Search

The following essay makes a critical analysis of the discourses/practices of modernity from the perspective of biopolitics around abnormality, science (as technoscience) and the possibilities of community that exist in the relationships of the marginalized. Taking as referents the films Freaks and The Shape of Water. Showing how cinema plays and proposes critical elements of these practices/discourses of modernity. Within this abnormality, we will consider monstrosity as metaphor and corporeal reality, and women as borderline and marginal bodies of the cast (in Rancière's terms). An analysis that plays with the contingency of the social crisis we are going through worldwide, as well as the social and corporal fragments, but which, nevertheless, in their entrails make possible other forms of relationships, other fabrics and possibilities of community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Con el objetivo de evidenciar la forma en que la diversidad sociodemográfica ha resignificado el proceso de desarrollo territorial y origina líneas de fuga que trascienden la hegemonía de los poderes económicos-políticos-ambientales en los Llanos-Orientales, se realiza una metodología experimental que combina análisis situacionales, la genealogía, y la reconstrucción histórica de fenómenos sociales a través de 87 entrevistas a líderes sociales entre el 2019-2021. Los resultados muestran un territorio de activa conexión cultural que favorecen la lucha contra hegemónica dentro de las metáforas de "el mito del Estado nación" y "la imposibilidad de generar alternativas". El análisis expone la existencia de rebeliones de conducta a través de resistencias cotidianas creativas, políticas y culturales, que favorecen el poder de la confianza, la solidaridad, la cooperación, el afecto, así como los liderazgos colectivos. Se concluye que el poder central no tiene la capacidad de capturar estas resistencias ya que no tiene la potencia analítica para percibir la reconfiguración del espíritu humano ni las variaciones del tejido social. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the context of violence in Mexico driven by the War on Drugs (2006-2012), and the spread of repertoires of high lethality and corporal punishment, a series of interpretations have focused their study based on the drifts of biopolitics -- necropolitical and thanatopolitics. The article discusses these interpretations, proposing that the use of this conceptual framework gains heuristic capacity to understand contemporary phenomena of bare life production, if this category is understood beyond sovereignty and is linked to studies on labor and capital accumulation. The article proposes to understand biopolitics as a differentiated device according to specific historical contexts, which is crossed by the concrete forms of the capital-labor contradiction. It argues that the production of expendable lives can be understood by the precariousness of labor and the dynamics of capital accumulation, which generate profit even with death. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work analyzes consumer practices, using some theoretical proposals by Michel Foucault. It is proposed that consumption operates in and on the bodies of the subjects, which becomes a field of deployment of power-knowledge. To that end, Foucault's concepts of discipline and biopolitics are used. Following a qualitative methodology, the corpus of analysis is constructed, consisting of stories by young university men from La Araucanía (Chile). It shows how the consumption practices of these young people operate as mechanisms of resistance, which necessarily occurs alongside the deployment of disciplinary powerknowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latin American regional sciences and technologies currently have crisis effects, differentiated from those that have distinguished the changes in the "normal sciences" (Kuhn, 1969). In this crossover of epistemic inflection emerges the "decolonial turn" towards the creation of technosciences (González Casanova, 2017), in convergence with the contributions of Latin American thought (Quijano, 2009 Lander: Mignolo, 2007). Thus, this article will place in analysis, from the perspective of investigative co-production (Bialakowsky, et al., 2013), the foundations and keys of said emergencies in relation to praxis aimed at challenging the hegemonic social intellect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through the interrogation of the blurred frontier between power over life and its potency, a series of contemporary Latin American novels problematize the relations between aesthetics, politics, and the living by the invention of modes of shared life. The novels Inclúyanme afuera (2014) by María Sonia Cristoff, and El animal sobre la piedra (2008) by Daniela Tarazona, configure experiments of the common that find an aesthetic and political productivity of the living in affect--understood as the threshold between the cohesion and the disintegration of bodies--that cannot be captured by the logic of biopower. Unsettling the boundaries between human and animal, and between the organic and the inorganic, both novels pose the problem of the norm as a mutation immanent to the living, while simultaneously exploring the dynamism of matter and its capacity to express itself in new configurations. In this sense, the novels also elaborate a language that, far from any regime of representation, operates as a mode of experimentation and composes forces that arrange or disintegrate the borders between bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this text is to describe the action and operability of a hospital unit of hemodynamics, in order to interpret concrete forms of life around body, organs and diagnoses. The research carried out was qualitative, with a critical-reflexive approach, based on participant observation and in-depth interviews with patients, doctors, nurses and relatives of patients in the Hemodynamic Hospital Unit. The results are presented as the construction of new corporalities, market exercises and lives reworked around technical mechanics under the concept of biopolitics and socio-sanitary risk, concluding how the epistemic devices and objects establish the political, economic and cultural proportions of life in the contemporary world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The border can no longer be understood as a line demarcating a State's sovereignty. On the contrary, border production, that is, border deployment via multiple spaces that are internal and external to the State itself, brings about a recomposition of sovereign power. Taking the EU framework as a case study, this paper examines this recomposition based on its interweaving with the security ethos. The border emerges as a shifting geography of imprecise limits through which processes of capturing spaces and subjectivities are activated. This capture, which combines increasingly extensive and invasive surveillance with militarised control rationales, is one of the most notorious manifestations of a securitarian act that is legitimised in the bio-necro-political management of a migrant subjectivity that is seen, largely, in terms of risk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the reflection on the Anthropocene and its implications on the meanings of political and civilizational alternatives. Although the approach is based on global changes such as climate change and the unsustainability of dominant production/consumption and energy models, where culture and subjectivity are paramount, it emphasizes the analysis from the experience of a country/territory like Bolivia that the new century begins with an inspiring state narrative to face global changes from the perspective of the rights of nature and good living but which ends up replicating and deepening the predominant dispossession model of the 20th century. From there, the article intends to reflect on the dynamics of accommodation/resistance/resignification from the advance of the "hypertextractivist" border that expands disproportionately in the territories of Bolivia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main, presently evolving demographic phenomena which are perceived as Global Risks in terms of both structure (ageing, proportion of young people, and gender imbalance in the workforce) and dynamics (growth, fertility, mortality, and migrations) have become indispensable components of narratives aiming to shape the demographic behaviour of individuals and populations. Most of these stories start out from stereotypes, distortions and halftruths, to such an extent that they could be classified under the heading of what is now known as post-truth. This text defines "posttruth" and discusses its use in demography, giving examples as well as discussing its relationship with a shift from the governability of biopolitics to that of thanatopolitics, which is now being fostered in neoliberal discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies and exposes the main elements of the biopolitical theory of Roberto Esposito to explain what happens in the period in which subjectivity is placed within the negative defense of life, and in the sense of what the French philosopher conceived as governmentality. Four sections on this problem are worked on to explain Esposito's impolitic project and show his criticism of the current metaphysical character of political concepts: sovereignty, democracy, community and freedom. The concepts of community and immunity are studied transversally to understand the author's need to amputate the bios-zoé relationship of the biopolitical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I will provide a genealogical interpretation of Latin American feminisms, based on three conceptual territories: desire, the body and what I call the biopolitics of the maternal, which allows me to explore one of the great gravitational nodes for these types of feminism: maternity/ies. Here I discuss a controversial issue that uses various discourses and practices to pinpoint the feminist discomfort and insolence that have arisen in response to the patriarchal restraints from the 19th century to the present. This is achieved through the choice of certain moments, as symbolizing scenes, which I regard as crucial to understanding the particularities of the feminisms in the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We work on the tensions between two continents in permanent dispute: "blood" and "politics", "reality" and "device", "nature" and "culture". Those are old issues, and old tensions, but they do not stop updating and now all over the place on issues such as biometrics, genetic maps, identification of disappeared, indigenous or gender or minor or drugs identity politics, surrogate pregnancy or the management of marginality. Te ten texts gathered in this special issue discuss from an interdisciplinary perspective the presence of blood - in its different forms - in the contemporary definition of what we understand by identity, human rights or citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present work of investigation approaches the critique of heterosexual reason starting from the conformation of the abject corporalities that question, from the material, symbolic and performative, the canon of normality that said reason institutes on the must be of the bodily representations. For this purpose, the constitution of a heterosexual rationality that orders the sexes and genders, and therefore the representation of bodies, through biopolitical and drug-pornographic governance will be interpreted. Based on this, the critical "ethos" of reason in Kant will be recognized, and the whole process of metaphysical and transcendental consideration, but with a cross reading between Nietzsche and Foucault that can account for a critique of heterosexual reason starting from of bodies as "great reason" and "moles" where power relations penetrate and produce subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to frame the gender category in the model of representations developed by Teresa de Lauretis, who reflects on the outcomes of the establishment of subjects in some discursive processes where normative dynamics that regulate the sexual possibilities land, but at the same time multiplies them from mechanisms set language and materialized in bodies. The concept of gender is read as a multiple space of recognition of differences, represented as forms of collective action through which the seemingly coherent formulas of the bio-politically determined heteronormative system can be questioned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analytical discussion regarding the relationship between gender, Human Rights expressed as Sexual Rights and biopolitcs on the subjective configuration of women, questioning at the same time the need to discuss, in the frame of Social Sciences and the studies of identity and subjectivity, the potential explanatory force of "gender" asan analytical category, in order to make visible the configuration processes of subjects that are immerse on the conquest of their freedom to determine their own gender identity in the frame of their right of gender and sex diversity in contemporary societies. The analysis is based upon some preliminary findings of an on-going doctoral research of particular study cases of Women in Search of exercising their Sexual Rights in the Metro politan Area of Guadalajara. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

En este artículo analizó la homofobia, la ciudadanía precaria y la negación de derechos humanos como formas de violencia biopolítica contra las poblaciones de la diversidad sexual. Parto de la hipótesis que ve a las leyes que se promulgan a favor de estas identidades como mecanismos de segregación y no de inclusión social, como pudiera pensarse; estos ordenamientos jurídicos no son útiles para erradicar dicha violencia biopolítica, son leyes que quedan como marcos normativos para regulan comportamientos políticos, sociales y gubernamentales adversos. Pero no erradican la homofobia ni los actos de agresión que esta animadversión histórica y cultural produce ni evitan la racionalidad biopolítica con la cual se administran estas poblaciones ni la espiral de violencia a la que están expuestas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I analyse the concept of psycho-politics in Byung-Chul Han's thought. I try to show how he transforms the bio-political comprehension of society (that has been developed by Michel Foucault, Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben) into a new comprehensive framework that includes the influence of new technologies and new social and labour structures in the individuals. Whereas in the modern era the biopolitics emerged in the social body as an immunological practice (in which the control was set from outside), Han points out that actually the individuals impose on themselves a new control from the inside in order to be more effective (psycho-politics). I also analyse how does this notion of psycho-politics relate with his treatment of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an analytical discussion regarding the relationship between gender, Human Rights expressed as Sexual Rights and biopolitcs on the subjective configuration of women, questioning at the same time the need to discuss, in the frame of Social Sciences and the studies of identity and subjectivity, the potential explanatory force of “gender” as an analytical category, in order to make visible the configuration processes of subjects that are immerse on the conquest of their freedom to determine their own gender identity in the frame of their right of gender and sex diversity in contemporary societies. The analysis is based upon some preliminary findings of an on-going doctoral research of particular study cases of women in search of exercising their Sexual Rights in the Metropolitan Area of Guadalajara. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present article analyses the construction of masculine sexuality that entails the sexological device, taking as source of analysis the TV program En el punto: de la ciencia al sexo, from the National Radio and Television System of Costa Rica (SINART). An important premise of the study is the contradiction in the heart of sexological discourse, according to which, in spite of the affirmation that sexuality is a holistic field, most of the suggestions, warnings and exhortations of this discipline, are directed to coitus. That polarization, reproduce the stereotypical designation of active men and passive women and strengthen a model of sexuality, in which the main goal is to maximize the performance of the male bio-genital apparatus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper work constitutes an attempt to make complex the analysis matrix about the implications of the extractive industry in Latin America; worning about differents extralegal mechanisms on wich is based the model itself. To achieve such content we appeal to some concepts and analysis axes made out by a french thinker, Michel Foucault, such as: governmentality, biopolitics, power networks, subject, and subjectivity. For the written preparation they were taking into account other literature sources, especially those books and scientific publications made by latinamerican intellectuals critical to the extractive model as they are among other the works of: Alberto Acosta, Maristella Svampa, Eduardo Gudynas, Edgardo Lander, Luis Tapia y Raúl Zibechi. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From David Viñas' Cayó sobre su rostro (1955) and Los dueños de la tierra (1958), this paper investigates correlated configurations between the conquest of the Patagonian territory and the imposition of a specific sexual, racial and familiar form. Both novels, so, draw a necessary relationship between the violent appropriation and biopolitical orderings that emerge from this process. Thus, Viñas involved in the political and cultural discussion of late 1950s and put into question the legitimacy of a project that collapsed with Peronism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2012, the University Coordinator for Sexual Dissidence (CUDS) leads the campaign "Donate for an Illegal Abortion", an artistic activism performance that tried to make visible the conflict related to abortion in Chile by means of several different disciplinary supports. They tried to position a debate by means of the collection of money on the streets for the performance of illegal abortions, video-clips, jingle songbooks, internet campaigns, training workshops for volunteers, among others. The divergences of the debate, however, tended to be neutralized by the conservative rhetoric of the vigilant consensus. In this way, the normality of the urban landscape is interrupted by performance acts that parody traditional schemes for the neoliberal rhetoric of consumption of solidarity. Also, this opens for us the possibility to relocate the intervention fields of the feminist dispute, widening its imaginaries and lusting bodies. Likewise, it is possible to redefine the traditional feminisms statutes, and reorder the regular landscape of the political economies of the image of pain and its visible bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is part of the Master's thesis in Social Policy "Female Stray Bodies: To a social construction of gender policy in Bogotá" like a result of my own work experience as a young state official of the Protection of Children and youth District Institute (or IDIPRON initials in spanish). During the research process we attempted to construct knowledge from the experience of those who were involved in the problem of study, questioning the construction of sexualities and gender in street contexts as well as the government response that support roles and gender stereotypes in District's social service programs, aimed at children and youth inhabitant of / in street. The purpose of the paper is to present the conceptual and methodological route for the construction of a new category: stray female bodies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the way the discourses and counter-discourses have been used in the construction of frames on behalf of the actor-network, Process of Black Communities, in its dialogue with the Colombian government within the framework of the hearings of the Inter-american Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) between 2007 and 2013. Theoretically, the notions of biopower, biopolitics, governmentality and discursive practices developed by Michel Foucault are addressed , as well as the theory of frames by Snow and Bendford. Methodologically, audios and videos of the hearings before the Commission are analyzed. In the analysis of the interaction between State and Afro petitioners there were identified frames, discourses and counter-discourses related to racism, territoriality, victimization of afro populations and women, and armed conflict. The findings identify frames around the issue of human rights, aimed at harnessing the discursive and political opportunities opened by the Commission to influence the decisions of the state actor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I review the way in which Michel Foucault reads the emblematic figures Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes in biopolitical courses. My hypothesis is that these names of political philosophy function as negative indices of biopower, as something that must be set in the margins of the Foucauldian text to be able to conceptualize biopower. The aim of this article is to contribute to the understanding of that margin where the problems of political legitimacy and representation are discussed and can be termed the juridical-discursive dimension of politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the issue of borders between natural patrimony and cultural patrimony by reading the Amazonian writings of Euclides da Cunha. During 1904 and 1905, when the world economy experienced a rubber boom, da Cunha was commissioned by Baron of Rio Branco—Brazilian Minister of Foreign Affairs—to make a report due to the territorial dispute between Brazil and Peru over the Amazonian region. Da Cunha's travel chronicles express a hybrid type of speech where, along a scientific interest, emerges a biopolitical agenda that includes considerations on the Amazonian population and an inventory of species observed as commodities. Da Cunha's texts let us recognize the traffic between neighboring conceptual territories: nature and culture, literature and governmentality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article, as a result of research, aims to provide key elements, which take into account the links between the free trade and the permanent violation of the human rights and even with crimes against humanity; situations that do not constitute themselves in isolated, circumstantial facts, which are the product of the apparent simultaneousness between crime in abstract, developed in areas where strategic projects for the global economy are projected and developed, but in a matter related, caused, sustained by both national and international economic, political groups that make a profit with these mega-projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a brief overview of the main coordinates framing the invention of psychiatry in the transition from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century. The presented synthesis allows to appreciate to what extent psychological medicine is a distinctive and characteristic product of what modernity and its science have made of madness, and, more specifically, the close relationship of its development with a series of processes that emplace it in at least five broader historiographical contexts: the respective histories of alterity, subjectivity, modern science, biopolitics and cultural criticism. Seen from this perspective, then, the history of psychiatry appears as the crystallization of a vast mutation whereby the traditional figure of the madman has become an immediate and ubiquitous mirror figure of ourselves, namely, a subject simultaneously psychologized, cerebralized, medicalized and split. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict is found in the beginning, in the word, as it is revealed by myths. If the birth of democracy occurs as a dissociation of religious thought, giving rise to law, it involved the exclusion of the living from the polis and also the marginalization of women. With capitalism, biopolitics integrates life, calculation, control and power, and it turns the body into a political pledge, at the time of the exclusion of the matters of love. This is what the article points out in relation to hospital care and public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although contemporary political theory has recently develop an interest in the ‘disabled' as an expression of its concern with difference and minorities, it has not paid enough attention to the heterogeneity of bodily experiences described under the label disabled that is uncritically applied to the deaf. With the help of contemporary deaf studies and social and political theory, the article interprets deafness as a social construct that is instantiated partly though oralism and its educational dispositive. The article analizes the educational dispositive of oralism that aims at determining the field of action and the production of subjectivity of the deaf according to the model of modern subject and democratic citizen. This model, based on oralism and audism, has oppressive effects of cultural imperialism and symbolic violence over the deaf population. In opposition to the educational biopolitical dispositive of oralism, the sociopolitical action of the Deaf has the potential of activating an affirmative biopolitics of the body and a politics of identity and recognition of Deaf culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its privileged position in the apparatus of sexuality, psychoanalysis is part of a profuse network of disciplinary and normalizing technologies engaged in the de-politicization display of bio-politics. However, we propose an interpretation of the polemic Freudian concept of the death drive from the perspective of the immune paradigm put forth by Roberto Esposito. The death drive informs the aphoristic nature of immunity, in so far that it allows for an opening-up to the productivity of the negative and the inclusion of otherness within the composition of self. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to describe and interpret the biopolitical dimension of the Chorographic Commission (1850-1859), which was organized by the central state to obtain relevant information for the governance of the population, the rationalization of production and the promotion of comerce. Starting from the revision of the commissions' documents along with other contemporary texts this article shows how different governance strategies were proposed, some of them focusing on the circulation of people and goods, while other strategies focused on discovering the laws behind socio economic processes paying attention to the particularities of the territory and of the national population. These particularities defi ned the limits of governance, which added to the country's political instability and reduced the impact of the commission's recommendations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes a limited tour of what currently means inclusion strategy in relation to the problem of the disability, taking as a reference the public policy held in the city of Rosario, Argentina. On this basis questions were raised in relation to biopolitics and governmentality. This tour was finally oriented to interrogate the same status of disability, a complex and diffuse problematic in itself, which outlined some basic coordinates to propose to think of it in terms of what M. Foucault called ⪡device⪢; that is, as a complex and heterogeneous political construction based on the normal-pathological dichotomy, which naturalizes the notion of deficit, it presents it as a personal tragedy that works at the same time promoting the sustainability of the economic policy of neo-liberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current paper aims at an analysis of ths state of exception or exceptional legislation, incorporating to studies coming from political theory, certain distinctions from the law that might contribute to a clarification of the debate. This in view that to-day we confront a "normalized" state of exception, since exceptions are incorporated into juridical ordering. This typo of legislations shows the relation between norm and decision and/or between norm and power, and in the juridical theory could be analyzed through figures like the tacit alternative clause of Kelsen or the relation between validity and efficacy of norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Mendel's original experiments on genetic characteristics of greenpeas, the biological sciences have evolved in an apparently unlimited fashion and created information systems on human genetics, whose most complete expression are undoubtedly the Biobanks. Use of human tissue able to revel disease history and individual lifestyle has generated interest in scientists, philosophers, lawyers and other scholars who reflect on the practical and theoretical challenges of this new knowledge. This paper explores ethical difficulties derived from administration of biobanks insofar as their implementation and development imply risks associated to the expression and expansion of contemporary "biopolitics", as conceived by Michel Foucault. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to its privileged participation in the deployment of sexuality, psychoanalysis would be part of an profuse network of disciplinary and normalizer technologies compromised with the dis-politicize display of biopolitics. We will propose an interpretation of the notion of narcissism established by Freud, from the perspective [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conflict is found in the beginning, in the word, as it is revealed by myths. If the birth of democracy occurs as a dissociation of religious thought, giving rise to law, it involved the exclusion of the living from the polis and also the marginalization of women. With capitalism, biopolitics integrates life, calculation, control and power, and it turns the body into a political pledge, at the time of the exclusion of the matters of love. This is what the article points out in relation to hospital care and public health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article will seek to inquire into the theoretical scope and consequences and impact that the conceptions of development have had. This will be, firstly, according to a certain kind of reflection about the purposes and the means of development so called "Development Ethics". This approach must be established in order to "Deliberative Democracy". Theoretical work that has been done, also during the last decades, to improve and expand the traditional and restricted notion of "political citizenship" -in the sense of a "Biological Citizenship", according to an affirmative biopolitical concept-, gives a relevant element of judgement that makes it possible to understand in a better way how it could be conceived the confluence of Development and Deliberative Democracy [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following article examines Foucault's definition of biopolitics, especially the problem of its origin. Foucault's thesis is that modern biopolitics has its most remote origin in the ancient Christian pastoral work; however, there are good reasons to believe that the origin may be found in Plato, given the biopolitical direction of his thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Foucault recognizes diverse forms of political rationality that articulate in a specific way the procedures aimed at resolving the issue of "how to govern", distinguishing between societies of sovereignty, discipline and security. Biopower emerges in the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of security as the articulation of two technologies: the anatomopolitics and biopolitics. Sex is the hinge that links the two axis along which the political technology of life is developed. It is related to the disciplining of the body (the domestication, intensification and distribution of its strengths) and with the regulation of the population. Sex translates the "political energy" as well as "the biological vigor" of a society. Nonetheless, Foucalt insists on leaving sex and desire aside in favor of the issue of the role of pleasures. These arguments by Foucault have been problematized by various feminist theorists. On the one hand, they denounce the masculine character of his rhetoric, the androcentrism of his perspective and the pessimism of his vision. On the other hand, they help inspire new analyses of the technologies of the body which make visible the specific gender differences, as well as the possibility to build new political projects in support of the emancipation of women. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an interview with several philosophers, including Vanessa Lemm, Miguel Vatter, and Gustavo Chirolla. They discuss the philosophy of biopolitics and the theory of subjectivation developed by French philosopher Michel Foucault. They also comment on the relationship between political power and human behavior and daily life.

This article discusses the implementation of the principle of the governance of life in Colombia, as part of an analysis on the forms of social and political uses of knowledge, in particular of hygiene. The practice and discipline of hygiene is considered to have provided the State with useful resources for forging new links with the population, especially during the process of its consolidation, from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the twentieth century. These possibilities enabled the State to create, and at the same time, control citizens' bodies, in various ways and among diverse social groups. Hygienic practice brought together international scientific knowledge with regional efforts toward homogenization, as well as national and local needs for differentiation. In order to study these links, the text focuses on the interaction between the hygiene discipline, its professionals, the international networks of knowledge exchange, and the principal hygiene mechanisms that were introduced to manage the population. Finally, the article reflects on some differences between the national situation and the most distinctive characteristics of the genealogy of biopower. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I present a dialogue between the results of my ethnographic fieldwork on internally displaced persons and a discussion about the relevance and potential of the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics in contemporary times. The article starts by tracing the attention that Foucault gave towards the transformation of the Providential, omnipresent, and biopolitical State, to one that is satisfied with introducing an environmental technology that no longer governs through the subjection of individuals, but through a "disinvestment" that creates the conditions for the same subjects, now as entrepreneurs, to be in charge of resolving conflicts and contradictions. I use some ethnographic vignettes to understand the actualization of this "disinvestment" that ends up producing and maintaining "zones of social abandonment." Specifically, I am interested in understanding how this "disinvestment" occurs within a State transformation that through the mandates of participation and decentralization, makes these subjects into agents responsible for their own development. Lastly, I suggest that this "zones of social abandonment" can also be zones of desire that go beyond what might be called a low intensity biopolitics. I use the example of the Peace Community of San José de Apartado and their antagonistic practices that are currently challenging these technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects on the concept of "anthropotechnics", developed by the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk, showing its dual meaning on "improving the world" (Weltverbesserung) and on "improving oneself" (Selbstverbesserung). The author suggests that this twofold idea can be read in relation to the foucauldian concepts of "technologies for the government of populations " (biopolitics) and "technologies of the self" (aesthetics of existence). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the author discusses articles within the issue, which centers around biopolitics, subjectivation, and the philosophy of Michel Foucault.

The purpose is to discuss under some premises of Foucault`s biopolitics, governmental practices in the field of the contemporary dominium of public mental health. Within this epistemology, I would like to revise the emergence of the device of the Public Policy on mental health attention for forced internal displacement victims at Colombia in the past decade. Under the Sentencia T 025 the Colombian constitutional court obliges the government to recognize the existence of forced internal displacement and states mandatory the provision of mental health attention to victims. I suggest that this dominium of the public policy in mental health for victims of sociopolitical violence is a biopolitic exercise, where the devices mainly used in public mental health such as population and individuals act upon certain groups focalizing interventions. This mediation acts under the naturalization of trauma, vulnerability and risk, and has the final effect of the medicalization of society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In May of 2011 and for only three days the government of Chile eliminated the use of chemicals to suppress protests because of its possible abortifacient effects. From this “political moment” -questioned official policy- this essay is an analysis of modes of enunciation fetus representing communication in politics, a figure that revealed strength as related to life meaning. The discussion of the fetus from the communication -past visions in favor against abortion- reveals the importance of technical and scientific discourse to the current policy and technologized and visual fragmentation of the body, reconfiguration of the ways to understand the body in the mediated context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work reflects on the heuristic and political potential of Michel Foucault's and Roberto Esposito's central theoretical categories regarding subjectivity production in postindustrial societies. After verifying an increasing standardization of contemporary ways of life as a starting point, these authors have developed a set of theoretical tools to define and apprehend this phenomenon as a bio-political moment of power. The leading question of this research is about the fruitfulness of these theoretical categories for thinking and directing political practice of an emancipatory nature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]