Search

What are the potentialities and limits of nonviolence as a method of resistance against modern biopolitics? This article offers an ethnographic account of Irom Sharmila's sixteen‐year‐long hunger strike against the continued state of emergency in the Indian state of Manipur. It interrogates how she envisioned the protest, the objectives that she set, and how her protest came to an end. This article demonstrates that her protest was not about a will to death, as it has often been described, but instead was based on a radical distribution of responsibility among the people suffering under the regime of violence. Her nonviolent protest as a Gandhian practice was directed particularly at the entailments of violence. In challenging the state but refusing to emulate it, she became an exemplar. She became the one who could not be killed even by the state with exceptional powers. Finally, by contrasting her protest with Manipuri nationalism, this article shows how the ethics of nonviolence offers a unique vision for peace and liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how China's propaganda system operates as an aspect of governance, especially how propagandists understand the public opinion they seek to influence. Understanding the concept of yuqing (public opinion conditions) is crucial for understanding propaganda in China. Yuqing is considered akin to the medical condition of public opinion (yulun). Hence, propaganda is treatment that the state provides to an organic social body of public opinion, which is subject to constant monitoring and treatment. The party-state is keen on establishing standards and norms about what a healthy and clean society should be. Thus, this paper argues that the propaganda system does not contribute to responsive authoritarianism by collecting grassroots information, but instead prioritizes cleansing public discourse in accordance with party-state logic. Furthermore, contrary to the belief that authoritarian propaganda focuses on demobilizing collective resistance and forcing compliance, China's propaganda system disciplines the public by actively constructing discursive norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines vampires as "outsiders" using critical theorist Michel Foucault's concepts of biopolitics and governmentality to analyze their portrayal in over 30 Anglophone films. Topics include the vampire's relationship with history, the regulation of behavior within governance, and the role of screenwriting practices in shaping the genre.

The article examines the mutual relations between education, biopolitics and authority. The objective is to deconstruct authority in relation to three biopolitical issues: abortion, sexual orientation, and IVF. This deconstruction is performed by analysis of the manifestations and strategies of authority employed in Polish textbooks for four subjects at secondary school: social studies, family life education, ethics, and religion. This provided an answer to the question both about the significance of biopolitical issues in the education process and about the role of authority in their construction. The main rhetorical practices for the construction of authority were science, using the strategy of "stating facts"; law, with the strategy of "establishing order"; and religion, whose strategy is "initiating opposition". In the article, I conduct a qualitative analysis of each of the three rhetorical practices and make conclusions on the role of authority in the process of teaching biopolitical issues in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I shall outline a thought experiment aimed at reversing the relationship between bíos and zoē established by the anthropological machine. Giorgio Agamben resorts to the notion of "anthropological machine" to define the mechanism that produces the qualified life of human beings (bíos), through the inclusive exclusion of their biological life (zoē). My experiment does not render the exclusionary logic of the anthropological machine inoperative, but reverses the hierarchy it establishes between bíos and zoē. The result is what I shall call the machine of biologism, or simply the biological machine. If the anthropological machine establishes its perimeters of exclusion/inclusion on the grounds of bíos, the biological machine resorts to zoē. Thus, the biological machine does not operate according to the anthropological difference, which deems the human being as essentially not an animal, but according to what I shall define as the biological difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article continues a debate on the ecological paradigm shift and its impact on art and art history. It explores the concept of Environmentality, a biopolitical governance model that regulates relational milieus of both human and nonhuman entities, as introduced by Michel Foucault and expanded by Thomas Lemke. Florian Sprenger emphasizes the importance of historicizing the concept of circulation in biopolitics, which manages bodies, populations, and environments.

The pandemic revealed the workings of biopower in relation to people with disabilities. In focusing on lives worth living, decisions were made based on metrics about the quality of life of various groups. Ultimately, the pandemic revealed the power structure lurking behind a rhetoric of "care and compassion." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In addition to the genocidal actions taking place in Gaza, the Israeli military also conducts large-scale assaults in the West Bank that destroy individuals' homes and communities, and invades Palestinian homes one home and garden at a time. While there are 250 of these invasions per month, they receive little scrutiny. Most of these invasions occur across the 19 refugee camps in the occupied Palestinian territories, where home is viewed as a gendered and temporal space: transient, penetrable, and violable. To analyze home invasion through a feminist lens, interviews were conducted with ten women-identifying refugees who described it as one of many forms of collective punishment that Palestinians experience that determines ability or debility as well as who may live and who may/must die. Interview participants saw home invasion as a type of domestic, gendered, and sexual violence that affects neighbors, kin, and communities and is mitigated through the collective support of women. Work on this article started well before the devastating and horrific events that unfolded after October 7, 2023. The article's scrutiny of the militarized infrastructure across the West Bank brings important context to the state violence in Gaza, and lays bare the vulnerabilities of the West Bank. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the meaning of technology in Arendt and Foucault's work, their historical analyses of technology, and the way that their notions of technology's role in modernity influence their historical methods. I argue that whilst the two political thinkers approach the idea of technology from different perspectives, there is also substantial overlap in the way that they conceive of technology – often critically – as a wide-ranging set of practices of power interlocked with particular modes of knowledge. This helps to properly situate some aspects of their work that converge, for instance their analyses of what Foucault calls 'biopolitics'. But their different conceptions of the historical character of technology, and its relationship to modernity, also create divergence: their concepts of 'technology' suggest different ways of thinking through the nature of historical continuity and discontinuity and the degree of access that we have to meaningful histories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the three major novels George Gissing published between 1889 and 1893: The Nether World, New Grub Street, and The Odd Women. These Long Depression novels, as they could be called, demonstrate the constant pressure exerted by the need to earn money to hold starvation at bay, to achieve an always precarious subsistence or survival. Gissing depicts circular, inescapable patterns in which one writes to earn money in order to survive just long enough to write more to buy more—never enough—food. His novels insistently ponder, and seem to try to literalize in reflexive ways, the question of what it means to "live on" one's writing as a late nineteenth‐century author. In so doing, this article suggests, these novels participate in the transformation of hunger from a troubling Malthusian fact of nature to be managed by political economy into both a biopolitical tool of the state, seen as a positive good in its spur to labor, as well as a central topos of an emerging modernist style of fiction that reflects, draws attention to, and critiques those biopolitical mechanisms. Notwithstanding his criticisms of a society that leaves artists hungry, Gissing seemed to personally believe that his own experiences of having "looked starvation in the face," having passed through "circumstances of hunger" and converted them into art, were part of what gave his work value and meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the durability of high post-mortem examination rates in Israel between the 1950s-1980s. Previous studies overlooked the issue of medical authority and the social history of autopsy, focusing on policy, technological development, and conflict between science and religion. By contrast, our analysis brings together the medical interest in unlimited research of dead bodies and the power relations between doctors and subaltern groups in Israel. Based on the Israeli State Archives, the Hebrew University Archives, and the daily press, we argue that medical biopolitical aspirations and the public shaped the history of postmortem examinations in Israel. High rates were embedded in the medical construction of doubt regarding the cause of death that only physicians could resolve by autopsy. Civilian protests led to a temporary decrease in the 1960s, while political and medical intervention brought about a gradual resurgence in post-mortem rates in the 1980s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study explores how Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) presents a State controlled systematic manipulation and psychological conditioning of individuals through Hypnopaedia and Soma. This paper adopts a comparative analysis, comparing the aforementioned means of mass conditioning used in the novel with the techniques used by the realworld capitalist states. It further delves into the nature of physical and mental manipulation of mass subjects in fiction compared with the reality. The analysis is conducted in lieu of Foucauldian notion of biopower, which characterizes the exertion of political power over populations, effectively reducing them to mere instruments of social control. The findings reveal that the rapid development and scientific progress observed in the modern world has made it possible for the states to use the fictional means of mass conditioning in the real world. The subconscious conditioning through mass media and the pervasive use of psychotropics are the real-world manifestations of Huxley's prophecies. Hence, it implies a trajectory towards the dystopia that he has predicted in his dystopian science fiction novel Brave New World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Folklor / Edebiyat is the property of Cyprus International University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article asks whether we can identify a vitalistic undertow in Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy that would make sense for contemporary political and constitutional theory as well. The arguments are presented by contrasting Nietzsche's philosophy with the social theory of Herbert Spencer. After an introduction, the first main part discusses Spencer and his so-called 'organic analogy' in which he draws parallels between natural organisms and the body politic. Spencer's social theory is a paradigmatic example of vitalism and organic state theory and, as a counterpoint, can help tease out Nietzsche's vitalism as well. The article then examines Nietzsche's admittedly fragmentary encounters with Spencer and his flirtations with vitalism and organic state theory. In the conclusions, the reconstructed narrative about Nietzsche's vitalism is linked with Nietzsche's main philosophical works in the hope of provisionally extracting a Nietzschean 'constitutional theory' from his notion of will to power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early Republican period of Turkey (1923–1945), the newly established state provided a biopolitical agenda for developing modern and secular life in order to break the Ottoman heritage religious-traditional social structure. Thereupon, sports, as an indicator of modernization, took an important place in the biopolitics of the regime. Sports spaces were instrumentalized as a medium where biopower infiltrated to build a modern life. In order to effectively accomplish the modern life-building project, the Republican Regime invited international modernist architects to insert sports spaces into the social realm in urban, rural, and industrial areas. Accordingly, this paper explores sports-related spaces as a biopolitical agenda of the Republican Regime in the discourse of planning the city of Ankara and rural and industrial areas. Exploring history through the lens of sports reveals how the city of Ankara and rural and industrial areas formed a spatialized approach to the Republican Regime as a biopower to develop modern life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature on early modern state-building in Europe has focused on war as its main driver and therefore on states' relationships with men. Feminist scholars have critiqued the Weberian conceptions this literature relies on as being gender biased. I suggest an alternative theoretical starting point for theories of early modern state-building: the political imperatives created by the demographic fluctuations of the Malthusian trap. Harnessing Foucault's concept of biopower and its application to the construction of gender, I argue that population fluctuations incentivized demographic regulation, in particular of childbearing, in order to keep birth rates high and maternal and infant mortality low, implying that early modern European states were constituted through the construction and maintenance of gender regimes. I propose strategies for empirical investigation and argue that a more accurate account of early modern European state-building needs to incorporate demographic regulation and therefore requires gender to be at its center. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of this article is to engage in a critical review of Roberto Esposito's biopolitical account by including a thoroughgoing interrogation of racism and white supremacy through the lens of Black affect studies. It is argued that both white supremacy studies and Esposito's framework could work side-by-side in ways that are productive for affirmative educational biopolitics. In particular, the analysis highlights two insights: first, engagement with white supremacy as a biopolitical category—in particular, white supremacy as an affective embodiment—is essential for the ability of education to interrogate the racialization of Black bodies; and, second, attentiveness to Black affect in biopolitical accounts is crucial for the decentering of white supremacy in education. These insights broaden the conceptual parameters of educational biopolitics by foregrounding the affective biopower of racism and white supremacy as central to affirmative educational biopolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction situates our approach to the nexus between citizenship, beauty politics and the state, highlighting how embodied aesthetics constitute a central dimension of state-subject relations. We propose 'aesthetic citizenship' to describe embodied aesthetics as a biopolitical field of self-making and a site of disciplining, educating and manufacturing 'proper' citizens through visual and sometimes surgical technologies of surveillance and recognition. In this introduction, we analyse how norms of bodily appearance are related to and shaped by state-led processes of citizenship, first in relation to ideas of nationhood and representation, and secondly in relation to what could be termed the biopolitics of beauty and aesthetic governance. Foregrounding affective, multisensorial and embodied aesthetics, this introduction probes a crucial, yet often overlooked lens with which to zoom in on the dynamics between state images and practices in their interrelatedness and as they are embedded in everyday life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Deconstruction occupies an "eccentric" place in the varied field of biopolitics, as it radicalizes the indissoluble knot that binds life to power. On the basis of Foucauldian analysis, Derrida reflects on the "deviation" of biopolitics, which turns into bio-thanato-politics, that is to say, politics over life (bios) and death (thanatos). Life and death are not opposite, rather, they are inseparable, as one has inscribed the other within itself. Derrida's bio-thanato-politics, as a deconstruction of the concept of life and its relationship with the power, which is always the power of life and death, is not a different declination of biopolitics, but its radicalization. Beyond the biopolitical alternative between a power over life and a power of life, Derrida thinks a bio-thanato-politics, namely, a politics of the survival. Surviving well together, indeed, is the essential character of his democracy to-come. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Environmental & Social Management Journal / Revista de Gestão Social e Ambiental is the property of Environmental & Social Management Journal and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The extractivism of resources that guarantee the continuity of life in dignified conditions accompanies the concentration of capital in a few hands; it means the alienated reification of reality, in favor of maintaining class privileges. These injustices use racist biopolitical mechanisms in order to classify and segregate populations as a correlate of the social division of labor that structures capitalist rapacity. Situation that causes the breakdown of democratic ways of coexistence. Subverting this provision deserves to destructure the mechanisms of population subjection by regulating fair human relations; calls for the collective appropriation of the right to manifest culture as self-care. Therefore, the research analyzes racism as a characteristic alienation of contemporary counterdemocracies; Next, it advocates ethically mediating community relations by taking advantage of the emancipatory capacity of humanizing pedagogies. It is a bibliographical study, of a diachronic nature, which is organized according to the deductive rationalist approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philip K. Dick's science fiction classic Do Androids Dream of Electrics Sheep? and its adaptation movie Blade Runner by Ridley Scott feature a devastated earth where bounty hunter Rick Deckard stalks authentic human replicants, designed for a short term highly flexible labor power. A group of these androids infiltrate to the earth of the productive apparatus which manufactured them, trying to persuade their maker to re-program their genetic makeup. Biopolitics as conceived by Roberto Esposito is apt at exploiting the reserves of sense present in Dick's critical scenario, and managing the mixing of languages of politics and biology, which originally were kept apart in the dystopic dimension of the novel and in the political philosophy tradition. Discarding the frontal approach to the categories of politics, Esposito urges to interrogate the categories of politics obliquely, thus entering the hidden layers of their meaning, fostering an innovative coexistence of opposites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Engaging with issues of categorisation, human supremacy, and (the lack of) empathy, in this article I read Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (2021), André Alexis's Fifteen Dogs (2015), and Alice Hatcher's The Wonder That Was Ours (2018); novels that I argue are connected by their interrogation of biopolitically produced and policed boundaries between human and nonhuman beings, and by their focus on inter-creatural empathy and care. Through the lens of critical posthumanism, Agambenian biopolitics, and care ethics, I explore how these texts interrogate boundaries between animals, humans and techno-creatures, and I contend that they provide nonhuman and marginalised human characters with a (narrative) voice in order to challenge and undermine anthropocentric conceptions of subjectivity, agency and community. Mapping the novels' portrayal of inter-creatural care relationships, I argue that affirming vulnerability potentially leads to the recognition of a "strange kinship" between human and nonhuman characters; and it is my ultimate claim that these texts turn proximity and porosity into productive and often transgressive inter-creatural entanglements, thereby disrupting processes of exclusionary differentiation, and opening the way to an imaginative exploration of new ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Confederated Colville Tribes collaborated with DroneSeed, a forestry drone start-up, to use drones to replant their tribal forest after a devastating fire. Using concepts from Bernard Stiegler to interrogate ethnographic data, this article argues that forestry drones are pharmaka: their biopolitics can be therapeutic, that is, negentropic, capable of reversing ecological simplification. Drone forestry is a type of arborescent governmentality, a tree-based computer-coded attempt to control the growth of a forest. For the Colville, this negentropy is also an act of sovereignty that protects culture and honors multispecies relationships. For DroneSeed, it is an experiment in negentropic geoengineering, an attempt to profitably leverage technologies and biological regeneration to sequester carbon and reduce global existential risk. Ultimately the project was not the success desired; the failure of technoliberal projects that blend ecological and economic liberalism shows that a more radical approach might be necessary to root carbon and slow capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sexuality has long been central to ethnographic constructions of exotic difference, an index critically demarcating the borders of European Modernity and its negative and positive Others, and underpinning both extra-European colonial domination and modern biopolitical regimes of subjectivity, citizenship, and society. Representations of Eastern European sexuality, however, were also crucial to both Western and Eastern imaginings of modern "European" selves, politics, and societies, and their boundaries of belonging. Yet while recent scholarship has drawn attention to reemerging European orientalisms and sexuality's salience in postsocialist politics, particularly in relation to recent postsocialist homophobias, little scholarly attention has been paid to the significance of these histories of European sexual difference for the biopolitical character of current borders of postsocialist difference. In this article I combine postcolonial theories of sexuality, geographies of European belonging, and postsocialist studies of sexual politics to analyze popular, political, and scholarly discourses surrounding sexual politics and homophobia in Hungary. Melding historical debates about Hungarian belonging, discursive analysis, and ethnographic fieldwork, I argue that dominant interpretations of these events constitute postsocialist homophobia as a particularly consequential "problem" reinscribing deeply rooted, and profoundly biopolitical, borders between Europe's East and West. These readings not only naturalize an imagined West as a space of proper sexual citizenship and tolerance, masking its persistent heteronormativity; they also render Hungary a time–space of complex, ambiguous sexual-political resistance, essentializing its inhabitants as inevitable sexual others of Western Modernity: for some failures of proper sexual citizenship; for others avatars of alternative, sexually-traditional Europeanness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The science fiction writer Han Song's trilogy Hospital, published between 2016 and 2018 in China, presents an eerie world of eternal pain within futuristic hospitals. With Michael Berry's translation coming out from January 2023, this work by one of the most well-known writers of contemporary Chinese science fiction is made available to an English readership. This article interrogates the nature of this pain which articulates not an impending risk of death but the patients' inability to die. Through a process of datafication and digitalization, the patients are converted into streams of algorithmic codes and dehumanized as digital "profiles" to be collected, deposited, and re-accessed. These "profiles" become sophisticated enough to develop their own agency that replaces the patients as the targets of biopolitics, indicating an ontological transition that disempowers human beings and subjectivizes the meta-being of the patients' digital "changelings." I argue that this ontological transition signals a historical change in governmentality, epistemology, and political economy, gesturing towards new methods for the governance and commodification of populations in a discourse of patior ergo sum — I suffer, therefore I am. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper critiques recent developments in educational discourse through an analysis of two UK Government White Papers and three specific problems. We argue that the latter herald forms of 'biocreep'. Echoing the analysis of such phenomena in the work of Michel Foucault, this gradual extension of 'biopolitics' into the field of education is a tendency which has accelerated with the Coronavirus pandemic and raises many questions for policy analysis. First, we show how the White Papers' approach to life and its related assumptions embody an attempt to further entrench the techniques of biopolitical population management in secondary and further education settings. Second, our analysis of the two Papers shows not just a deepening discursive shift towards ways of instrumentalising educational processes, but also identifies a triple problem of political assemblage: primo, this shift relies on the assemblage of a 'problematic subject'; secondo, it simultaneously assembles the problem of value extraction; and tertio, it obscures the problem of desire or unruliness of the assemblages created. Just as discursive practices of instrumentation, administration and evacuation try to manage these assemblages, they remain unable to contain the three problems they enshrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The quarantine hotel is one of several political instruments used to control the spread of Covid-19 in diverse countries, from Norway to China. I apply discourse analysis to map the discursive struggle to define the quarantine hotel in Norway. The government and other key political actors channel a biopolitical discourse constituting the quarantine hotel as necessary to protect the Norwegian population from imported contagion. This discourse's meaning is contested by a juridical counter-discourse articulated by lawyers and travellers, which constitutes the quarantine hotel as imprisonment/internment and a breach of rights. Travellers tend to combine this with a biopolitical counter-discourse, dismissing the quarantine hotel's biopolitical properties, strengthening the juridical critique. These discourses are important resources in a transnational, ongoing struggle, where the prize is the legitimacy of the politics of Covid-19, and the very ordering of the post-pandemic world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Mediterranean Journal of Gender & Women's Studies (KTC) / Akdeniz Kadın Çalışmaları ve Toplumsal Cinsiyet Dergisi is the property of Mediterranean Journal of Gender & Women's Studies (KTC) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

A literary criticism of the fictional mystery novel "Origins of Love," by Kishwar Desai is presented. The authors discuss how Desai speculated on the bioethical issue of artificial reproduction technology in India including commercial surrogacy. Also highlighted are the biopolitical confiscation of surrogate bodies, the Foucauldian notion of biopower in the ART markets, and the slow violence of neoliberalism in relation to reproductive technology.

This article explores the implications of the recent proliferation of 'zoo-break' narratives in relation to the discourse on the Anthropocene and the figure of the sacrifice zone in particular. Taking the zoo cage as a manifestation of what Agamben calls the 'inclusive exclusion' of zoē within bíos, and hence of the sacrificial logic that constitutes the human subject at the expense of the animal, the article explores how in these 'zoo-break' narratives, the biopolitical framework breaks down, and how they lay bare the sacrificial logic of human exceptionalism. Focusing especially on the figure of the zoo-in-wartime, the article investigates how this sacrificial logic operates and asks how we might reframe these zoo-break narratives as productive sites for representing and reflecting on history and violence in a more-than-human sense. The article concludes by arguing that the figure of the zoo-in-wartime can also be read as a 'frame of war' (Butler) in which both human and nonhuman lives become grievable, but only if we engage in a mode of reading that resists the instrumentalising, extractivist logic of the sacrifice zone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes two Catalan novels, Albert Sánchez Piñol's Victus: Barcelona 1714 (2012) and Martí Domínguez's L'esperit del temps (2019), in light of the concept of immunity developed by the Italian theorist Roberto Esposito. It is argued that the two works share an affinity by demonstrating the material relevance of Esposito's concepts, especially with reference to the skin as the basis for biopolitics. Victus links the rending of skin to textuality but simultaneously uses the breaking open of the body to highlight community as an assemblage of diverse material actors and agents. L'esperit del temps situates Nazi thanatopolitics at the intersection of biology and law, emphasizing how a politics of death relies on what kinds of matter, such as the phenotype of skin, are fetishized, pathologized, and subjected to human-centered techniques of power. Domínguez returns to the Second World War to comment on more contemporary concerns regarding bioethics and the increasingly mainstream presence of extremist politics in Europe. Opening the discussion with the reflections on skin of Donna Haraway and Jean-Luc Nancy, the article closes by engaging with Haraway's work on companionship and the "illicit fusion" of beings, particularly in the historical period referred to as the "Chthulucene," in which kinship and multispecies assemblages are viewed as tools for survival. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines Antonin Artaud's 'Theatre and the Plague' in the light of the Covid-19 pandemic and through the Ancient Greek term stasis , which describes a civil war between domestic and public spaces. Once initiated, it was believed that this conflict would spread from household to household like a contagion; city states thus implemented draconian measures in the name of preventing stasis. Giorgio Agamben argues that such measures were embedded in subsequent theories of the state, fuelling ever more oppressive policies throughout history. Artaud's 'Theatre of Cruelty' energizes a force comparable to this stasis , both in terms of its latency and its contagiousness, activating dormant conflicts in the individual that are expressed through networks of infection and create frontiers of shared resistance to institutional authority. 'Theatre and the Plague', read through the lens of stasis , can thus offer valuable contributions to current debates around biopolitics, particularly those seeking collective forms of agency during and beyond the current pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following recent research in cultural studies that has observed "the emergence of biopolitics in the Americas," this article proposes a new aspect to the early modern experience of eating. Rather than simply a vehicle for pollution, eating appears in the 1555 captivity of the Hessian adventurer and autobiographer Hans Staden by Tupinambá in Brazil as a flashpoint for techniques of coercive self-governance. Working as an arquebusier on early Portuguese sugar plantations, Staden witnessed the dangerous sweetness of early modern capitalism. Yet Staden's keen sensitivity to the political economy of cassava root flour, a commodity on which he himself depended, also suggests he witnessed his own unhappy conscription into a regime that required him to discipline himself in order to survive. Staden's frustrated memories showcase biopower's surprisingly intimate, personal, reach, revising our understanding of modernity as altogether distinct from the feudal past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The objective of the article is to show how the necropoder contributes to the study of organizations in Mexico. It starts from developing and contributing to the Foucaultian conceptions of biopoder and biopolitics, for this purpose various authors are used. The analysis focuses on the violence exerted by organizations in Mexico, the production of subjectivity, discourses and institutional power practices. Power is analyzed as a relationship of strength and strength relations that are exercised at the microphysical level in organizations; But it is also necessary and prudent to perform a macrophysic power, from this the methodology is the analysis of discourse and institutional practices from a genalogical horizon. In both analytical levels the effects of necropoder exercise are shown. Here I centers in addition to the discussion of the necropoder, in what I have called genocide, homo demens, reification and subjectivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides a conceptual understanding of the processes of financialization based on the concept of the biopolitics of housing financialization. Drawing on the Foucauldian categories of disciplining and regulation, we elaborate an empirical analysis of the mechanisms that, in Mexico, propagated the aspiration of various sectors of the population with limited resources to have access to a home of their own through mortgage loans. The construction of the notion of biopolitics of the financialization of housing is based on an empirical research conducted at two different times (2017 and 2020) and consisting of semi-structured interviews with owners of affordable housing in the periphery of the Metropolitan Area of the Valley of Mexico. It shows that, far from benefiting borrowers, their insertion in credit relations undermines income and negatively impacts their quality of life. The present discussion is articulated through five devices of the financial biocapitalism of housing --the discourse of personal wealth, socio-territorial stratification, the fallacy of social credit, the reality of peripheral life, and the reality of indebted lives--, which help to explain the epistemic violence inherent to a financialized model of economic and territorial development that produces economic and political gains for a few people, to the detriment of those who are supposed to benefit from housing policies. The analysis reveals that the devices implemented reflect the subtlety of the exercise of power in the financialized provision of housing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The exacerbation of the narcissism that drives the consumerist alienations typical of the fetish of globalized merchandise, by preventing ethics as recognition of the human condition in otherness, uses racism as a biopolitical mechanism. Thus, human segregation allows the overexploitation of work, the transfer of value to the hegemonic centers of power. Social reification subordinates human rights to the accumulation of capital; therefore, biophilic manifestations are prevented in favor of dispossessing the population of the material resources capable of shaping well-being. Consequently, this research has the purpose of analyzing the characteristic death drive of contemporary racism as authorization to dispossession. It is a bibliographical study of a diachronic type executed from the deductive rationalist approach. It concludes that the humanization of societies is possible by educating to recognize the sensitive and rational quality in others, to form coexistence protected by the ability to produce justice and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Revista de Filosofía (0185-3481) is the property of Universidad Iberoamericana Cuidad de Mexico and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article intends to read the profound dynamics that characterise the current war in the light of certain classical philosophical categories such as the relationship established by Hegel between substance and subject, the difference between the concept of substance and the concept of function as it was discussed by Cassirer, and finally the binomial power over life and right of death reread by Foucault in a biopolitical key. In the light of these polarities, it is in fact possible to identify two opposing worldviews - on which depend two completely different ways of understanding the function of the state, the weight to be ascribed to rights, and even two different ways of conceiving and conducting war - that do not necessarily coincide with the two opposing sides in the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The film De Humani Corporis Fabrica has repeatedly been dubbed in the English-speaking film criticism media as a "non-fiction shocker" (Chang, 2023), a sample of "tactile cinema" (Mullen, 2023) with "ample gore on display" (Mintzer, 2022). This paper, firstly, aims to contradict these claims, as the film's goal is not to elicit an immersive representation of the human body but a reflection on how it is instead objectified, abstracted, and interpreted by means of deconstructing the medical gaze and via a complex interplay between the viewer's quasi-identification and alienation. To this end, it closely analyses the patterns in the camerawork, the various degrees of remediation of the medical imagery, and the relationships between denotation and connotation, highlighting the prevalence of de-dramatization strategies, which run counter to societal taboos and conventional representations of the hospital in popular culture as a sensationalized site of emergencies. As such, we argue that De Humani Corporis Fabrica is an essay film that seeks neither to "shock" viewers nor to mount a narrow institutional critique of the French sanitary system. By delving into the film's intricate biopolitics, we outline how the various levels of transgression, the emphasis on "malfunction," and the pervasiveness of technology are framed as symptoms of broader tensions between paternalistic modes of interaction and patient-centred approaches within the Western sanitary system at large. Finally, by interpreting the ending as a counterpoint to the objectifying gaze that the film lures us into adopting throughout, we consequently stress the film's defiant sense of "anarchy," as it urges us to reclaim "our" bodies, be them individual or collective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Praxis Filosófica is the property of Universidad del Valle and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This text constitutes a reflection from Michel Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, beginning from the genealogical writings of the author in which he raises the development of social medicine and society’s medicalization processes to make a contrast with the social and political situation caused by the Covid-19 pandemic worldwide. The aim of the writing is to propose a critical look at the biopower exercise which is justified from fear and what it causes as a social teaching. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In her last novella, The Hour of the Star, Lispector makes plain that the brilliance of life – any life whatever – lies in its capacity to endlessly contemplate itself and that as such it is inseparable from its mode of contemplation. As we will suggest in this article, Lispector's view of life as living contemplation resonates with Giorgio Agamben's conception of being as potentiality. In the last installment of his Homo Sacer series, The Use of Bodies, Agamben tries to offer an alternative paradigm of life to that of Western biopolitics, whose power operates on its separation of bare life from forms of life. Central to this new ontology is Agamben's notion of a life as inseparable from its mode or form, as he highlights using a hyphen: form-of-life. By form-of-life, Agamben means that one's living is never reducible to the biological or economic facts of existence because it essentially concerns itself with its potentialities, its singular modes of being. Life that contemplates itself is a life which simply is without being reducible to its function. In The Hour of the Star, Lispector's heroine, Macabéa is not simply a figure of bare life as some critics have suggested by reducing her life to her factual circumstances. She is rather a figure whose life is affected by its own sensation of existing – its unborn possibilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article addresses Giorgio Agamben's critical commentary on the global governance of the Covid-19 pandemic as a paradigm of his political thought. While Agamben's comments have been criticized as exaggerated and conspiratorial, they arise from the conceptual constellation that he has developed starting from the first volume of his Homo Sacer series. At the centre of this constellation is the relation between the concepts of sovereign power and bare life, whose articulation in the figure of homo sacer Agamben traces from the Antiquity to the present. We shall demonstrate that any such articulation is impossible due to the belonging of these concepts to different planes, respectively empirical and transcendental, which Agamben brings together in a problematic fashion. His account of the sovereign state of exception collapses a plurality of empirical states of exception into a zone of indistinction between different exceptional states and the normal state and then elevates this very indistinction to the transcendental condition of intelligibility of politics as such. Conversely, the notion of bare life, originally posited as the transcendental condition of possibility of positive forms of life, is recast as an empirical figure, whose sole form is the absence of form. We conclude that this problematic articulation should be abandoned for a theory that rather highlights the non-relation between sovereign power and bare life, which conditions the possibility of resistance and transformation that remains obscure in Agamben's thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers information on contributors to a scholarly publication, highlighting their diverse research interests and forthcoming works. Topics include Tobias Barnett's exploration of the concept of 'milieu' in modern French thought, examining its intersections with colonialism and fascism. Andrew Benjamin's upcoming books on classical and Renaissance gestures and biopolitics are discussed, reflecting his research focus.

Built on theoretical frameworks of surveillant assemblage, sousveillance and other surveillance and biopolitical scholarship, I analyze two Chinese art projects, Dragonfly Eyes (2017), an experimental film by Xu Bing and Eye Contact (2016), a performance piece by Ge Yulu, as artistic sousveillance to resist surveillance biopower in a control society. I put the two works in dialogue as their shared yet different strategies critically engage with the surveillant assemblage, DIY technology and biopolitical production. Apart from problematizing the algorithmic violence and biopower of the global and also local surveillant assemblage, both art projects also contribute to more-than-human configurations of the surveillance system. I also point out that as these two surveillance artworks are symptomatic of surveillance systems, they may embody mimetic violence and post considerations for more ethical reflections in artistic sousveillance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A discourse of care undergirded colonial political rationality during the era of Indian indenture-ship in the Caribbean. In this essay the voyage of the Salsette from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1858 serves as an entry point into a broader conversation on the repeated archival invocation of care toward coolies during their passage to the plantation colonies. Care, which is synonymous with neither affect nor benevolence, refers to a series of techniques aimed at managing bodies traded for profit. Analyzing the apparatuses through which care for indentured servants was administered, the essay illuminates the racialized and caste-based knowledge systems that were mobilized to "make live" the reserve of potential labor force aboard. Concomitantly, it reads the colonial archive for moments in which indentured servants register their presence through their responses to being or refusal to be cared for and considers the stakes of such refusal for the colonial capitalist project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on historical medical, scientific, and psychological publications, this article of fers a brief history of the idea of the »threshold«, insofar as it has been applied to smells and smelling. It follows two genealogies of smell-related thresholds, firstly backwards from 1980s cultural history, via 1930s sociology and psychoanalysis, to 1840s psychophysics, and then forwards from psychophysics, via fin-de-siècle experimental psychology, to 1980s environmental governance. Responding to concerns about the epistemological utility of smelling in the eighteenth century, the nineteenth century witnessed attempts to render olfaction amenable to measurement, quantification, and visualization. Experimental psychologists aimed to construct pure noses and pure smells through experimental assemblages that used physical thresholds to give validity to the idea of olfactory thresholds. Since the 1950s these assemblages have been leveraged in regulating odor pollution. However, as in the case of environmental governance, the laboratory-origins of olfactory thresholds should give pause to smell studies scholars who seek to deploy the concept as an analytical tool or form of narrative emplotment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]