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This volume sheds light on the social and cultural transformations that accompanied the Covid-19 crisis by looking at health and biopolitics from a philosophical and literary perspective. The biopolitical measures taken globally in response to the crisis have led to previously unheard-of restrictions in liberal societies, resulting in deep and potentially lasting transformations both in social structures and interpersonal relationships. Many researchers have addressed the Covid-19 crisis as a political or epidemiological challenge, but few have paid sufficient attention to the culturally specific reactions and cultural representations of the human beings at the centre of events. Literary analyses capture this human component and give insights into different reactions to, and protests against, the health-political measures addressing the crisis. This book puts the notion of biopolitics, first extensively theorised in the 1970s, to work in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, and uses literary case studies as starting points for discussions of contemporary politics, media, and legal and surveillance regimes. It brings together eleven scholars from six countries with the shared aim of combining literary and philosophical expertise to create a better understanding of the changes in society and political attitudes induced by the ongoing pandemic.

Every aspect of the pandemic was said to be ‘total,'absolute, and undiscriminating. Its very name implied as much. The virus was everywhere, and a threat to us all. In Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus: The Elision of an Alternative, Michael Lewis identifies three moments within the pandemic that were conceived in such a monolithic way: (1) ‘The Science,'which had to be unanimous if it was to assume a sovereign role, and to have us ‘follow'it; (2) ‘non-pharmaceutical interventions,'which were regarded as the only possible response, without which death and disease would ‘run riot'; and (3) the one sole remedy that could bring about the promised end of the restrictions, to the exclusion of every other conception of medicine, treatment, and care. In each case of seeming universality, dissent immediately identifies you as a friend of the virus. And yet if all of these cases have been revealing their counterproductivity ever since, what are we to make of the elision of alternatives? Is it part of a more general tendency to thrust the questioning of hegemonic notions to the margins of respectable discourse, inhabited solely by the mad, bad, and dangerous to know?

Con la introducción del término'dispositivo', Foucault buscó modificar las categorías con las que la tradición ilustrada había analizado el poder político. De este modo, postuló una nueva teoría del poder y provocó un desplazamiento de su objetivo, desde la capacidad de dar muerte hacia la gestión y el control sobre la vida. Las derivas posteriores del pensamiento biopolítico, con los italianos Giorgio Agamben y Roberto Esposito como sus principales representantes, tendieron a destacar el carácter constrictivo de los dispositivos, dejando de lado las posibilidades intrínsecas de resistencia que ya el mismo Foucault había planteado en su obra tardía. Luciana Cadahia retoma este aspecto de la teoría foucaultiana no solo para mostrar el carácter abierto y reversible de los dispositivos, sino también para adentrarse en una dimensión muy poco explorada por los herederos de Foucault, a saber: el papel de la sensibilidad en la configuración de los dispositivos. Así, desplaza los debates contemporáneos en torno a este concepto e indaga el vínculo entre Foucault y los filósofos de la Modernidad, Hegel y Schiller en especial, con el objeto de resituar sus trabajos en el terreno de la filosofía, encontrar conexiones entre los problemas que plantean y repensar la relación de la filosofía consigo misma. Mediaciones de lo sensible se propone recuperar el compromiso de la filosofía con el presente,'puesto que esta no debería limitarse a denunciar cuáles son las categorías políticas de pensamiento que dominan nuestras formas de existencia y los sistemas filosóficos de la Modernidad que las impulsaron, sino ver en qué medida las formas actuales de existencia posibilitan una reapropiación y desvíos de la tradición filosófica de la Modernidad'.

The volume studies, from different perspectives, the relationship between ancient thought and biopolitics, that is, theories, discourses, and practices in which the biological life of human populations becomes the focal point of political government. It thus continues and deepens the critical examination, in recent literature, of Michel Foucault's claim concerning the essentially modern character of biopolitics. The nine contributions comprised in the volume explore and utilize the notions of biopolitics and biopower as conceptual tools for articulating the differences and continuities between antiquity and modernity and for narrating Western intellectual and political history in general. Without committing itself to any particular thesis or approach, the volume evaluates both the relevance of ancient thought for the concept and theory of biopolitics and the relevance of biopolitical theory and ideas for the study of ancient thought. The volume is divided into three main parts: part I studies instances of biopolitics in ancient thought; part II focuses on aspects of ancient thought that elude or transcend biopolitics; and part III discusses several modern interpretations of ancient thought in the context of biopolitical theory.

A missed phone call. A misheard word. An indiscernible noise. All these can make the difference between life and death. Failures to listen are frequently at the root of the marginalization and exclusion of certain forms of life. Audibility decides livability. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates for the first time the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in recent European philosophy, as well as the political stakes of this entanglement.Nowhere is aurality more pivotal than in the dialogue between biopolitical theory and deconstruction about the power over and of life. Closer inspection of these debates reveals that the main points of contention coalesce around figures of sound and listening: inarticulate voices, meaningless sounds, resonant echoes, syncopated rhythms, animal cries, bells, and telephone rings.Shattering Biopolitics stages a series of “over-hearings” between Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben who often mishear or completely miss hearing in trying to hear too much. Notions of power and life are further diffracted as Hélène Cixous, Catherine Malabou, and Jean-Luc Nancy join in this high-stakes game of telephone. This self-destructive character of aurality is akin to the chanciness and risk of death that makes life all the more alive for its incalculability.Punctuating the book are a series of excurses on sound-art projects that interrogate aurality's subordination and resistance to biopower from racialized chokeholds and anti-migrant forensic voice analysis to politicized speech acts and activist practices of listening.Shattering Biopolitics advances the burgeoning field of sound studies with a new, theoretically sophisticated analysis of the political imbrications of its object of inquiry. Above all, it is sound's capacity to shatter sovereignty, as if it were a glass made to vibrate at its natural frequency, that allows it to amplify and disseminate a power of life that refuses to be mastered.

This collection addresses Esposito's long-standing engagement with early modern philosophy, philosophy of biology, biopolitics, and the impolitical and the impersonal, together with his significant dialogues with contemporary philosophers like Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Simone Weil, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot.

The term biopolitics can be fully understood only within the context of modern forms of governing society. From this perspective, the development of modern medical knowledge, the re-organization of the hospital as a health institution, the growing attention to issues related to population, and the rise of biological knowledge can be connected with the infl uence of economic rationality on the most important political strategies. In this book, the crucial role that the family has played throughout the history of biopolitics is also explored explaining how it is fi rstly a place of government of life as well as a means to extend various forms of biopower to the whole society. By analysing the works of key fi gures in the debate on biopolitics – such as Agamben, Negri, Esposito, Rose, Cooper, among others – this volume offers a systematic examination of this notion also in relation to the current ecological crisis and the pandemic of Covid-19, addressing fundamental problems of political thought and referring to great thinkers such as Foucault and Arendt, Plato and Aristotle. Mimesis International

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.

The book discusses how the two interrelated questions of biopolitics and ethics influence discursive and non-discursive practices in the fields of international relations and strategic studies. The book debates the following research question of how discussions on global regimes that rule human empowerment and human fragility in international and strategic arenas require the establishment of a complex relation between the contested concepts of biopolitics and ethics. The book focuses on six main areas which are (1) the politics of (in)security, (2) complex emergencies and contemporary terrorism, (3) health, risk and population management, (4) environment and climate change, (5) the politics of memory and trauma and (6) migration and refugee flows. The usefulness of the book derives from critically questioning how, international public policies in sensitive areas like terrorism, global health, global migration flows or humanitarian assistance are being built through global policy regimes and global discursive regimes.

Rosalyn Diprose and Ewa Ziarek show us that biopolitics - along with sexism, racism and political theology - seeks to control to women's reproductive agency. They reconfigure Arendt's philosophy of natality (birth rate) in terms of biopolitical theory and feminism to defend women's reproductive choices and democratic pluralism.

After Sept. 11, 2001, George W. Bush declared, “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” Bush's assertion was not simply jingoist bravado—it encapsulates the civilizationalist moralism that has motivated and defined the United States since its beginning, linking the War on Terror to the nation's settlement and founding.In Queer Terror, C. Heike Schotten offers a critique of U.S. settler-colonial empire that draws on political, queer, and critical indigenous theory to situate Bush's either/or moralism and reframe the concept of terrorism. The categories of the War on Terror exemplify the moralizing politics that insulate U.S. empire from critique, render its victims deserving of its abuses, and delegitimize resistance to it as unthinkable and perverse. Schotten provides an anatomy of this moralism, arguing for a new interpretation of biopolitics that is focused on sovereignty and desire rather than racism and biology. This rethinking of biopolitics puts critical political theory of empire in dialogue with the insights of both native studies and queer theory. Building on queer theory's refusal of sanctity, propriety, and moralisms of all sorts, Schotten ultimately contends that the answer to Bush's ultimatum is clear: dissidents must reject the false choice he presents and stand decisively against “us,” rejecting its moralism and the sanctity of its “life,” in order to further a truly emancipatory, decolonizing queer politics.

One of Europe's leading philosophers, Roberto Esposito has produced a considerable body of work that continues to have a significant impact on political science, sociology, literature, and philosophy. This volume offers both a comprehensive introduction to and critical explanation of Esposito's political thought and key concepts from his oeuvre. The contributors address aspects of his growing corpus such as the impolitical, community, immunity, the impersonal, affirmative biopolitics, justice, life, the third person, and the body. In addition, they highlight Esposito's reading and interpretation of classical political thinkers, including Hobbes, Machiavelli, Vico, Arendt, and Kant. The book explores applications of Esposito's philosophy to issues in international relations, post-colonialism, literature, science, technology, and philosophical and artistic practice, bringing Esposito into dialogue with important social-political concerns.

The concept of biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used in recent years in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In Biopolitics, Mills provides a wide-ranging and insightful introduction to the field of biopolitical studies. The first part of the book provides a much-needed philosophical introduction to key theoretical approaches to the concept in contemporary usage. This includes discussions of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri. In the second part of the book, Mills discusses various topics across the categories of politics, life and subjectivity. These include questions of sovereignty and governmentality, violence, rights, technology, reproduction, race, and sexual difference. This book will be an indispensable guide for those wishing to gain an understanding of the central theories and issues in biopolitical studies. For those already working with the concept of biopolitics, it provides challenging and provocative insights and argues for a ground-breaking reorientation of the field.

The problematic of biopolitics has become increasingly important in the social sciences. Inaugurated by Michel Foucault's genealogical research on the governance of sexuality, crime and mental illness in modern Europe, the research on biopolitics has developed into a broader interdisciplinary orientation, addressing the rationalities of power over living beings in diverse spatial and temporal contexts.The development of the research on biopolitics in recent years has been characterized by two tendencies: the increasingly sophisticated theoretical engagement with the idea of power over and the government of life that both elaborated and challenged the Foucauldian canon (e.g. the work of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito and Paolo Virno) and the detailed and empirically rich investigation of the concrete aspects of the government of life in contemporary societies. Unfortunately, the two tendencies have often developed in isolation from each other, resulting in the presence of at least two debates on biopolitics: the historico-philosophical and the empirical one. This Handbook brings these two debates together, combining theoretical sophistication and empirical rigour.The volume is divided into five sections. While the first two deal with the history of the concept and contemporary theoretical debates on it, the remaining three comprise the prime sites of contemporary interdisciplinary research on biopolitics: economy, security and technology. Featuring previously unpublished articles by the leading scholars in the field, this wide-ranging and accessible companion will both serve as an introduction to the diverse research on biopolitics for undergraduate students and appeal to more advanced audiences interested in the current state of the art in biopolitics studies.

Quale rapporto corre fra il pensiero politico degli antichi e il destino biopolitico dell'Occidente? La biopolitica discende dal legame, istituito dagli antichi, fra la vita e la polis, come sostiene Agamben? Oppure l'assunzione e la cura del bios in quanto opera del politico sono radicate nel rifiuto della metafisica del sommo bene sul quale si fonda la modernità? O, infine, la politica dei moderni è una contraffazione della politica, e tale contraffazione ha piuttosto a che fare – come crede Quinzio – con l'escatologia cristiana e il mancato ritorno del Messia? A partire dall'indagine sulla funzione che i concetti di vita, paura della fine e potere ricoprono nella teoria politica di Hobbes, il volume cerca di rilevare le tracce delle antiche pratiche di cura, conoscenza e governo di sé e degli altri all'interno dell'attuale politieía, culminando nell'idea secondo cui il bene che la biopolitica insegue, individuabile nell'elusione della morte, rappresenta la contraffazione dell'oramai superato sommo bene degli antichi metafisici.

This book explores the origins of western biopolitics in ancient Greek political thought. Ojakangas's argues that the conception of politics as the regulation of the quantity and quality of population in the name of the security and happiness of the state and its inhabitants is as old as the western political thought itself: the politico-philosophical categories of classical thought, particularly those of Plato and Aristotle, were already biopolitical categories. In their books on politics, Plato and Aristotle do not only deal with all the central topics of biopolitics from the political point of view, but for them these topics are the very keystone of politics and the art of government. Yet although the Western understanding of politics was already biopolitical in classical Greece, the book does not argue that the history of biopolitics would constitute a continuum from antiquity to the twentieth century. Instead Ojakangas argues that the birth of Christianity entailed a crisis of the classical biopolitical rationality, as the majority of classical biopolitical themes concerning the government of men and populations faded away or were outright rejected. It was not until the renaissance of the classical culture and literature – including the translation of Plato's and Aristotles political works into Latin – that biopolitics became topical again in the West.The book will be of great interest to scholars and students in the field of social and political studies, social and political theory, moral and political philosophy, IR theory, intellectual history, classical studies.

Given the propensity of contemporary protection measures such as counterterrorism efforts and fierce protection strategies against viral threats, as well as physical and legal barriers against migration, a number of political philosophers, including Peter Sloterdijk and Roberto Esposito, have claimed that contemporary (political) culture can be characterised by a so-called'immunisation paradigm'. This book critically examines the intricate entanglement between biological immunological notions and their political philosophical appropriation, whilst studying the'immunisation response'to recent viral threats, including the Swine Flu pandemic of 2009 and the lab-bred Avian flu threat of 2012, to analyse immunisation as a biopolitical strategy. Offering insights into to the polarising tendencies in contemporary political culture resulting from the appropriation of immunological concepts in political thought, the author also shows how political philosophers tend to build on purely defensive understandings of immunity. As such, Immunological Discourse in Political Philosophy constitutes a theoretically sophisticated critique of the'semantic trap'caused by the use of immunological concepts in political philosophy. Arguing for a more versatile and less defensive immunological repertoire, which allows for the development of alternative and less polarised forms of political debate, this book will appeal to scholars of political theory, sociology, philosophy and science and technology studies.

This interdisciplinary collection of essays demonstrates how the ethical and political problems we are confronted with today have come to focus largely on life. The contributors to this volume define and assess the specific meaning of life itself. It is only by doing so that we can understand why life has become an all-encompassing problem, why all questions, especially ethical and political, have become vital questions. We have reached a moment in history where every distinction and opposition is no longer in relation to life, but within it, and where life is at once a theoretical and practical problem.This book throws light on this nexus of problems at the heart of contemporary debates in bioethics and biopolitics. It helps us understand why and how life is understood, valued, cared for and framed today. Taking a genuinely transdisciplinary approach, these essays demonstrate how life is a multifaceted problem and how diverse the origins, foundations and also consequences of bioethics and biopolitics therefore are.

What are phenomena of contemporary biopolitics in the twenty-first century? Foucault's theory of biopolitics as neoliberalism is opposed to post-political theories developed by Agamben, Hardt and Negri and as such – more instructive. Because microstrategy of power is not Foucault's final word on politics, political genealogy opens the space for creative and local critique of biopolitics. And if military interventions, terrorism and wars against terrorism are exemplary phenomena of biopolitics, bellum justum is a contradictio in adjecto. In response to such biopolitics, the relation between sovereignty and democracy is re-examined and we are entering a time of small revolutions.

Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Political provides a critical legal introduction to this increasingly influential Italian theorist's work, by focusing on Esposito's reconceptualisation of the relationship between law, community and the political. The analysis concentrates primarily on Esposito's Catégories de l'Impolitique, Communitas, Immunitas and Bíos, which, it is argued, are animated by an abiding concern with the position of critique in relation to the tradition of modern and contemporary legal and political philosophy. Esposito's fundamental rethinking of these notions breaks with the existing framework of political and legal philosophy, through the critique of its underlying presuppositions. And, in the process, Esposito rethinks the very form of critique. As the first monograph-length study of Esposito in English, Roberto Esposito: Law, Community and the Political will be of considerable interest to those working in the areas of contemporary legal and political thought and philosophy.

Although both share a focus on human life as it is inscribed by power, Foucauldian biopolitics and Lacanian psychoanalysis have remained isolated from and even opposed to one another. In Being, Time, Bios, A. Kiarina Kordela aims to overcome this divide, formulating a historical ontology that draws from Spinoza, Marx, Heidegger, and Sartre to theorize the changed character of'being'and'time'under secular capitalism. With insights from film theory, postcolonial studies, and race theory, Kordela's wide-ranging analysis suggests a radically new understanding of contemporary capitalism—one in which uncertainty, sacrifice, immortality, and the gaze are central.

Comment Foucault pense-t-il la naissance de la biopolitique? La réponse à cette question est cherchée à partir du rapport avec Georges Canguilhem, dont les travaux sur le concept de vie ont eu une influence indiscutable sur Foucault. A travers la reconstruction de la ligne bio-épistémologique, le nœud biopolitique est défait par l'articulation de la relation entre technique et vie.

Against Ecological Sovereignty is a passionate defense of radical ecology that speaks directly to current debates concerning the nature, and dangers, of sovereign power. Engaging the work of Bataille, Arendt, Levinas, Nancy, and Agamben, among others, Mick Smith reconnects the political critique of sovereign power with ecological considerations, arguing that ethical and political responsibilities for the consequences of our actions do not end with those defined as human.Against Ecological Sovereignty is the first book to turn Agamben's analysis of sovereignty and biopolitics toward an investigation of ecological concerns. In doing so it exposes limits to that thought, maintaining that the increasingly widespread biopolitical management of human populations has an unrecognized ecological analogue—reducing nature to a “resource” for human projects. Smith contends that a radical ecological politics must resist both the depoliticizing exercise of sovereign power and the pervasive spread of biopolitics in order to reveal new possibilities for creating healthy human and nonhuman communities.Presenting a stinging critique of human claims to sovereignty over the natural world, Smith proposes an alternative way to conceive of posthumanist ecological communities—one that recognizes the utter singularity of the beings in them.

Nous entrons dans le'biosiècle', siècle qui consacre le vivant dans ses dimensions multiples. De l'économie à l'histoire, en passant par la politique et la philosophie, la bioquestion se retrouve au centre des débats. Entre la vocation pastorale de l'Etat moderne et l'incertitude historico-écologique de notre époque, l'auteur appelle à un retour au sens des choses et à l'émergence d'un rapport nouveau non pas avec le seul univers mais avec la vie et le vivant.

Several of the key concepts of biopolitics have come under scrutiny since the outbreak of Covid-19 pandemic. This volume brings into discussion how biopolitics can be conceptualized critically within a milieu of mass healing, such as in India. Contributors to this volume discuss crucial themes like geropolitics and pandemic reflections on the question of old age, borders and logistics in a world emerging from the pandemic, immunization of humans and humanization of immunity, thus defining the Indian contexts of the biopolitical problematic. Extending its analysis into a retrospective vision of thought traditions and socio-political underpinnings that shaped modernity and post-coloniality in India, it also explores the medico-therapeutical discourse embedded in philosophy of medicine and philosophical modernity tracing its interstitial positioning as therapeutic-assemblages in a milieu of mass healing.This book will be useful for scholars and researchers of biopolitics, philosophy, political philosophy, sociology, science and technology studies, medical sociology, health and well-being, and cultural studies.

Addressing their shared passion for literature, art, and music, this book documents how Samuel Beckett and David Bowie produce extraordinarily empathetic creative outputs that reflect the experience and the effect of alienation. Through an exploration of their artistic practices, the study also illustrates how both artists articulate shared forms of human experience otherwise silenced by normative modes of representation. To liberate these experiences, Bowie and Beckett create alternative theatrical, musical, and philosophical spaces, which help frame the power relations of the psychological, verbal, and material places we inhabit. The result is that their work demonstrates how individuals are disciplined by the implicitly repressive social order of late capitalism, while, simultaneously, offering an informed political alternative. In making the injunctions of the social order apparent, Beckett and Bowie also transgress its terms, opening up new spaces beyond the conventional identities of family, nation, and gender, until both artists finally coalesce in the quantum space of the posthuman.

Supplying an insightful introduction to current trends in general education reform, this second edition of General Education Essentials: A Guide for College Faculty gives an important, timely overview of general education curricular design.General education curricula provide students with the intellectual flexibility they need to adapt thoughtfully and productively to the rapid changes of the workplace and the world at large. This book offers methods for engaging in curricular reform efforts that support university culture and teachers and examines the implications of general education reform in the classroom, with a keen eye toward syllabi, course content, and student work. By expertly blending theory with curricular ideas for implementation, this text offers an impactful illustration of the shift from distributive to integrative to high impact models of general education.Featuring plentiful examples from a variety of fields and disciplines, this book is essential reading for any higher education faculty member tasked with equipping students with the skills they need to become perceptive scholars and productive citizens.A Co-Publication with AAC&U

Outlining an original analysis of the political dimension of restorative justice, this book seeks both to enhance the critical comprehension of this phenomenon and to forge new tools for acting politically through restorative justice, inviting restorative justice scholars, practitioners and advocates to become a radical political movement.Restorative justice is widely studied, nationally and internationally legislated, and increasingly practised; however, the growth of relevant policy, practice and research has been only marginally accompanied by the development of updated, theoretically informed and critical reflections on the relationships between politics and restorative justice. This is a significant problem since neglecting the political dimension may limit the capacity of the restorative justice movement to critically appreciate its possible role in confronting oppressive social and political arrangements. This book addresses this gap by providing reflections on restorative justice in relation to six complex political concepts – difference, sovereignty, community, identity, equality and subalternity. Engaging with the thoughts of Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Jean-Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, each chapter works as a prism to unravel and reconstruct creatively restorative justice unearthing its political conditions and effects.Providing an innovative contribution to our thinking about the political nature and significance of restorative justice from the specific perspective of political theory, Restorative Justice and Contemporary Political Theory will appeal to both students and scholars of restorative justice specifically and of criminal justice and criminology more broadly.

Birth controlled analyses the world of selective reproduction – the politics of who gets to legitimately reproduce the future – through a cross-cultural analysis of three modes of ‘controlling'birth: contraception, reproductive violence and repro-genetic technologies. It argues that as fertility rates decline worldwide, the fervour to control fertility, and fertile bodies, does not dissipate; what evolves is the preferred mode of control. Although new technologies like those that assist conception or allow genetic selection may appear to be an antithesis of other violent versions of population control, this book demonstrates that both are part of the same continuum. All population control policies target and vilify women (Black women in particular), and coerce them into subjecting their bodies to state and medical surveillance; Birth controlled argues that assisted reproductive technologies and repro-genetic technologies employ a similar and stratified burden of blame and responsibility based on gender, race, class and caste. To empirically and historically ground the analysis, the book includes contributions from two postcolonial nations, South Africa and India, examining interactions between the history of colonialism and the economics of neoliberal markets and their influence on the technologies and politics of selective reproduction.The book provides a critical, interdisciplinary and cutting-edge dialogue around the interconnected issues that shape reproductive politics in an ostensibly ‘post-population control'era. The contributions draw on a breadth of disciplines ranging from gender studies, sociology, medical anthropology, politics and science and technology studies to theology, public health and epidemiology, facilitating an interdisciplinary dialogue around the interconnected modes of controlling birth and practices of neo-eugenics.

The liberating promise of big data and social media to create more responsive democracies and workplaces is overshadowed by a nightmare of election meddling, privacy invasion, fake news and an exploitative gig economy. Yet, while regressive forces spread disinformation and hate,'guerrilla democrats'continue to foster hope and connection through digital technologies. This book offers an in-depth analysis of platform-based radical movements, from the online coalitions of voters and activists to the Deliveroo and Uber strikes. Combining cutting edge theories with empirical research, it makes an invaluable contribution to the emerging literature on the relationship between technology and society.

In the context of contemporary capitalist societies, this book provides philosophical reflections on new forms of domination, vulnerability and alienation in the social relations associated with work. Following Hannah Arendt, who viewed work as a world-building activity, the volume addresses issues pertaining to the crisis of work and loneliness as a political problem of exclusion and meaninglessness.

The Modernist Bestiary centres on Le Bestiaire ou Cortège d'Orphée (1911), a multimedia collaborative work by French-Polish poet Guillaume Apollinaire and French artist Raoul Dufy, and its homonym, The Bestiary or Procession of Orpheus (1979), by British artist Graham Sutherland. Rather than reconstructing the lineage of these two compositions, the book uncovers the aesthetic and intellectual processes involved that operate in different times, places and media. The Apollinaire and Dufy Bestiary is an open-ended collaboration, a feature that Sutherland develops in his re-visiting, and this book shows how these neglected works are caught up in many-faceted networks of traditions and genres. These include Orphic poetry from the past, contemporary musical settings, and bestiary writing from its origins to the present. The nature of productive dialogue between thought and art, and the refracted light they throw on each other are explored in each of the pieces in the book, and the aesthetic experience emerges as generative rather than reductive or complacent.The contributors'encounters with these works take the form of poetry and essays, all moving freely between different disciplines and practices, humanistic and posthumanist critical dimensions, as well as different animals and art forms. They draw on disciplines ranging from music, art history, translation, Classical poetry and French poetry, and are nurtured by approaches including phenomenology, cultural studies, sound studies, and critical animal studies. Collectively the book shows that the aesthetic encounter, by nature affective, is by nature also interdisciplinary and motivating, and that it spurs the critical in addressing the complex issues of'humananimality'.Praise for The Modernist Bestiary'Enacting in multiple compelling ways the mobility and relationality at the heart of its concerns, this collection makes a major contribution to the various fields into which it intervenes, including modernist studies, translation studies, critical animal studies, and research into intermedial transmission, especially between text and image and text and music.'- Martin Crowley, University of Cambridge

Noelle Molé Liston's The Truth Society seeks to understand how a period of Italian political spectacle, which regularly blurred fact and fiction, has shaped how people understand truth, mass-mediated information, scientific knowledge, and forms of governance. Liston scrutinizes Italy's late twentieth-century political culture, particularly the impact of the former prime minister and media mogul Silvio Berlusconi. By doing so, she examines how this truth-bending political era made science, logic, and rationality into ideas that needed saving.With the prevalence of fake news and our seeming lack of shared reality in the'post-truth'world, many people struggle to figure out where this new normal came from. Liston argues that seemingly disparate events and practices that have unfolded in Italy are historical reactions to mediatized political forms and particular, cultivated ways of knowing. Politics, then, is always sutured to how knowledge is structured, circulated, and processed. The Truth Society offers Italy as a case study for understanding the remaking of politics in an era of disinformation.

In On Biopolitics, Marco Piasentier discusses one of the most persistent questions in biopolitical theory – the divide between nature and language – and attempts to redraw the conceptual map which has traditionally defined the permissible paths to address this question.Taking his cue from Foucault's exhortation to think philologically and biologically, Piasentier traverses the main theoretical and methodological frameworks which have informed the biopolitical debate on nature and language, biology and politics. Biopolitical theory becomes the center of gravity for an investigation encompassing diverse philosophical models, from the Heideggerian linguistic turn to post-Darwinian naturalism. The divide between traditions is not proof of an impossible encounter, but constitutes the site for a new conceptual topography. Working in this interdisciplinary space, Piasentier puts into question the command of language and the ends of nature: two vestiges of a ‘human, all too human'worldview that preclude the possibility of thinking philologically and biologically about biopolitics.On Biopolitics: An Inquiry into Nature and Language is essential reading for humanities and social sciences scholars with an interest in moving beyond debates about nature and language.

War-torn deserts, jihadist killings, trucks weighted down with contraband and migrants—from the Afghan-Pakistan borderlands to the Sahara, images of danger depict a new world disorder on the global margins. With vivid detail, Ruben Andersson traverses this terrain to provide a startling new understanding of what is happening in remote “danger zones.” Instead of buying into apocalyptic visions, Andersson takes aim at how Western states and international organizations conduct military, aid, and border interventions in a dangerously myopic fashion, further disconnecting the world's rich and poor. Using drones, proxy forces, border reinforcement, and outsourced aid, risk-obsessed powers are helping to remap the world into zones of insecurity and danger. The result is a vision of chaos crashing into fortified borders, with national and global politics riven by fear. Andersson contends that we must reconnect and snap out of this dangerous spiral, which affects us whether we live in Texas or Timbuktu. Only by developing a new cartography of hope can we move beyond the political geography of fear that haunts us.

Social media, characterized by user-generated content, interactivity, participation and community formation, have gained much research attention in recent years. At the same time, intimacy, affectivity and emotions are increasingly growing as fields of study. While these two areas are often interwoven, the actual interconnections are rarely studied in detail. This anthology explores how social media construct new types of intimacies, and how practices of intimacy shape the development and use of new media, offering empirical knowledge, theoretical insights and an international perspective on the flourishing field of digital intimacies.Chapters present a range of research tools used, such as interviews, online ethnography, visual analysis, text analysis and video analysis. There is also rich variation in sources for the empirical material studied, including Tumblr, YouTube, dating sites, hook-up sites, Facebook, Snapchat, Couchsurfing, selfies, blogs and photographs, as well as smartphones, tablets and computers. By focusing on the intersection between social media and intimacies, and their continuous co-constitution, this anthology offers new insights into the vast landscape of contemporary media reality. It will be a valuable resource for teachers, students and scholars with an interest in new media, communication, intimacy and affectivity.

Today, it often seems as though Assisted Reproductive Technologies (ARTs) have reached a stage of normalization, at least in some countries and among certain social groups. Apparently some practices – for example in vitro fertilization (IVF) – have become standard worldwide. The contributors to Assisted Reproduction Across Borders argue against normalization as an uncontested overall trend.This volume reflects on the state of the art of ARTs. From feminist perspectives, the contributors focus on contemporary political debates triggered by ARTs. They examine the varying ways in which ARTs are interpreted and practised in different contexts, depending on religious, moral and political approaches. Assisted Reproduction Across Borders embeds feminist analysis of ARTs across a wide variety of countries and cultural contexts, discussing controversial practices such as surrogacy from the perspective of the global South as well as the global North as well as inequalities in terms of access to IVF.This volume will appeal to scholars and students of anthropology, ethnography, philosophy, political science, history, sociology, film studies, media studies, literature, art history, area studies, and interdisciplinary areas such as gender studies, cultural studies, and postcolonial studies.

As a scientific, materialist worldview becomes increasingly difficult to repudiate, and as philosophers increasingly uncover and articulate the conceptual nature of morality and distinctively moral normativity, the threat of moral anti-realism becomes more and more real. This perspective is argued in Chapter One. Chapter Two discusses how laws and bioethical trends that pertain to the clinical management of patients in a vegetative coma differ from country to country and continue to give rise to unresolved legal debates and scientific controversy. Chapter Three covers how caregivers in palliative care must be supported to better understand patient's hopes and needs, making them comfortable to decide when or how much they want to eat. Chapter Four synthesizes findings from four empirical studies conducted in Western Africa (Togo) on topics related to the autonomy (end of life decision-making among terminally-ill patients), benevolence and non-malevolence (breaking bad news to elderly patients and their families), and justice (informal payments to physicians, criminal prosecution in cases of HIV transmission) principles of bioethics. Finally, Chapter Five argues that expert members in Ethics committees have an unfair upper-hand, with their decisions trumping other debates in committee deliberations. Qualitative research is brought to bear which illustrates this and which also notes how expertise dilutes the training given to newly appointed ethics committee members.

The topic of biopolitics is a timely one, and it has become increasingly important for scholars to reconsider how life is objectified, mobilized, and otherwise bound up in politics. This cutting-edge volume discusses the philosophical, social, and political notions of biopolitics, as well as the ways in which biopower affects all aspects of our lives, including the relationships between the human and nonhuman, the concept of political subjectivity, and the connection between art, science, philosophy, and politics. In addition to tracing the evolving philosophical discourse around biopolitics, this collection researches and explores certain modes of resistance against biopolitical control. Written by leading experts in the field, the book's chapters investigate resistance across a wide range of areas: politics and biophilosophy, technology and vitalism, creativity and bioethics, and performance. Resisting Biopolitics is an important intervention in contemporary biopolitical theory, looking towards the future of this interdisciplinary field.