Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Death

Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Death PDF Author: Paolo Palladino
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1474283020
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 286

Book Description
While the governance of human existence is organised ever-increasingly around life and its potential to proliferate beyond all limits, much critical reflection on the phenomenon is underpinned by considerations about the very negation of life, death. The challenge is to construct an alternative understanding of human existence that is truer to the complexity of the present, biopolitical moment. Palladino responds to the challenge by drawing upon philosophical, historical and sociological modes of inquiry to examine key developments in the history of biomedical understanding of ageing and death. He combines this genealogy with close reflection upon its implications for a critical and effective reading of Foucault's and Deleuze's foundational work on the relationship between life, death and embodied existence. Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Death proposes that the central task of contemporary critical thought is to find ways of coordinating different ways of thinking about molecules, populations and the mortality of the human organism without transforming the notion of life itself into the new transcendent truth that would take the place once occupied by God and Man.

Assisted Death in the Age of Biopolitics and Bioeconomy

Assisted Death in the Age of Biopolitics and Bioeconomy PDF Author: Anna E. Kubiak
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1527558096
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 165

Book Description
This book analyses assisted death in the philosophical context of biopolitics, searching for the form of resistance which would not produce ‘bare life’ and would not exclude marginalized social groups. A great deal of the criticism of euthanasia from pro-life movements associates this term with the Nazi practice of eugenics, and this book considers the inescapability of the Holocaust in this regard, while also moving the discussion on assisted death in new directions.

The Philosophy of Life and Death

The Philosophy of Life and Death PDF Author: Nitzan Lebovic
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349465286
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 301

Book Description
Some of the first figures the Nazis conscripted in their rise to power were rhetoricians devoted to popularizing the German vocabulary of Leben (life). This fascinating study reexamines this movement through one of its most prominent exponents, Ludwig Klages, revealing the philosophical-cultural crises and political volatility of the Weimar era.

The Biopolitics of Punishment

The Biopolitics of Punishment PDF Author: Rick Elmore
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810144891
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 309

Book Description
This volume marks a new chapter in the long-standing debate between Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault regarding argumentative methods and their political implications. The essays chart the undertheorized dialogue between the two philosophers on questions of life, death, punishment, and power—an untapped point of departure from which we might continue to read the convergence and divergence of their work. What possibilities for political resistance might this dialogue uncover? And how might they relate to contemporary political crises? With the resurgence of fascism and authoritarianism across the globe, the rise of white supremacist and xenophobic violence, and the continued brutality of state-sanctioned and extrajudicial killings by police, border patrols, and ordinary citizens, there is a pressing need to critically analyze our political present. These essays bring to bear the critical force of Derrida’s and Foucault’s biopolitical thought to practices of mass incarceration, the death penalty, life without parole, immigration and detention, racism and police violence, transphobia, human and animal relations, and the legacies of colonization. At the heart of their biopolitics, the volume shows, lies the desire to deconstruct and resist in the name of a future that is more just and less policed. It is this impulse that makes reading their work together, at this moment, both crucial and worthwhile.

Improper Life

Improper Life PDF Author: Timothy C. Campbell
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452932786
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 205

Book Description
How biopolitics can get beyond its obsession with death

The Government of Life

The Government of Life PDF Author: Vanessa Lemm
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823255999
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Book Description
Foucault’s late work on biopolitics and governmentality has established him as the fundamental thinker of contemporary continental political thought and as a privileged source for our current understanding of neoliberalism and its technologies of power. In this volume, an international and interdisciplinary group of Foucault scholars examines his ideas of biopower and biopolitics and their relation to his project of a history of governmentality and to a theory of the subject found in his last courses at the College de France. Many of the chapters engage critically with the Italian theoretical reception of Foucault. At the same time, the originality of this collection consists in the variety of perspectives and traditions of reception brought to bear upon the problematic connections between biopolitics and governmentality established by Foucault’s last works.

Beyond Foucault

Beyond Foucault PDF Author: Anne Brunon-Ernst
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317174763
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 247

Book Description
In his hugely influential book Discipline and Punish, Foucault used the example of Jeremy Bentham's Panopticon prison as a means of representing the transition from the early modern monarchy to the late modern capitalist state. In the former, power is visibly exerted, for instance by the destruction of the body of the criminal, while in the latter power becomes invisible and focuses on the mind of the subject, in order to identify, marginalize, and 'treat' those who are regarded as incapable of participating in, or unwilling to submit to, the disciplines of production. The Panopticon links the worlds of Bentham and Foucault scholars yet they are often at cross-purposes; with Bentham scholars lamenting the ways in which Foucault is perceived to have misunderstood panopticon, and Foucauldians apparently unaware of the complexities of Bentham's thought. This book combines an appreciation of Bentham's broader project with an engagement of Foucault's insights on economic government to go beyond the received reading of panopticism as a dark disciplinary technology of power. Scholars here offer new ways of understanding the Panopticon projects through a wide variety of topics including Bentham's plural Panopticons and their elaboration of schemes of 'panoptic Utopia', the 'inverted Panopticon', 'panoptic governance', 'political panopticism' and 'legal panopticism'. French studies on the Panopticon are groundbreaking and this book brings this research to an English-speaking audience for the first time. It is essential reading, not only for those studying Bentham and Foucault, but also those with an interest in intellectual history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and those studying contemporary surveillance and society.

Terms of the Political:Community, Immunity, Biopolitics

Terms of the Political:Community, Immunity, Biopolitics PDF Author: Roberto Esposito
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823242641
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 161

Book Description
This title calls for the opening of political thought toward a re-signification of terms - such as 'community, ' 'immunity, ' 'biopolitics, ' and 'the impersonal' - in ways that affirm rather than negate life.

Immunitas

Immunitas PDF Author: Roberto Esposito
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 150952617X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 200

Book Description
This book by Roberto Esposito - a leading Italian political philosopher - is a highly original exploration of the relationship between human bodies and societies. The original function of law, even before it was codified, was to preserve peaceful cohabitation between people who were exposed to the risk of destructive conflict. Just as the human body's immune system protects the organism from deadly incursions by viruses and other threats, law also ensures the survival of the community in a life-threatening situation. It protects and prolongs life. But the function of law as a form of immunization points to a more disturbing consideration. Like the individual body, the collective body can be immunized from the perceived danger only by allowing a little of what threatens it to enter its protective boundaries. This means that in order to escape the clutches of death, life is forced to incorporate within itself the lethal principle. Starting from this reflection on the nature of immunization, Esposito offers a wide-ranging analysis of contemporary biopolitics. Never more than at present has the demand for immunization come to characterize all aspects of our existence. The more we feel at risk of being infiltrated and infected by foreign elements, the more the life of the individual and society closes off within its protective boundaries, forcing us to choose between a self-destructive outcome and a more radical alternative based on a new conception of community.

Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism

Necropolitics, Racialization, and Global Capitalism PDF Author: Marina Gržinic
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 0739191977
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 339

Book Description
This book articulates a contemporary, globalized world as one in which radical disparities in distribution of wealth are being reproduced as the basis for depoliticized social, institutional, and ideological discourses. At its center is a reorientation of global capitalism from the management of life towards making a surplus value from death. This change is presented as a reorientation of biopolitics (bio meaning life) to necropolitics (necro meaning death). Therefore in the book we work with processes of change, of a historicization of biopolitics and its turn into necropolitics that leads to a theoretical trajectory from M. Foucault to A. Mbembe and beyond. This book interprets the sustained perception of existence of dichotomy between these provisional extremes as a trademark of apolitical and/or post-political logics on which contemporary institutional, political, and social discourses tend to be structured upon. More, contrary to the majority of approaches that insists on a profound dichotomy between democracy and totalitarianism, between poverty and free market, and between democracy and capitalism, this book does not interpret these relations as dichotomous, but as mutually fulfilling. The book elaborates, in the context of articulation of these logics, contemporary, imperial racism (racialization) as an ideology of capitalism and states that the First World’s monopoly on definition of modernity has its basis in contemporary reorganization of colonialism. In the book, the authors trace a forensic methodology of global capitalism with which life, art, culture, economy, and the political are becoming part of a detailed system of scrutiny presented and framed in relation to criminal or civil law. Criminalization of each and every segment of our life is working hand in hand with a depoliticization of social conflicts and pacification of the relation between those who rules and those who are ruled. The outcome is a differentiation of every single concept that must from now bear the adjectives of the necropolitical or forensic; therefore we can talk about forensic images, art, projects, and necropolitical life, democracy, citizenship. This will change radically the perspectives of an emancipative project of politics (if it is any possible to be named as such) for the future.