Search results for "biopolitics"
showing 10 items of 23 documents
The Double Paradigm of Power
2010
As everybody knows, power is a ugly thing, escaping an immediate catch that is aimed to represent it in a univocal way. In the western culture, its conformation is investigated by the classic metaphysical question – what is power? – so inexorably linking it to its essence, that yet defines the perimeter of truth in connection with its existence: in fact that question is possible only for what it is, not for what it is not (i.e. nihilism); things as they are given, they are so in their essence, that is unalterable in time and not deniable as truth effect. If things are by essence, they are true. So and not otherwise, that’s all! The primacy of essence as a real signification of things in the…
Letture operaiste di Gramsci. Il caso Negri
2020
This article aims to analyze the relationship between Antonio Negri and the political and philosophical categories of Antonio Gramsci. It is my intention to resume, from the Sixties of the last century to nowadays, the stragegical uses of Gramsci’s thought by Negri. According to me, we can divide four periods in the theoretical framework of Negri. In the first one, Gramsci is an author incompatible with the workerist strategy of class struggle. In the second one, there is a sort of use of Gramsci against Gramsci. Pointendly, Negri tries to subtract the author of the Prison Notebooks from the prerogatives of the Pci. After the arrest of Negri in the 1979, Gramsci’s figure became more ambiguo…
CRITICA DELLA BIOPOLITICA. FORZA DEL VIVENTE E ACRAZIA ETOPOLITICA
2016
In this paper Vaccaro criticizes the notion of biopolitics in the specific link between life and death, opposing the power of living to the concept of life as a natural substance and the force of ethopolitical acratis to the ontological fixing of the politics.
Vita di un impero: tracce di metafore biologiche in Tucidide
2019
Although we do not find in the narrative of the Peloponnesian War an explicit analogy between the phases of human life (more or less distributed) and those of the great political bodies, it remains nevertheless fruitful in my opinion to explore the text in search of clues for biological metaphors. In particular, I will follow the traces left throughout the narrative by three crucial elements: daring (τόλμα), desire (ἔρως), disease (νόσος). The biological metaphor of the 'degrees of development' of the living being in Thucydides does not find fulfillment in the senectus. His absence was charged by Reinhart Koselleck as a distinctive feature of Greek historiography, especially of the classica…
Bene vivere politice
2022
Abstract This chapter approaches the question of biopolitics in ancient political thought looking not at specific political techniques but at notions of the final aim of the political community. It argues that the “happiness” (eudaimonia, beatitudo) that constitutes the greatest human good in the tradition from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas is not a “biopolitical” ideal, but rather a metabiopolitical one, consisting in a contemplative activity situated above and beyond the biological and the political. It is only with Thomas Hobbes that civic happiness becomes “biopolitically” identified with simple survival; for modernity, as Hannah Arendt puts it, mere being alive becomes the greatest human…
L’allattamento tra cura e cultura: dall’Africa all’ipertrofia tecnologica
2017
L’allattamento è una pratica finora poco studiata dall’antropologia culturale e medica, atto che si colloca tra la natura e la cultura, tra la sfera privata e quella sociale della donna e che, come la nascita e la gravidanza. Esso esprime in dinamiche biopolitiche che denotano l’organizzazione della società stessa, le gerarchie nei ruoli e i rapporti di genere. In quanto pratica culturale, l’allattamento si differenzia in base all’appartenenza sociale ed etnica della madre e del neonato, portando con sé delle differenze rituali come nella legge della “parentela di latte” nelle società musulmane o nei tabu apotropaici dell’Africa subsahariana. Il saggio propone alcune riflessioni su quanto t…
I corpi del virus
2020
In un articolo recentemente uscito in italiano, Bruno Latour spiega che il nuovo coronavirus illustra in modo eclatante come gli attori non umani irrompano nei nostri spazi collettivi esigendo profonde trasformazioni (e invitando a ripensare così noi stessi al loro interno). Al momento è impossibile valutare questi cambiamenti sul lungo periodo. È chiaro però che SARS-CoV-2 ha avuto subito effetti visibilissimi sulle istituzioni che danno forma al nostro universo collettivo: mercati finanziari, filiere produttive, sistemi sanitari, regolamenti, lockdown. Mi sembra che il luogo di convergenza di questi ambiti tematici sia il corpo, figura in cui si incrociano le isotopie mediche, economiche,…
A Farewell to Homo Sacer? Sovereign Power and Bare Life in Agamben’s Coronavirus Commentary
2021
AbstractThe 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, respective…
Foucault and the birth of psychopolitics : Towards a genealogy of crisis governance
2020
The article contributes to the genealogy of current tendencies in crisis governance by reconstructing Michel Foucault’s analysis of the application of the notion of crisis in 19th-century psychiatry. This analysis complements and corrects Reinhart Koselleck’s history that viewed crisis as originally a medical, judicial or theological concept that was transferred to the political domain in the 18th century. In contrast, Foucault highlights how the psychiatric application of the concept of crisis was itself political, conditioned by the disciplinary power of the psychiatrist. Unlike the ancient medical concept of crisis that emphasized the doctor’s judgement in observing the event of truth i…
Políticas de aparición/desaparición (The Politics of Appearance/Disappearance)
2019
Los asuntos concernientes a las políticas de la des/aparición son amplios, variados y complejos. Atendiendo a los procesos históricos y a las categorizaciones de la (des)aparición que de ellos se derivan, en este trabajo identificamos dos entradas analíticas que consideramos principales. En primer lugar, abordamos el significado de la aparición y la desaparición desde la perspectiva de la teoría política liberal. En concreto, analizamos cómo regímenes políticos distintos se relacionan con el individuo-ciudadano y el espacio púbico. En segundo lugar, respondiendo a una asentada tradición te&oacu…