly matter in life – family, love, and life itself. The new normal must now emphasize the role of education as a source of inner strength that can empower the person to live well reinforcing values based on a social consciousness. Critical pedagogy is possible under the new normal. The distance between the teacher and student does not make the educational process less real and in the absence of a vaccine, online learning is the safest strategy. Governments cannot freeze an entire school year since education is the only way out from poverty for millions. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a reason to re-imagine teaching using technology to encourage all students to question systems of oppression or greed, as the persistent pursuit of the truth is what education is all about. [1] Hartsell, Layne, Krabbe, Alexander, & Pastreich, Emmanuel. “Covid-19, Global Justice, and a New Biopolitics of the Anthropocene.” Social Ethics Society Journal of Applied Philosophy 6, no. 2 (2020), 3. [2] Ravetz, Jerome. “Science for a Proper Recovery: Post-Normal, not New Normal.” Issues in Science and Technology [Internet] July 15, 2020. https://issues.org/post-normal-science-for-pandemic-recovery/ [3] Hartsell, et al. “Covid-19, Global Justice, and a New Biopolitics of the Anthropocene,” 6. [4] Ravetz, “Science for a Proper Recovery: Post-Normal, not New Normal.” [5] Ibid. [6] Freire, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. (New York: Continuum Books, 1993). [7] Freire writes that in such a situation “instead of communicating, the teacher issues communiqués and makes deposits which the students patiently receive, memorize, and repeat.” See his Pedagogy of the Oppressed. [8] Bakardjieva, Maria. Internet Society. (London: Sage Publications, 2005). (shrink)

In this article I propose a conception of “civil religion” to bridge the tension between immanence and transcendence that has characterized Italian Theory to date. This tension is due to the two central components of Italian Theory, namely, the discourse on biopolitics and the discourse on political theology. In what follows I argue that this conception of “civil religion” originates with Machiavelli and is functional to his vision of democratic constitutionalism. I propose a new genealogy of this conception (...) drawn from the history of the reception of Alfarabi and Averroes in western political thought. The article explains that the difference between civil religion and political theology consists in the former maintaining the priority of worldly happiness over otherworldly salvation. The article concludes with a reflection on how this concept of worldly happi- ness can serve to contrast the “biopolitical” pursuit of private happiness. (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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In this paper I propose a new interpretation of the British evolutionary synthesis. The synthetic work of J. B. S. Haldane, R. A. Fisher and J. S. Huxley was characterized by both an integration of Mendelism and Darwinism and the unification of different biological subdisciplines within a coherent framework. But it must also be seen as a bold and synthetic Darwinian program in which the biosciences served as a utopian blueprint for the progress of civilization. Describing the futuristic visions of (...) these three scientists in their synthetic heydays, I show that, despite a number of important divergences, their biopolitical ideals could be biased toward a controlled and regimented utopian society. Their common ideals entailed a social order where liberal and democratic principles were partially or totally suspended in favor of bioscientific control and planning for the future. Finally, I will argue that the original redefinition of Darwinism that modern synthesizers proposed is a significant historical example of how Darwinism has been used and adapted in different contexts. The lesson I draw from this account is a venerable one: that, whenever we wish to define Darwinism, we need to recognize not only its scientific content and achievements but expose the other traditions and ideologies it may have supported. (shrink)

The theme of the 6th biennial Radical Philosophy Association Conference, held at Howard University in Washington, D.C. in November 2004, was "Philosophy Against Empire." The U.S. imperial project, pursued by both Republican and Democratic administrations, has many dimensions, including military force and the mechanisms for its legitimation; the global economy and flows of money and people across borders; and biopolitics, or the disciplining of bodies through the micro-mechanisms of power apart from traditional forms of sovereignty. These issues are (...) explored in depth in these collected and revised essays from the Conference, along with the forms of subjectivity that can resist and respond to the alienation produced within and by the imperial project, toward the creation of an alternative global order. Authors include Karsten Struhl, Ann Ferguson, Edmund Byrne, David Cormier, Harry Targ, Jo-Ann Pilardi, Lucinda Joy Peach, Devin Zane Shaw, Tzuchien Tho, Eduardo Mendieta, Richard Schmitt, Richard Jones, Richard Peterson, Peter Amato, William McBride, Omar Dahbour, Kory Schaff, David Schweickart, and Carol Gould. (shrink)

Subject to severe financial constraints while operating within a regime of moral panics driven by the `war on terrorism', higher education in the United States faces both a legitimation crisis and a political crisis. With its increasing reliance on Pentagon and corporate interests, the academy has largely opened its doors to serving private and governmental interests and in doing so has compromised its role as a democratic public sphere. This article situates the development of the university as a militarized (...) knowledge factory within the broader context of what I call the biopolitics of militarization and its increasing influence and power within American society after the tragic events of September 11, 2001. Highlighting and critically engaging the specific ways in which the forces of militarization are shaping various aspects of university life, this article focuses on the growth of militarized knowledge and research, the increasing development of academic programs and schools that serve military personnel, and the ongoing production of military values and subject positions on US campuses. It also charts how the alliance between the university and the national security state has undermined the university as a site of criticism, dissent and critical dialogue. (shrink)

This essay addresses the ethical and political significance of Foucault’s late work on the ethics of care of the self and parrhesia. We argue, first, that understanding this significance requires seeing Foucault’s investigation of these classical practices against the backdrop of his identification of, and attempt to make perspicuous, the problem of biopolitical governance – specifically the paradox of relations of power and capacity. On this basis we go on, second, to consider how this turn may inform an ethics of (...) democratic governance. In constructing this case, we demonstrate the relationship between the ethics of care of the self as a practice of freedom and the tradition of moral perfectionism identified by Stanley Cavell. This allows us to show how Cavell and Foucault mutually complement each other in the articulation of an approach to an ethics of democracy and we outline the fundamental features of such an approach. (shrink)

"The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign—and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location—the life of the people—where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and (...) measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious—which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways—are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remains locates much of modernity—from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments—in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to examine the contrast between humanism and anti-humanism as two different modern paradigms of considering the individual’s relationship with nature. My thesis is that ecology, as an ideological discourse, reshaped the both the democratic and totalitarian perspectives on humanism and anti-humanism by addressing liberties, self-care, and authenticity in terms of normative laws for environment, health, and the idea of naturalness. Reconsidering Luc Ferry’s analysis from The New Ecological Order: Tree, Animal, Human, I (...) will explain how a social-critical theory of modernity might be conceived in the terms of humanism and anti-humanism, represented by different ecological discourses whose main contribution was to add to the modern social contract the value of non-human beings, including animals, plants, and natural objects as subjects of law (in their most democratic versions) or to discount the value of humans (in their totalitarian structures), viewing racism, for example, as a clinical, biopolitical, and hence “ecological” discourse. I will argue that this condition is a cultural symptom of the anti-natural attitude of the modern individual. (shrink)

Nietzsche challenges the tenets of received political wisdom in a number of ways and his thinking contains resources for revitalising political thinking. Nietzsche and Political Thought offers fresh insights into Nietzsche's relevance for contemporary political thought in light of recent advances in research in the field and key topics in contemporary theorising about politics. An international team of leading scholars provide vital new perspectives on both core and novel topics including justice, democratic theory, biopolitics, the multitude, political psychology, (...) and the Enlightenment. In spite of the controversies, what becomes clear is that Nietzsche is vital for political thought and a more sensitive and nuanced approach than conventional understandings allow is required. Nietzsche continues to have a lively presence in contemporary philosophy and this book reawakens interest in the political dimension of his thinking. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to highlight the confluence of pastoral power and biopolitical power, as foundations for today’s unholy alliance that undermines the sense of democratic political subjectivity. From that perspective, it explores the connections between the Heideggerian conception of subjectivity and alternative pastoral power and biopolitics that Foucault calls through its ethics focused on self-care.

In the management of the Covid 19 crisis, digital technologies were used in a major way. This article defends the hypothesis that these technologies took the form of a “tacit social experimentation”. This article justifies this concept in three levels. The first part uses this concept to qualify the form of biopolitics that was implemented to manage the crisis. Digital technologies were used to discipline the population and, literally speaking, as instruments of knowledge of the population. Uncertainty forced experts (...) to make preliminary observations and act to produce knowledge. Second, this article shows that the use of digital technologies during the crisis was experimental in a second sense. By promoting telemedicine within a more flexible legal framework, the authorities authorised an experimental use of telemedicine without knowledge or control of its side effects. Finally, the article defends the use of the concept of “tacit social experimentation” for ethical and political purposes. For indeed, understanding the experiments carried out during the crisis begs the question of the involvement of the participants and their democratic steering. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Governmental and Public Reason Governmentality and the State Liberal and Neo‐Liberal Governmentality Governmentality and Legitimacy References.

This article studies the eugenic theories of Marathi sexological writer and novelist Narayan Sitaram Phadke, and his attempts to domesticate the modern ideal of the adult romantic couple as a yardstick of ‘emotional democracy’ in late colonial India. Locating Phadke's work against the backdrop of the Child Marriage Restraint Act (1929) and its eugenicist concerns, I argue that he conceptualized romantic love as an emotion and a form of sociability central to the state's biopolitical schemes of ensuring modern coupledom but (...) as exceeding the state's capacity to rationally order Indian sex life. Consequently, he crafted literary supplements like the bildungsroman to circulate ‘English’ idioms of emotional and corporeal intimacy in Marathi; his novels domesticated eugenic sexology for its ‘vernacular’ audiences by advocating caste-bound romantic love as the blueprint for Indian marital coupling. As exemplified by Phadke's work, an emerging Marathi discourse of love demarcated a space for the young couple to operate as a vehicle of interpersonal openness within the constraints of the upper-caste joint family. By outlining the parameters of this Brahmanical aesthetic discourse, I show that the couple became the locus of a self-styled ‘democratic’ form of emotional attachment aimed at developing a necessary dynamism within endogamous caste-based marital arrangements without radically transforming them. The science performed through the Marathi novel in the 1920s and 1930s consequently explains the increasing prominence of romantic love as a form of developmental ‘democratic’ discourse at a time when both romantic love and democracy-in-practice were widely experienced as absent from Indian society. (shrink)

In the last decade, we have witnessed the return of one of the most controversial terms in the political lexicon: totalitarianism. What are we talking about when we define a totalitarian political and social situation? When did we start using the word as both adjective and noun? And, what totalitarian ghosts haunt the present? Philosopher Simona Forti seeks to answer these questions by reconstructing not only the genealogy of the concept, but also by clarifying its motives, misunderstandings, and the controversies (...) that have animated its current resurgence. Taking into account political theories and historical discussions, Totalitarianism especially focuses on philosophical reflections, from the question of totalitarian biopolitics to the alleged totalitarian drifts of neoliberalism. The work invites the relentless formulation of a radical question about democratic age: the possibilities it has opened up, the voids it leaves behind, the mechanisms it activates, and the "voluntary servitude" it produces. Forti argues that totalitarianism cannot be considered an external threat to democracy, but rather, one of the possible answers to those questions posed by modernity which democracies have not been able to solve. Her investigation of the uses and abuses of totalitarianism as one of the fundamental categories of 20th and 21st centuries promises to provoke much-needed discussion and debate among those in philosophy, politics, ethics, and beyond. (shrink)

Dimitris Vardoulakis asks how it is possible to think of a politics that is not commensurate with sovereignty. For such a politics, he argues, sovereignty is defined not in terms of the exception but as the different ways in which violence is justified. Vardoulakis shows how it is possible to deconstruct the various justifications of violence. Such dejustifications can take place only by presupposing an other to sovereignty, which Vardoulakis identifies with agonistic democracy. In doing so, Sovereignty and Its Other (...) puts forward both a novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice. (shrink)

This essay argues that Speech-Language Pathology emerged as a response to the early twentieth-century demand for docile, efficient, and thus productive speech. As the capacity of speech became more central to the industrial and democratic operations of modern society, an apparatus was needed to bring speech under the fold of biopower. Beyond simple economic productivity, the importance of SLP lies in opening the speaking subject up to management and normalization—creating, in short, biopolitical subjects of communication. We argue that SLP (...) accordingly emerged not as a discreet institution, but as a set of practices which can be clustered under three headings: calculating deviance, disciplining the tongue, and speaking the truth of pathologized subjects. (shrink)

Debates about obesity are really about the meaning of responsibility. The trend toward local foods reflects the changing nature of space due to new communication technologies. Vegetarian theory capitalizes on biotechnology’s challenge to the meaning of species. And food politics, as this book makes powerfully clear, is actually about the political anxieties surrounding globalization. In _Eating Anxiety_, Chad Lavin argues that our culture’s obsession with diet, obesity, meat, and local foods enacts ideological and biopolitical responses to perceived threats to both (...) individual and national sovereignty. Using the occasion of eating to examine assumptions about identity, objectivity, and sovereignty that underwrite so much political order, Lavin explains how food functions to help structure popular and philosophical understandings of the world and the place of humans within it. He introduces the concept of digestive subjectivity and shows how this offers valuable resources for rethinking cherished political ideals surrounding knowledge, democracy, and power. Exploring discourses of food politics, _Eating Anxiety_ links the concerns of food—especially issues of sustainability, public health, and inequality—to the evolution of the world order and the possibilities for democratic rule. It forces us to question the significance of consumerist politics and—simultaneously—the relationship between politics and ethics, public and private. (shrink)

In the pursuit of knowledge, Dorion Sagan argues in this dazzlingly eclectic, rigorously crafted, and deliciously witty collection of essays, scientific authoritarianism and philosophical obscurantism are equally formidable obstacles to discovery. As science has become more specialized and more costly, its questing spirit has been constrained by dogma. And philosophy, perhaps the discipline best placed to question orthodoxy, has retreated behind dense theoretical language and arcane topics of learning. Guided by a capacious, democratic view of science inspired by the (...) examples set by his late parents—Carl Sagan, who popularized the study of the cosmos, and Lynn Margulis, an evolutionary biologist who repeatedly clashed with the scientific establishment—Sagan draws on classical and contemporary philosophy to intervene provocatively in often-charged debates on thermodynamics, linear and nonlinear time, purpose, ethics, the links between language and psychedelic drugs, the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, and the occupation of the human body by microbial others. Informed by a countercultural sensibility, a deep engagement with speculative thought, and a hardheaded scientific skepticism, he advances controversial positions on such seemingly sacrosanct subjects as evolution and entropy. At the same time, he creatively considers a wide range of thinkers, from Socrates to Bataille and Descartes to von Uexküll, to reflect on sex, biopolitics, and the free will of Kermit the Frog. Refreshingly nonconformist and polemically incisive, _Cosmic Apprentice_ challenges readers to reject both dogma and cliché and instead recover the intellectual spirit of adventure that should—and can once again—animate both science and philosophy. (shrink)

This article argues that the indefinite detention and torture of prisoners at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp and the intentional destabilization of Palestinian civilian life in the Israeli occupied Palestinian territories are indicative of the emergence of a new postmodern form of power. Coining the term homo dolorosus – the man who is available to be made to suffer – this article seeks to understand this emergent politics of suffering through a historicized reading of Foucault’s typology of power, informed by (...) the work of Giorgio Agamben. It is argued that, just as discipline was the dark inverse of the modern utopian Enlightenment project of universal democratic inclusion, the politics of suffering is the dark inverse of the postmodern biopolitical project of security. Using the work of Mikkel Joronen, Jasbir Puar and Lauren Wilcox as signposts, this article argues that homo dolorosus is produced by power’s encounter with a population that it perceives or represents as simultaneously risky and dependent. Moreover, it is suggested that homo dolorosus may be the manifestation of a project that aims to do away with freely-deciding subjectivity while keeping the human body alive. (shrink)

Spinoza's political thought has been subject to a significant revival of interest in recent years. As a response to difficult times, students and scholars have returned to this founding figure of modern philosophy as a means to help reinterpret and rethink the political present. Spinoza's Authority Volume I: Resistance and Power in Ethics makes a significant contribution to this ongoing reception and utilization of Spinoza's political thought by focusing on his Ethics. By taking the concept of authority as an original (...) framework, this books asks: How is authority related to ethics, ontology, and epistemology? What are the social, historical and representational processes that produce authority and resistance? And what are the conditions of effective resistance? -/- Spinoza's Authority features a roster of internationally established theorists of Spinoza's work, and covers key elements of Spinoza's political philosophy, including: questions of authority, the resistance to authority, sovereign power, democratic control, and the role of Spinoza's "multitudes". (shrink)

Until the late twentieth century, there were three main political currents in the Netherlands: Christian, Labor, and Liberal, giving Christian party politics a stronger position than in European countries with a binary division between conservative and progressive. The history of the debate about embryo research coincides with the end of this period. Whereas in the 1980s the Christian Democrat party still had strong religiously motivated views about embryo protection, it has since lost both the power and the drive to pursue (...) this. However, due to strategic opportunities arising in the margin of Dutch coalition politics, smaller parties inspired by Christian belief are still quite influential on issues of medical ethics in the highly fragmented political landscape of the present. (shrink)

This is the introduction to the symposium on Maxime Lepoutre, Democratic Speech in Divided Times (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). The symposium contains articles by Paul Billingham, Rachel Fraser, and Michael Hannon, and a response by the author.

Feminist Geneaologies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures provides a feminist anaylsis of the questions of sexual and gender politics, economic and cultural marginality, and anti-racist and anti-colonial practices both in the "West" and in the "Third World." This collection, edited by Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, charts the underlying theoretical perspectives and organization practices of the different varieties of feminism that take on questions of colonialism, imperialism, and the repressive rule of colonial, post-colonial and advanced capitalist nation-states. It provides (...) a comparative, relational, historically grounded conception of feminist praxis that differs markedly from the liberal pluralist, multicultural understanding that sheapes some of the dominant version of Euro-American feminism. As a whole, the collection poses a unique challenge to the naturalization of gender based in the experiences, histories and practices of Euro-American women. (shrink)