The Experts below are selected from a list of 14166 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Sergei Prozorov - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Democratic Biopolitics
2019Co-Authors: Sergei ProzorovAbstract:Contemporary studies of Biopolitics tend to assume that the rise of biopolitical governance entails the eclipse of democracy. The abstract egalitarianism of democratic government appears to be incompatible with the concrete, particularist and individualizing operations of biopower. The revival of democracy is then only conceivable as the overcoming of Biopolitics. Democratic Biopolitics challenges this interpretation and argues for the possibility of a positive synthesis of Biopolitics and democracy, in which both rationalities can positively transform each other. The book identifies the sources of the impasse of the current critique of Biopolitics in its broadly Rousseauan orientation that conceives of democratic subject as subtracted from all particular identities, interests or forms of life. In contrast, we argue that democracy is practicable from within particular forms of life as long as their contingency is affirmed and manifested. Drawing on a wide range of authors both belonging to and outside the Biopolitics canon, Prozorov develops a vision of democratic Biopolitics that consists in the coexistence of diverse and incommensurable forms of life on the basis of their reciprocal recognition as free, equal and in common. He demonstrates the realizability of this vision by addressing its correlates in our lived experience and argues for its sustainability by elucidating the pleasure involved in the freeform, experimental way of living that democracy makes possible.
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foucault s affirmative Biopolitics cynic parrhesia and the biopower of the powerless
Political Theory, 2017Co-Authors: Sergei ProzorovAbstract:While Foucault’s work on Biopolitics continues to inspire diverse studies in a variety of disciplines, it has largely been missing from the debates on the possibility of “affirmative Biopolitics” which have been primarily influenced by the work of Agamben and Esposito. This article restores Foucault’s work to these debates, proposing that his final lecture course at the College de France in 1983–1984 developed a paradigm of affirmative Biopolitics in the reading of the Cynic practice of truth-telling (parrhesia). The Cynic problematization of the relation between truth and life and their transvaluation of conventional truths by relocating them to the domain of bare life not only seeks to transform one’s life in accordance with the truth but also, through the confrontation with the existing conventions and norms, to transform the world as such. Cynic parrhesia is thus biopolitical, insofar as it reclaims the power of one’s life from the social order and its rationalities of government and applies it to one...
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Badiou's Biopolitics: : The human animal and the body of truth
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 2014Co-Authors: Sergei ProzorovAbstract:The paper addresses Alain Badiou's attempts to overcome the biopolitical tendency in contemporary Western societies by redefining politics as a ‘truth procedure’, transcending the mere existence of human beings and exposing them to the dimension of eternal truths. I argue that Badiou's account of the formation of the ‘body of truth’ fails to break with the biopolitical logic and instead corresponds to Agamben's definition of Biopolitics in terms of the inclusive exclusion of bare life from the political order of ‘good life’. While Badiou's claims to overcome Biopolitics are problematic, his politics of truth nonetheless exemplifies a genuine alternative to the ‘democratic-materialist’ Biopolitics that he criticizes. Through a reading of Badiou's account of the generation of truths I demonstrate that the content of truths is neither arbitrary nor transcendent in relation to the bodies of human beings but rather affirms their ontological equality against every form of hierarchy or exclusion. Badiou's ‘body ...
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Powers of Life and Death Biopolitics beyond Foucault
Alternatives: Global Local Political, 2013Co-Authors: Sergei ProzorovAbstract:The problematic of Biopolitics has become increasingly important in the social sciences. Starting from Michel Foucault’s genealogies of governance of sexuality, crime, and mental illness in modern Europe, which marked the shift from negative and repressive techniques of sovereign power toward the positive and productive power over life, the research on Biopolitics has developed into a wider interdisciplinary orientation, addressing the rationalities of power over living beings in diverse spatialand temporal contexts. While Biopolitics is conventionally understood as positive and productive, numerous studies of Biopolitics, both theoretical and empirical, suggest that this claim is by no means unproblematic. Biopolitics is inherently paradoxical, in that its ambition to ‘‘make live,’’ to foster, augment, and optimize life, remains intertwined with its apparent opposite, the negative power of exclusion and annihilation. While this conversion of Biopolitics into ‘‘thanatopolitics’’ was noted already in Foucault’s History of Sexuality I, its full implications have been elaborated in the more recent theories of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and others. These studies demonstrate that the association of the positive power over life with the negative power of death is hardly coincidental but rather lies at the heart of the biopolitical project. While the interpretations of this conjunction of the powers of life and death are certainly diverse and resort to ontological, anthropological, historical, and ideological arguments, they clearly demonstrate that the problematic of Biopolitics may no longer be viewed in terms of a simple temporal succession from the dark age of sovereign negativity to the glorious age of positive power that makes life live. Biopower, however we define it, is always already a power of life and death, not only in the sense that fostering the life of some presupposes the death of others but also in the more ominous sense that the life fostered, amplified, and optimized in biopolitical practices remains in proximity to death precisely by virtue of being enfolded in an apparatus of power, whose biopolitical productivity does not exclude sovereign negativity. This understanding of Biopolitics introduces a range of problems for critical research. Insofar as it is no longer meaningful to simply oppose biopower to sovereignty as the positive to the negative, what does the task of critique consist in? Is it a matter of attempting to dissociate the powers of life and death, to free Biopolitics from its constituent negativity? What does it mean to speak of a ‘‘positive’’ or ‘‘affirmative’’ Biopolitics given the intertwining of the powers of life and death? Can Biopolitics be affirmative, unless what one affirms in it is precisely death itself? Alternatively, if a Biopolitics without negativity and death is impossible, should criticism aim at exiting the biopolitical
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Living Ideas and Dead Bodies: The Biopolitics of Stalinism
Alternatives: Global Local Political, 2013Co-Authors: Sergei ProzorovAbstract:Aside from casual references to Soviet Biopolitics in the work of Foucault, Agamben, and Esposito, the theoretical literature on Biopolitics has largely ignored the Soviet experience, while empirical research in Russian studies has rarely addressed Biopolitics. The article examines the experience of Stalinism as an important case for the study of Biopolitics that helps resolve a problem preoccupying scholars from Foucault onward: the proximity of Biopolitics to its opposite, the thanatopolitics of the mass production of death. How is it that a mode of power presenting itself in terms of care, augmentation, and intensification of life so frequently end up negating life itself? The article addresses this question in the context of the confluence of two political rationalities in the project of Soviet socialism, the revolutionary transcendence of the old order and the biopolitical immanentism of the construction of new forms of life. Focusing on the catastrophic policies of the Great Break (1928–1932), it ar...
Luis Loboguerrero - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Biopolitics of security in the 21st century an introduction
Review of International Studies, 2008Co-Authors: Michael Dillon, Luis LoboguerreroAbstract:This essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of Biopolitics as a dispositif de securit e and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early Biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant Biopolitics of security in the molecular age.
Michael Dillon - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Biopolitics of security a political analytic of finitude
2015Co-Authors: Michael DillonAbstract:Preface 1. A Political Analytic of Finitude: The Infinity of Finite Government and Rule 2. Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century 3. Biopolitics, Government and Economy 4. Underwriting Security 5. Pious Economies 6. Biopolitics of Security, Race and War 7. Governing Terror: The State of Emergency of Biopolitical Emergence Conclusion: Acceleration: Advent of the Baroque Katechon
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Biopolitics of security in the 21st century an introduction
Review of International Studies, 2008Co-Authors: Michael Dillon, Luis LoboguerreroAbstract:This essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of Biopolitics as a dispositif de securit e and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early Biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant Biopolitics of security in the molecular age.
Dillon Michael - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century
Review of International Studies, 2008Co-Authors: Luis Lobo-guerrero, Dillon MichaelAbstract:This essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of Biopolitics as a dispositif de securite and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early Biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant Biopolitics of security in the molecular age.
Marc Schuilenburg - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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The birth of mindpolitics: understanding nudging in public health policy
Social Theory & Health, 2017Co-Authors: Rik Peeters, Marc SchuilenburgAbstract:This article addresses the question: ‘In what ways have nudging and other behavioural techniques entered the realm of policymaking for public health and what does that mean for the way contemporary society is governed?’ In our genealogy of Dutch public health policy, we have identified four periods: ‘rational persuasion/individual responsibility’ (‘70s), ‘welfarist emancipation’ (‘80s), ‘neo-liberal regulation’ (‘90s), and ‘management of choice’ (now). We show how a different type of technique, which we call ‘mindpolitics’, has slowly complemented the Biopolitics of public hygiene and health care. We argue that to think in terms of Biopolitics today means to think of its relation to a world in which public health is managed through architecture of choice and the way individuals are nudged into making better decisions.