Abstractabstract:This article investigates the presentation of state power and affective life in the anime series Yuki Yuna Is a Hero. Juxtaposing the portrayal of the recruitment of female bodies and affects into the defense of the sovereign with the historical context of Imperial Japan, this article elaborates how the series captures the sovereign violence that creates biopolitical subjects in everyday life. It then illustrates how the series appropriates and subverts the genre conventions of the magical girl (mahō shōjo) anime (...) through Giorgio Agamben’s idea of bare life and the state of exception. This subversion offers an opportunity to rethink the politics of disaster in contemporary Japan. Finally, this article probes into the utopian potential of the series by elucidating its affirmation of the relationality of life in an enchanted world. (shrink)

ArgumentWhen Japan faced the world after the collapse of its feudal system, it had to invent its own modern identity in which the Tokyo Cherry became the National Flower. Despite being a garden plant, it received a Latin scientific species name as if it was an endemic species. After Japan’s colonial conquest of Korea, exploring the flora of the peninsula became part of imperial knowledge practices of Japan. In the wild, a different cherry was discovered in Korea that was (...) proposed as the endemic parent of the Tokyo Cherry, supporting imperialist policies. Following Japan’s defeat after the Pacific War, South Korea in turn entered its search for cultural identity. The supposed parent of the Tokyo Cherry was now successfully acclaimed as the parent species of the colonial oppressor’s Tokyo Cherry and named the King Cherry. Such scientific practice into cherries smoothly intertwined with nationalism and its legacy continues to interfere with research today. (shrink)

This article displaces the terrain upon which the question of power in modern societies has been framed by reference to the concept of hegemony. It presents a genealogy of power which pays attention to what has been at stake in the shifts in the effectivity of the concept of hegemony for cultural theory from the 1960s, correlating the mutations in the analyses of power to shifts in the analysis of the relations of culture, politics and the economy. Questions of the (...) relation of internality or externality of power with regard to the governed, and issues of counter-conducts and 'counter-hegemonic' struggles will guide the development of this genealogy. The article brings to bear on the issues the point of view of hybrid forms of sovereignty, such as imperial governmentality and implications relating to the emergence of biopolitics in the 19th century. It is argued that the situation today regarding global governance and new forms of rule compels us to re-examine the problem of consent and consensus by turning to the apparatuses for constituting hybrid publics that work through biomedia and new strategies of securitization and insecuritization. (shrink)

This paper uses Foucault’s concepts “discipline” and “biopower” to expose the complexity of power relations in Augustan Rome and its historiography. Focusing on Augustus’ Res Gestae and Tacitus’ Annales, I argue that the absolute sovereignty of the emperor did not preclude the advancement of techniques to classify, hierarchize and normalize individuals, nor did Imperial sovereignty work against the development of a discourse about the enhancement and protection of the population. By demonstrating the conceptual and historical relevancy of Foucault’s (...) modern power triad of “sovereignty-discipline-government” to first century CE Rome, the paper suggests that biopolitical societies have a far more extensive history than the one said to have started around the turn of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

This essay follows the assumption that the first principle of classical metaphysics has its counterpart in political sovereignty as suprema potestas. Therefore, both can be equally described as arché. Their epitome is the God of so-called ontotheology, who thus proves to be what I call the Ur-Arché. In contrast to current post-metaphysical approaches, however, I suggest overcoming ontotheology through a different metaphysics, which emphasizes the self-transcending surplus character of being. I regard early Christian martyrdom as an eminent way in which (...) the surplus of being is manifested. This has two interwoven aspects, one ontological and one political, both arising from the excessive idea of the Christ event, or the notion that there is life beyond life unto death. I will analyse the mechanism allowing early Christian martyrs to counteract Roman imperial sovereignty. Finally, I will relate this to contemporary life systems in which sovereignty has become anonymous biopower. (shrink)

Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 2009. 320pp. pbk. $19.95 ISBN-13: 978-0816666119. In Games of Empire , Nick Dyer-Witheford and Greig de Peuter expand an earlier study of “the video game industry as an aspect of an emerging postindustrial, post-Fordist capitalism” (xxix) to argue that videogames are “exemplary media of Empire” (xxix). Their notion of “Empire” is based on Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire (2000), which (...) characterizes the contemporary world order as a decentralized system of global economic, political, and economic power that transcends national boundaries. In the view of the authors, Hardt and Negri’s account sets itself apart from other analyses of international politics by offering a “comprehensive account of conditions of work, forms of subjectivity, and types of struggle in contemporary capital” (xx). Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter thus divide Games of Empire into three sections to reflect each of these aspects of Empire ’s argument, seeing their work as the first account to explore “virtual games within a system of global ownership, privatized property, coercive class relations, military operations, and radical struggle” (xxix). Books in the University of Minnesota Press’s Electronic Mediations series “explore the humanistic and social implications” of new technologies that spark “significant changes in society and culture, politics and economics, thinking and being.” That’s an abstract goal, and one that Games of Empire surely meets. Yet at times it can be difficult to understand exactly which specific intervention this book seeks to make. It is unclear whether the authors of Games of Empire see their work as an indictment of game scholars’ lack of attention to political economy, or whether it’s a work of political theory hoping to show that other disciplines should be paying more attention to the production and play of videogames. Because Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter don’t directly criticize previous political critiques of gaming—such as Edward Castronova’s exploration of the “porous membrane” allowing two-way traffic between virtual economies and those of the real world, or Alexander Galloway’s unraveling of control protocols in algorithmic design, or Ian Bogost’s idea of political procedural rhetoric—they sometimes leave the reader wondering how to situate the book in the broader discourse on games and politics, either separately or together. Thus, Games of Empire might best be seen as an introduction to the writings of Hardt and Negri for game players and designers, rather than as a text for communicating the basic concepts of game studies and design. It is neither a truly new theory of games or digital media, nor is it a new theory of Empire—and that’s not a criticism. It is instead an introduction to Empire through popular culture, as Zizek does for Lacan in Looking Awry . If one were teaching an introductory course on contemporary political theory, this book would offer obvious inroads into Negri and Hardt’s thinking for a number of reasons. Despite its radical ideological bent, the book isn’t off-putting to readers who don’t necessarily share the authors’ politics. It synthesizes complex ideas from difficult thinkers like Marx, Foucault, and Guattari while integrating modifications and critiques of Empire theory itself. And although the book is dense, sometimes feeling longer than it actually is (just over 200 pages), Games of Empire maintains a breezy readability by tightly coupling core concepts of Empire theory to well-known games and widely-publicized conflicts within the videogame industry. The first section of the book focuses on immaterial labor, the accumulation of “cognitive capital,” and the global process of manufacturing videogame consoles. It is significant for the authors that videogames began as hacker experiments within research institutes of the military industrial complex, programmed on stolen time, before becoming a commodity (7). This is the first in a string of examples showing how creative dissidence and conflict fuel the continuing evolution of Empire’s control. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter explain that the videogame industry now constitutes an international production apparatus dominating both creative work in developed nations and manual labor in developing ones. Because game industries in the United States, Western Europe, and Japan are predominately non-unionized, they serve as an exemplary system for analyzing how global capital exploits contemporary intellectual work—including an excellent analysis of the “EA Spouse” scandal of 2004. On the side of the consumer, the authors argue that rabid “console races” that drive the industry forward from a technological perspective serve to structure gamer identity and combat piracy; later in the book, these machines offer a window into the worlds of Congolese coltan mining and electronic waste (222-224). In the second section, Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter move on to deep case studies of individual games to show how the most popular game genres embed imperial assumptions about conflict, exchange, and urban life. First they argue that military training games such as Full Spectrum Warrior —co-developed by university researchers, industry developers, and military contractors—contribute to the “banalization” of war, a subjective state wherein perpetual preparedness for war is accepted as a part of everyday life (100). Chapter five covers Michel Foucalt’s notion of “biopower,” the extension of capital accumulation to life itself. The authors argue that virtual worlds such as World of Warcraft , which take market capitalism as a given and force players into essentialist roles and racial antagonisms, are organized to maximize control and profit (often on the backs of virtual currency “farmers” in China and southeast Asia). Finally, they criticize the naïve assumption that humor and cynicism in the popular sandbox game franchise Grand Theft Auto offer any remedy to its racialized, violent content. Instead, such games indulge and normalize the fantasy of getting rich at any cost by keeping the realities of contemporary urban life and corporate greed at a safe distance (181). Part three of Games of Empire focuses on “games of multitude,” a preliminary attempt to escape from Empire’s order through alternate modes of videogame development and play. Multitude is defined dialectically, as “the engine and the enemy” of Empire (187). This is the most important, yet also most contradictory section of the text. It lays bare the process by which Empire and its media feed our creative and intellectual development to overabundance. At a certain point, the force of the multitude reaches such a level that it threatens the stability of Empire; however, instead of following Hardt and Negri’s utopian assumptions about the radical potential of the multitude, the authors here follow Paolo Virno’s warning that Empire is “very good at adopting apparently iconoclastic practices and utopian ideas as management techniques and revenue sources” (188). At every turn, advances in player configurative power provide new sources of revenue and advertising angles for the game industry. A disappointing shortcoming of these latter pages is the lack of truly new examples for radical resistance within game development. Instead, it turns out that the radical left seems satisfied with the same mild successes that the left-of-center also has celebrated: artist’s mods, virtual world activism, and critical counterplay within strategy- and wargames. Having been frequently cited by many authors before Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter, this idea of subversion or resistance through play feels tired and unpersuasive. It is unclear if the authors believe it is possible to embrace game design itself as a way of pursuing what they call “exodus” from Empire, or if an all-too-fashionable subversion is the only workable strategy. While the book does explore how the earliest independent game studios were eventually subverted and incorporated into the game industry proper, it doesn’t affirm or critique more recent non-commercial, DIY game development projects such as Klik-of-the-Month Club and Ludum Dare. Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter’s analysis of so-called “tactical games,” including the editorial works of La Molleindustria, leads to an even more ambivalent take on the contemporary design ecology. At the conclusion of his essay on “Countergaming,” Galloway asserts that avant-garde videogame artists “should create new grammars of action […] should create alternative algorithms” (Galloway 125). Yet Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter characterize works such as McDonald’s Video Game and Oiligarchy as didactic, suggesting that the role of radical political games might be “limited to that of agitprop” (199). They are concerned that games like those of Molleindustria rigidly structure the activities of their players in order to prove a point. Yet, despite their repeated assertion that the equation of greater interactivity with democratic digital liberation is flawed, the authors see potential in policy simulators that “allow players to edit or tweak” (202) their parameters in response to what Bogost has called simulation fever , the simultaneous drive toward and fear of simulation (Bogost 108). The possibility of practicing radical design is bucked, and early attempts at critical game development like those of Molleindustria’s seem to be relegated to the status of exceptions that prove the rule for player-centered exodus. Overall, there is one glaring question Games of Empire leaves unanswered: how exactly are videogames the “exemplary media” of Empire, and what are the implications of videogames being exemplary in this way? Presumably Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter want to avoid essentialist claims, so they’re not keen on following Wark’s desire to mark “the game’s difference from [legacy media] as something that speaks to changes in the overall structure of social and technical relations” (Wark 225). It is also unclear how the production apparatuses, labor standards, and subjectivizing processes involved in the creation and use of other any other kind of digital media would fail to justify their equally exemplary status. Even the book’s concluding paragraph holds that virtual games “are one molecular component of this undecidable collective mutation” (Dyer-Witheford and de Peuter 229) of intellect, labor, and daily life. In the end, the authors seem to back away from their focus on games as exemplary to bring their work in line with broader theories of the gradual digitization of the everyday, in line with Galloway and Manovich. Despite these flaws, there is an undeniable elegance to Games of Empire ’s contrasting of gaming’s overwhelmingly imperial content with its multitudinous form . And its ambivalence about the potential of independent or political game development might be seen by scholars of Empire as a strength rather than a weakness, an acceptance that every new expression of multitude offers another opportunity for the expansion of Empire. The book also functions as a strong, all-encompassing call to greater responsibility on the part of mainstream game developers to be more conscious of the ideologies they embed in their work, of the way their intellectual property is used and manipulated by those who employ them, and of the material impact their industry has on the world at large. For players it offers a toolbox of concepts for radical examinations of their own play activities, asking them to be more cognizant of the consequences of their consumption of digital media and the ways in which their virtual lives interface with the real. REFERENCES Bogost, Ian. Unit Operations: An Approach to Videogame Criticism . Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. Castranova, Edward. Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games . Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Dyer-Witheford, Nick and de Peuter, Greig. Games of Empire: Global Capitalism and Video Games . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2009. Galloway, Alexander. Gaming: Essays on Algorithmic Culture . Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). Wark, McKenzie. Gamer Theory . Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. (shrink)

What is hospitality? Who is it addressed to? Hospitality aims at welcoming those who arrive; it demands giving space and time and sharing our own resources with others. In view of the current global migration crisis and in the midst of the social debates and a critique of the failure of affluent countries and Western democracies to respond in solidarity to those in need, this article attempts to re-consider the space for hospitality drawing from the ethical and the political as (...) the two fundamental pillars of social architecture. In an effort to discuss collective grassroots reactions to this general lack of hospitality, I address the Catalan social platform Volem Acollir in their request to the state to open up the borders for the reception of a larger number of migrants. Far from being an individual choice, or an optional political decision, hospitality confronts us with the moral dilemma of the human response to our cultural others. (shrink)

This study investigates the significant relationship between mental health and academic motivation among graduating students. Thus, the study employed a correlational design to determine if there is a significant relationship between mental health and academic motivation among 150 graduating college students. Hence, the Mental Health Inventory 38 (MHI-38) and Academic Motivation Scale (AMS-C28) were employed to measure the study variables. Moreover, statistical analysis reveals that the r coefficient of 0.35 indicates a low positive correlation between the variables. The p-value of (...) 0.00, which is less than 0.05, leads to the decision to reject the null hypothesis. (shrink)

The deaths of millions from war, genocide, poverty and famine are symptomatic of a crisis that extends beyond site-specific failures of governance, culture or economies. Rather than reiterate standard critiques of capitalism, uneven development and inequality, this article probes and maps a shift in both the global economy and logic of capital that posits death as a central activity of value creation. “Crisis,” then, is more than an accidental failure or inconvenient side effect of either global economy or political reality, (...) but pivotal to both. Extending notions of biopower and necropolitics, I argue that, due to the extension of market logic, populations have been reconfigured and reconceptualized as “excess” - not only disposable but also fundamentally valued only in their negation. This devaluation of selected population is devalorization of living labor, thus creating a space for death as a generalized commodity, market and economic activity. Crucially, this shift exceeds the historic understandings... (shrink)

Biopower agregates no longer families distributed on land but mobile individuals. How can power count forces and take energy from them, if they differ from each other, if they are free? Power comes from beneath, from strategic relations between subjects.

This article utilizes the Foucauldian concepts of biopower and normalization to give an analysis of the debate surrounding the controversial administration of the HPV vaccine to adolescents. My intention is not to solve the problem, rather to utilize a Foucauldian framework to bring various facets of the issue to light, specifically the way the vaccine contributes to strategies of power in reference to how young adults develop within relationships of power. To begin, the article provides an overview of the (...) Foucauldian concepts of biopower and normalization, including how these two strategies of power were present in the administration of the smallpox vaccine in the 19th century. Next, information about HPV and the history of the current controversy in the United States is presented. Lastly, the article presents an analysis of the strategies of biopower and normalization present in the debate on HPV, including an emphasis on how the vaccination is similar to, and different from, 19th century smallpox vaccination. It also explores the way that mechanisms of disease control affect and are affected by individual subjects, in this case, adolescents. (shrink)

This paper explores the analytical relevance of Foucault's notion of biopower in the context of regulating and managing non-human lives and populations, specifically those animals that are the focus of livestock breeding based on genetic techniques. The concept of biopower is seen as offering theoretical possibilities precisely because it is concerned with the regulation of life and of populations. The paper approaches the task of testing the 'analytic mettle' of biopower through an analysis of four policy documents (...) concerned with farm animal genetics: the UK's National Scrapie Plan (2003); the UK National Action Plan on Farm Animal Genetic Resources (2006); the Agriculture and Environment Biotechnology Committee's report on Animals and Biotechnology (2002); and the Farm Animal Welfare Council's report on the Welfare Implications of Animal Breeding and Breeding Technologies in Commercial Agriculture (2004). Of interest is whether and how the four policy case studies articulate a form of biopower in relation to human-livestock animal relations in the context of genetic approaches to livestock breeding, and how biopower is variably expressed in relation to the different policy issues addressed. In concluding, the paper considers the overall applicability and relevance of biopower in the context of regulating animal lives within livestock breeding, highlighting both possibilities and limitations, and offers suggestions for taking forward research on livestock populations from a neo-Foucaultian perspective. (shrink)

Although Foucault adamantly refused to make moral pronouncements or dictate moral principles or political programs to his readers, his work offers a number of tools and concepts that can help us develop our own ethical views and practices. One of these tools is genealogical analysis, and one of these concepts is “biopower.” Specifically, this essay seeks to demonstrate that Foucault's concept of biopower and his genealogical method are valuable as we consider moral questions raised by genetic enhancement technologies. (...) First, it examines contemporary debate over the development, marketing, and application of such technologies, suggesting that what passes for ethical deliberation is often little more than political maneuvering in a field where stakes are very high and public perceptions will play a crucial role in decisions about which technologies will be funded or disallowed. It goes on to argue that genuine ethical deliberation on these issues requires some serious investigation of their historical context. Accordingly, then, it takes up the oft-heard charge from critics that genetic enhancement technologies are continuous with twentieth-century eugenic projects or will usher in a new age of eugenics. Foucault explicitly links twentieth-century eugenics with the rise of biopower. Through review of some aspects of the twentieth-century eugenics movement alongside some of the rhetoric and claims of enhancement's modern-day proponents, the essay shows ways in which deployment of genetic enhancement technologies is and is not continuous with earlier deployments of biopower. (shrink)

This chapter discusses Foucault's conceptualizations of power‐biopower, pastoral power, and governmentality developed mainly in his lecture courses at the College de France in the late 1970s. It also explicates his analysis of liberal and neoliberal governmentality central in these lectures‐the forms of governmentality that he saw as specific to modern Western societies. Foucault did not intend these lectures to be published‐they have only been published posthumously‐and he regarded the arguments and ideas central in them as working hypotheses. The demands (...) of biopolitics thus posed a theoretical challenge to liberal governmentality, and biopolitics and liberalism formed a historical intersection: they were linked de facto, not de jure. (shrink)

Michel Foucault articulated the hypothesis of biopower and biopolitics in the 1970s, and Giorgio Agamben developed this hypothesis in his Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, published in English in 1998. Since these interventions, biopower and biopolitics have become indispensable as a theoretical point of reference in the humanities and social sciences. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that in the last thirty years the process of biopower and biopolitical regulation has increased, so much so that (...) today every aspect of social relation is subjected to the operations of this power. This chapter considers the position of biopower in the thought of Foucault and Agamben, and how the two conceive of power and resistance to power. It examines how biopower relates to sovereign power in both philosophers’ work, and specifically how Agamben’s development of Foucault’s thought is radical and offers a markedly different direction to scholarship on biopower and its relationship to sovereign power. Despite the relative age of Foucault’s writings, they continue to offer conceptual and theoretical tools for scholars in ways that Agamben’s theories and work do not. I use the example of the coronavirus pandemic to illustrate the shortcomings in Agamben’s thought. Finally, this chapter draws on recent work by Alexander Weheliye and Achille Mbembé to explore the close relationship between sexuality and race, and to show how both gender and race open up new avenues for exploring biopower and its relationship to sovereignty in the twenty-first century. (shrink)

The case for an unprecedented penetration of life mechanisms into the politics of Western modernity has been a cornerstone of 20th-century social theory. Working with and beyond Foucault, this article challenges established views about the history of biopower by focusing on ancient medical writings and practices of corporeal permeability. Through an analysis of three Roman institutions: a) bathing; b) urban architecture; and c) the military, it shows that technologies aimed at fostering and regulating life did exist in classical antiquity (...) at the population scale. The article highlights zones of indistinction between natural and political processes, zoē and bíos, that are not captured by a view of destructive incorporation of or over life by sovereign power. In conclusion, the article discusses the theoretical potential of this historical evidence for contemporary debates on ‘affirmative biopolitics’ and ‘environmental biopower’. (shrink)

Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” has been a highly fertile concept in recent theory, influencing thinkers worldwide across a variety of disciplines and concerns. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault famously employed the term to describe “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” With this volume, Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar bring together leading contemporary scholars to explore the (...) many theoretical possibilities that the concept of biopower has enabled while at the same time pinpointing their most important shared resonances. Situating biopower as a radical alternative to traditional conceptions of power—what Foucault called “sovereign power”—the contributors examine a host of matters centered on life, the body, and the subject as a living citizen. Altogether, they pay testament to the lasting relevance of biopower in some of our most important contemporary debates on issues ranging from health care rights to immigration laws, HIV prevention discourse, genomics medicine, and many other topics. (shrink)

The political shockwaves from the partition of India and Pakistan were felt far beyond the local tragedies that followed in its wake – not least in British imperial politics, where the two new Dominions and the subsequent reorganisation of the Commonwealth drastically altered the character of the imperial machinery. This article covers the first decade of Pakistan’s and India’s independence through the activity of the Commonwealth journal The Round Table. Through studying the interaction between the local correspondents and (...) the English editorial staff, it argues that the inclusion of these new members, whose political class did not primarily stem from settlers, pressed the journal to transform its character. Thus, the journal went from facilitating imperial discussion, in which a homogenous group of contributors sought agreement, to transnational debate, in which a heterogeneous set of national perspectives were contrasted without any substantial reconciliation. As such, this meant the breakdown of the journal’s vision of a united, disinterested imperial truth and in its place spawned a multitude of parallel national views. (shrink)

This article argues that criminal justice and health institutions under settler colonialism collude to create and sustain “truths” about First Nations lives that often render them as “bare life,” to use the term of Giorgio Agamben. First Nations peoples’ existence is stripped to its sheer biological fact of life and their humanity denied rights and dignity. First Nations people remain in a “state of exception” to the legal order and its standards of care. Zones of exception place First Nations people (...) in a separate and diminished legal order. Medical and health agencies have been instrumental in shaping colonial “biopower,” both in and beyond carceral settings to ensure that First Nations lives are managed in accordance with the colonial settler state project. This project is able both to threaten First Nations rights to live and to maintain settler self-perceptions of decency and care. We illustrate this discussion with reference to the tragic and unnecessary deaths in custody of twenty-two-year-old Yamatji woman Ms Dhu in 2014 in South Hedland Police Station, Western Australia, and twenty-six-year-old Dunghutti man David Dungay Jnr in Long Bay jail in Sydney, NSW, in 2015. Health professionals and police demonstrated callous disregard to Ms Dhu and Mr Dungay—treating them as “bare life.”. (shrink)

Until now, philosophical debate about human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research has largely been limited to its ethical dimensions and implications. Although the importance and urgency of these ethical debates should not be underestimated, the almost undivided attention that mainstream and feminist philosophers have paid to the ethical dimensions of hESC research suggests that the only philosophically interesting questions and concerns about it are by and large ethical in nature. My argument goes some distance to challenge the assumption that ethical (...) considerations alone must be foregrounded in philosophical discussions about hESC research by introducing a critical stance on the epistemological and ontological assumptions that underlie and condition it. A central aim of the paper is to show how Foucault's insights into knowledge-power, taken in combination with Hacking's claims about styles of reasoning, can make these assumptions evident, as well as cast light on their potentially deleterious implications for disabled people. Arguing in this way also enables me to draw out constitutive effects of research on stem cells, that is, to indicate how the discursive practices surrounding research on stem cells, as well as the technology itself, contribute to the constitution of impairment. (shrink)

In its hegemonic definition, biopolitical governmentality is characterised by a seemingly infinite capacity of expansion, susceptible to colonise the landscape and timescape of the living present in the name of capitalistic productivity. The main trait of biopower is its normative, legal and political plasticity, allowing it to reappropriate critiques and resistances by appealing to bioethical efficacy and biological accuracy. Under these circumstances, how can we invent rebellious forms-of-life and alternative temporalities escaping biopolitical normativity? In this essay, I interrogate the (...) theoretical presuppositions of biopolitical rationality. I provide a deconstruction of the conceptual and temporal structures upholding the notion of biopolitics, in view of laying the ground for new forms of resistance. The articulation between life and power has a long philosophical history, which has been largely ignored by social theorists and political thinkers using biopolitics as an interpretative model. I re-inscribe this model within the tradition of critical materialism, by articulating Foucault’s ‘critical ontology’ to recent philosophical works on biological plasticity (Malabou). In these discourses, the logic of biopower depends on a representation of life – ‘the living’ – as living present. Biopower finds itself anchored in the authority of the present, that is to say, of being-as-presence (ontology); it sustains presentist definitions of life and materiality, be it under the form of a ‘plastic’ ontology. By drawing on Derrida’s notions of ‘spectrality’ and ‘life-death’ and Francesco Vitale’s work on ‘biodeconstruction’, I deconstruct these discourses on life and materiality and attempt to dissociate them from their ontological grounding, in order to suggest new paths of resistance to biopower. In particular, I follow the tracks of “the monster” in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Malabou. Foucault tells us that the monster is a singular figure, parasitic and subversive, beckoning a life beyond life, at once organic and non-organic, located at the limit between the normal and the exceptional, and exceeding the scope of biopolitical normativity in both theoretical and practical terms. It exists at the intersection of what Foucault names “the symbolics of blood” and “the analytics of sex”. As such, it materialises a self-transformative dimension of the living which remains, I argue, inadequate to Malabou’s representation of plasticity. The monstrous is a self-deconstructive motif calling for another biopolitical rationality, before or beyond ontological reductions or reconstructions. (shrink)

“It may be thought that I am prejudiced. Perhaps I am. I would be ashamed of myself if I were not.” 1 When Mark Twain undertook correspondence for San Francisco’s Alta California on a $1250 trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 he had an established reputation as a humorist and was on the cusp of making the transition from journalist to author. Innocents Abroad, “an unvarnished tale” 2 published in 1869 and sewn together with questionable regard for (...) coherence or thematic consistency, sold thirty-one thousand copies in one year. Only Uncle Tom’s Cabin had done better, as Twain himself noted. What made his work such a success? “This book is the record of a pleasure trip” , Twain declared, yet there had already been innumerable pleasure trips and by more established authors than he. The multiplicity and seemingly contradictory narrative stances in Innocents makes any essentialist reading hard to establish and what one stance purports is as likely and easy to prove as any other. In the main though, two bodies of criticism have prevailed hitherto, one seeing the text as flawed by internal discontinuities, the other perceiving that disjointed narration need not preclude a unified authorial consciousness. It is my contention that Twain most likely wrote with at least five entirely separate purposes in mind, none of which coexisted simultaneously: i. The profit, reputation and contractual fulfilment to be had in writing c. 1500 words to newspapers daily. ii. The demonstrable acquisition of high society vocabulary and cultural regard commended by Mrs. Fairbanks and Olivia Langdom. iii. An arrant attack upon Presbyterianism. iv. A break with the codified genre of travel writing. v. The promotion of Twain as healer of a wounded nation. Point v) has gone largely neglected by critics. Yet Twain’s role as a unifier in post Civil-War society, as projector of national identity abroad for the benefit of domestic patriotism, and as healer of war-torn America is a cornerstone to our understanding Innocents. As shall be seen, shades of mental/national injury coexist in the text, alongside a humorous denigration of foreigners. The resultant implied superiority of America and Americans, notwithstanding Twain’s passing jabs at them and in spite of their bloody internecine conflict, is what I term “imperial therapy.”. (shrink)

The present paper looks at the intersection of juridical and biopower in the U.S. Supreme Court’s school desegregation cases. These cases generally deploy “equitable relief” as a relay between the juridicially-specified injury of segregation and the biopolitical mandates of integration, allowing broad-based biopolitical remedies for juridically identified problems. This strategy enabled the Courts to negotiate between these forms of power. The analysis here thus suggests the continued relevance of juridical power, and also the limits of Foucault’s own analysis, which (...) suggested that biopower tended to fully colonize juridical power by way of norms. (shrink)

Despite Foucault’s claim in his final interview that his ‘whole philosophical development’ was determined by his reading of Heidegger, to date little has been published exploring the relationship between these thinkers. Undoubtedly, the primary reason for this silence is the seeming impossibility of reconciling Foucault and Heidegger’s work. Indeed, in key respects, we could hardly imagine two more different philosophers. Heidegger seeks to recover a primordial sense of being that he believes has been lost through the history of the West. (...) Foucault pursues an entirely contrary trajectory, calling into question both the primordial status of forms of thought and experience, and the transcendental closure of philosophical-historical narratives. Heidegger’s work is focused on a single question (the question of being), developing a single way into this question. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a framework to understand the transition in Foucault’s work from the disciplinary model to the governmentality model. Foucault’s work on power emerges within the general context of an expression of capitalist rationality and the nature of freedom and power within it. I argue that, thus understood, Foucault’s transition to the governmentality model can be seen simultaneously as a deepening recognition of what capitalism is and how it works, but also as a recognition of the changing (...) historical nature of the actually existing capitalisms and their specifically situated historical needs. I then argue that the disciplinary model should be understood as a contingent response to the demands of early capitalism, and argue that with the maturation of the capitalist enterprise many of those responses are no longer necessary. New realities require new responses; although this does not necessarily result in the abandonment of the earlier disciplinary model, it does require their reconfiguration according to the changed situation and the new imperatives following from it. (shrink)

We can now survey the ruins of a Babelian tower of discourse about cosmopolitanism. We speak of “elite travel lounge,” “Davos,” “banal” as well as of “reflexive,” “really existing,” “patriotic,” and “horizontal” cosmopolitanisms. Here, an attempt is made to extract what is normative and ideal in the concept of cosmopolitanism by foregrounding the epistemic and moral dimensions of this attitude towards the world and other cultures. Kant, in a rather unexpected way, is profiled as the exemplification of what is here (...) called “imperial” cosmopolitanism, which is both blind and dismissive of its own material conditions of possibility. Then, through a discussion of the works of Nussbaum, Appiah, Mignolo, Butler, Benhabib and Beck the author elaborates a version of cosmopolitanism that is grounded, enlightened, and reflexive, which corrects and supersedes Kant’s own Eurocentric cosmopolitanism. We do not live in an age of cosmopolitanism, but in an age of cosmopolitization. Democratic iterations that are jurisgenerative are matched at the global level by cosmopolitan iterations that are both jurisgenerative and affect generating. (shrink)

In the spirit of summer, and especially summer reading, we asked a few well-read writers for an essay on a book or books exploring bioethics issues through story. The result is a compelling look at how we face our fears and hopes about biotechnology and medicine. A reading list appears at the end. Bioethics lives in the shadow of great structures and practices of power, and yet, it has not been notable for its contributions to an understanding of power.1 Indeed, (...) the narrative that bioethics has fashioned for itself has been mainly a liberationist romance: a quest narrative in which the individual, seeking autonomy, struggles against limitations, constraints, and inhibitions imposed by forces (rules .. (shrink)

This contribution argues, first, that pre-national forms of state were not displaced or supplanted by a new, national form. What we call the nation-state was not the successor to imperial or city-states but was itself a form of the European imperial city-states that had driven the expansion of capitalism in previous centuries. It argues, second, that national states emerged only after 1945 and only in a handful of states where, through welfare reforms and market and industry regulation, investment (...) and production were made to serve the expansion and integration of national markets. Third, with the dismantling of Keynesian policies in these states, pre-national (pre-Keynesian) structures are resurfacing. What scholars describe as the emergence of ‘post-national spatialities’ and of ‘global cities’ and city regions represents the resurgence of a durable and historically dominant form of state: the imperial city-state form. The ‘re-scaling’ of nation-states and growing prominence of ‘global cities’ and ‘city regions’ are heralding the end of the brief history of actually existing nation-states and the re-deployment of the imperial city-state model. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: In this article, we propose an alternative Foucauldian reading of Martin Luther’s thought and early Lutheranism. Michel Foucault did not mention the Reformation often, although he saw it as an amplification of pastoral power and the governing of people’s everyday lives. We aim to fill the gap in his analysis by outlining the disciplinary and biopolitical aspects in Luther and early Lutheranism. Therefore, we also contribute to the ongoing debate regarding the birth of biopolitics, which, we argue, predates Foucault’s (...) periodisation. Our approach to tackling these questions is three-pronged. First, we establish the context by highlighting a few Reformation-era examples of the conceptual opposite of biopower, namely, sovereign power. Second, we scrutinise the disciplinary aspects of early Lutheranism, underscoring the fact that disciplinary institutions appear to subject people to new models of behaviour. Third, we describe the biopolitical under-currents in Luther’s thought and its early reception. We argue that the reformer’s views on issues such as marriage and poor relief appear to carry a biopolitical significance before the alleged birth of biopolitics. (shrink)

Society Must Be Defended is a collection of Michel Foucault’s courses at the College de France in 1976. In this volume, Foucault discusses the emergence of a new technology of domination called biopower. It is a power that is not “individualizing”, but “massifying”, that is directed at man as a member of a “species”. Biopolitics exerts control over relations between the human races. Yet, some critics claim that Foucault’s biopower does not address colonial societies and problems. This paper (...) argues that Foucault’s theory of biopower could be applied to the postcolonial discourse, too. To trace Foucauldian biopower in postcolonial literature, the authors of this article have focused on E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India. In this paper, the plot and the dialogue of Forster’s novel is studied based on Foucault’s theory of biopower as discussed in his Society Must Be Defended. It is concluded that in Forster’s novel, it can be noticed that the English power, which dominated early twentieth century Indian society, employs biopower to subjugate the Indian population. The English officials control India not merely by means of disciplinary institutions, but by manufacturing norms for an entire race which are explainable in terms of Foucault’s theory of biopower. (shrink)

Republicanism and imperialism are typically understood to be located at opposite ends of the political spectrum. In Imperial Republics, Edward G. Andrew challenges the supposed incompatibility of these theories with regard to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century revolutions in England, the United States, and France. Many scholars have noted the influence of the Roman state on the ideology of republican revolutionaries, especially in the model it provided for transforming subordinate subjects into autonomous citizens. Andrew finds an equally important parallel between Rome's (...) expansionary dynamic — in contrast to that of Athens, Sparta, or Carthage — and the imperial rivalries that emerged between the United States, France, and England in the age of revolutions. Imperial Republics is a sophisticated, wide-ranging examination of the intellectual origins of republican movements, and explains why revolutionaries felt the need to 'don the toga' in laying the foundation for their own uprisings. (shrink)

The article deals with the dance revolution of the twentieth century - the emergence of "new dance” in which desire is produced, and not simply represented. Contemporary dance places the emphasis on spontaneity, the autonomous functioning of the body, and improvisation. There are at least two basic conceptions of desire in philosophy: the first is mimetic desire of the other (longing for a recognition from the other) and bodily desire (which corresponds to libido in psychoanalysis). The first conception had been (...) proposed by Hegel and developed by A. Kojève and René Girard, the second - by Nietzsche and later by J. Deleuse and F. Guattari. Some scholars place their hopes in bodily desire (and corporeality in general) for putting resistance to the repressive biopower. The affirmative conception of desire critiques therefore Michel Foucault's theory of biopower and biopolitics. In the article, it is suggested that contemporary dance is a mechanism of producing desire, in the positive, affirmative meaning of the term. Dance can be considered literally a "machine of desire”: it makes the body to move awakening its energies, enhancing vitality and triggering emotions. The production of desire happens in the viewer as well as in the dancer. The spectator perceives movement through kinaesthetic empathy, a direct bodily imitation of the dancer's movement. The article presents the cases of Isadora Duncan, the founder of "free”, or "early modern dance”, and of Yvonne Rainer, a postmodern dancer and the author of the "No Manifesto”. Both performers reformulated dance and movement as a value in itself and a machine for both representing and creating desire. (shrink)

In this article, I explore how the twin forces of imperial and entomological power allowed Britain to shape locust research and control across Africa, the Middle East and South Asia from the 1920s to the early 1950s. Imperial power came from the size of the formal and informal empire, and alliances with other colonial powers to tackle a common threat to agriculture and trade. Entomological authority came primarily from the work of Boris Uvarov and his small team of (...) museum and fieldworkers based at the Imperial Bureau of Entomology (IBE), later the Imperial Institute of Entomology (IIE). I begin by discussing how Uvarov's phase theory of the origin of swarming changed the prospects for the control of locust plagues. The imperial gaze and networks of the IBE and IIE were suited to a problem that was transnational and transcontinental. In the 1930s, Britain was drawn into plans for international cooperation on locust organizations that met the needs of science, to give better sharing of knowledge, and the needs for science, to secure the resources for research and control. However, such organizations were only created during the Second World War, when new plagues threatened military operations, as I show in relation to the measures taken to control the red locust and desert locust. In the final section, I follow the fate of the wartime cooperation in initiatives to establish permanent control organizations. It is a story of the decline of British political power in locust affairs as the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization and regional agencies took over. My account of British locust research and control reveals a neglected aspect of histories of entomology and imperial/colonial science, especially their international relations and the continuing importance of metropolitan research centres. (shrink)

An Imperial State at War: Britain from 1689 to 1815. Edited by Lawrence Stone (London: Routledge, 1994), 374 pp., £40.00 cloth.

While there has been a surge in scholarship on Imperial Way Buddhism (kōdō Bukkyō) in the past several decades, little attention has been paid, particularly in Western scholarship, to the life and work of Ichikawa Hakugen (1902–1986), the most prominent and sophisticated postwar critic of the role of Buddhism, and particularly Zen, in modern Japanese militarism. By way of a thorough and critical investigation of Ichikawa’s critique, Imperial-Way Zen: Ichikawa Hakugen’s Critique and Lingering Questions for Buddhist Ethics by (...) Christopher Ives seeks to provide answers to a number of important questions regarding Zen ethics in the context of modern Japan. Particularly fruitful is Ives’ discussion, in chapter 7, of the .. (shrink)

This dissertation examines philosophical and literary configurations of "violence" in discourses of human freedom and imperial subjugation in Germany and Japan. The concept of "violence" marks the ethical limit of normative claims. Without a definition in itself, "violence" serves the critical function of disclosing norms orienting social and political life. Each of the authors studied in this dissertation turned toward a conception of human freedom founded in the confrontation of social norms disclosed by rhetorical violence. Chapter one examines the (...) rhetoric of Immanuel Kant's Zum ewigen Frieden in the historical context of its writing. Kant engages in a performative argument for publicity in his critique of Prussian imperialism and the censorship of revolutionary views. Through rhetorical gestures such as the title of his essay as an invocation of death and the clausula salvatoria as a hedge against his critics, Kant encodes the political upheavals of the historical exterior in the rhetorical movement of his essay. He argues for peace by performing violence in language. Whereas Kant's essay has been conventionally read apart from its historical context, Heinrich von Kleist's Die Herrmannsschlacht has been interpreted strictly in terms of the historical moment of its writing. Chapter two argues instead for a rhetorical reading of Kleist's play in which language emerges as both the central theme of the text and an agent of anti-imperial violence. Kleist concretizes metaphors of the body such that they perform the politics of absolute opposition. Freedom for Kleist means opposition to the other. Chapter three turns to an alternative conception of human freedom grounded in opposition. In his Phanomenologie des Geistes, Hegel produces a performative narrative of the development of subjectivity in relations of violence. As an "unhappy consciousness," the subject no longer opposes an external other but itself as an internal "enemy." The freedom that it attains is constituted in self-subjection. Chapter four examines the appropriation of Kant and Hegel by the Japanese wartime philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tanabe Hajime. Both defend the project of Japanese imperialism by arguing for a form of freedom in which the subject negates its attachment to the imperial state. This negation inverts into a performance of subjectivity as the movement of self-subjection. (shrink)

In this article, I will elucidate the Indian government’s two primary discourses concerning yoga since 2014 as right-wing Hindu Nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu Nationalist political party, the Bharatiya Janata Party, have interacted with both international and domestic audiences. These discourses can be broadly grouped into two categories, or what I refer to as Modi and the BJP’s “double discourse”: Yoga as a global soft power solution to counter the Global North’s climate change privilege on the international (...) stage and Yoga as biopower for the advancement of India’s depressed economy on the domestic front. Relying on yoga’s polyvalent character, Modi and the BJP are able to frame yoga in these two particular ways—which together signal their commitment to neoliberal economic ideology—by drawing from historical and contemporaneous precedents which I also outline in the article. I conclude with a brief visit to the preparations for the BJP’s 2019 International Day of Yoga, where this double discourse becomes most evident in the two divergent themes announced for the event. (shrink)

This article critically engages with the influential theory of ‘‘molecularized biopower’’ and ‘‘politics of life’’ developed by Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose. Molecularization is assumed to signal the end of population-centred biopolitics and the disciplining of subjects as described by Foucault, and the rise of new forms of biosociality and biological citizenship. Drawing on empirical work in Science and Technology Studies, we argue that this account is limited by a focus on novelty and assumptions about the transformative power of (...) the genetic life sciences. We suggest that biopower consists of a more complex cluster of relationships between the molecular and the population. The biological existence of different human beings is politicized through different complementary and competing discourses around medical therapies, choices at the beginning and end of life, public health, environment, migration and border controls, implying a multiple rather than a singular politics of life. (shrink)

Imperial Plato presents new translations of three introductions to Plato's thought from the second half of the second century CE: the Introduction to Plato by Albinus of Smyrna, Dissertation 11 of Maximus of Tyre, and On Plato and his Teaching by Apuleius of Madaurus. These three presentations of Plato's ideas--one a Greek dialectic introduction with a suggested reading order for Plato's dialogues, another a Greek speech in the sophistic style of the time, and one a lengthy doxological study in (...) Latin--are examples by three distinct authors using divergent methods of the assorted ways in which Plato and Platonism were understood and discussed during the revival of Hellenism and Greek Philosophy, and the period of the Roman Empire often referred to as the Second Sophistic. (shrink)

This article discusses the poem written by Joseph Brodsky shortly after the proclamation of Ukrainian independence in the early 1990s. It compares this poem with other pieces by the same author that deal with the paradigm of “independence vs. imperial unity.” These poems present a difference, which is striking at first glance: Brodsky welcomes Lithuanian independence, while simultaneously denying the same rights to Ukrainians and Aztecs. As for Afghanis … his disdain is even more palpable. The proposed explanation is (...) the concept of “Cultural Empire,” which the poet considers to be the ultimate good. This article briefly mentions the general problem of de-imperializing classical Russian literature in the context of post-colonial studies. (shrink)

The Imperial Web and the War on Terrorism: U.S. Military Bases and Empire. The attacks of September 11,2001 and the subsequent global War onTerrorism directed by the United States have made it clear that the world is now dominated by an American Empire, which extends far beyond the British Empire of old. The extent of U.S. imperial ambitions is perhaps best understoood in terms of the history of its military bases, which are now located in around 60 countries. (...) These bases are not to be understood as a purely military phenomenon but as part of a larger system of economic, political and military power rooted in the hegemonic position of U.S. capitalism in the world economy as a whole. [Article adapted from the March 2002 issue of Monthly Review, vol. 53, no. 10]. (shrink)

The Terri Schiavo case, the latest high-profile “right-to-die” case in the United States, whose denouement saturated the US mediasphere at the end of March 2005, is a particularly complex problem in the Deleuzean sense. Its solution, which took more than 15 years, actualized lines from legal, medical, biological, political … multiplicities. The ellipses indicate the impossibility of completely delimiting the forces at work in any case (the virtual as endless differentiation) just as it indicates the necessity of cutting through them (...) in making any one solution work (actualization as differenciation). Thus that actualization, a creative resolution of the problem, brought some aspects of the virtual into distinctness, while others faded into momentary obscurity.1 The elements functioning most intensely in the Schiavo case cut across the fields of right, medical discipline and biopower, hence at the intersection of sexuality and racism, as Foucault explains.2 The turn to a liberal notion of the right to privacy as the right to die is never simple, for we remain trapped at the intersection of discipline and biopower if we ground that right in sovereign rights of personal autonomy and bodily integrity. The challenge to a Deleuzean jurisprudence is to creatively transform that right to show its basis in de-personalization. In other words, only in an extraordinary, ethical, situation, living along the fault line.. (shrink)

Political philosophy reduced man to a speaking being and forgot his old trade with nature. We discover back this trade, as a political object, an issue for militancy, and we don’t believe any longer in mankind power.