Search results for "biopower"
showing 10 items of 28 documents
Was Thomas Hobbes the first biopolitical thinker?
2023
Thomas Hobbes's name often comes up as scholars debate the history of biopower, which regulates the biological life of individual bodies and entire populations. This article examines whether and to what extent Hobbes may be regarded as the first biopolitical philosopher. I investigate this question by performing a close reading of Hobbes's political texts and by comparing them to some of the most influential theories on biopolitics proposed by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and others. Hobbes is indeed the first great thinker to assert the supreme political importance of safeguarding life. Furthermore, this prominence of non-contemplative life is not limited to mere su…
”Aika on kaikkein haurain pinta”
2016
“Time Is the Flimsiest Surface.” Affective Distance and the Weight of History in Yiyun Li’s Kinder Than Solitude
 This article examines the linkages between personal and political history and their relationship to the experience of time and a ective distance in Yiyun Li’s (b. 1972) novel Kinder an Solitude (2014). The method of analysis is a combination of close reading with a specific focus on affective distance, and a historically contextualizing approach. In this article, the notion of affective distance refers to an individual level psychic and emotional experience of estrangement, loneliness, and temporal and spatial discontinuity. The manifestation of a ective distance in Li’s no…
Er?mos Aporos as the Paradigmatic Figure of Western (Thanato) Political Subject
2013
The originary figure of the Western political subject is neither the Aristotelian zōon politikon nor the Agambenian homo sacer but the Socratic erēmos aporos. Like the Agambenian homo sacer, the Socratic erēmos aporos is abandoned by his fellow citizens, not outside the polis but in the polis, being a refugee in his own city. He lives, as Callicles says of Socrates in Gorgias (486c), “in his city as an absolute outcast.” Moreover, like the Agambenian homo sacer, the Socratic erēmos aporos also lives in a state close to death—“in a state as close to death as possible,” as Socrates says of himself in Phaedo (67d). However, there is a decisive difference between the Agambenian homo sacer and …
Building on precarious knowledge: The governing of family formation through matching practice in transnational adoption
2018
This article explores matching as a psycho-pedagogical technology of child placement in transnational adoption. Drawing on empirical data and theoretical linkages to governmentality and biopolitics...
Emotions and epistemology: a path for reconsideration in the 21st century
2017
The present paper explores the gap between sensations and emotions in the global capitalism. We held the thesis that there are diverse ways to systematise the theoretical orientations on which the studies on the body/emotion are based; a possible one, having in mind the Latin American context and without intent of exhaustiveness, is the following: a) a line of work connected to Foucault and his concepts of control, discipline, and technologies of the self; b) an approach connected to Bourdieu and his notions of habitus, body hexis, and social fields; c) a set of investigations in the field of biopolitics referring to Esposito and Agamben on the one hand, and to Negri and Hardt on the other;…
Biopoder y género: las vidas desnudas de la guerra
2014
ABSTRACT Faced with this new global sovereignty, which is supported by "societies in control" and whose fundamental political scene is the "bios", I am interested in tracking gender within the following parameters: politics/women/war. RESUMEN Frente a esta nueva soberania global, sostenida por las “sociedades control” y cuyo escenario politico primordial es el “bios”, me interesa rastrear las marcas de genero en la triada: politica/mujeres/guerra.
Confession, Voice and the Sensualization of Power: The Significance of Michel Foucault’s 1962 Encounter with Jean-Jacques Rousseau
2012
Michel Foucault is known for his critiques of the intertwinement of empirical knowledge, perception and experience, and power. Within this general framework, this article focuses on a fairly unnoticed text of Foucault’s: his 1962 Introduction to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Dialogues. The article shows that Foucault’s Introduction is central for more than one reason: Firstly, it is apparently the first piece, in which Foucault focuses in detail on confession as an individualizing mode of power and truth-utterance. Secondly, in this text, Foucault treats confession as an empirical, sensual and affective form of power. Thirdly, in this early text, Foucault presents what can be called his critique …
DIONYSIAN BIOPOLITICS: KARL KERÉNYI’S CONCEPT OF INDESTRUCTIBLE LIFE
2014
Scholar of religion Karl Kerenyi's last book, Dionysos, is a grand attempt at reinterpreting ζωη (zoe), the Greek concept of indestructible life, which he distinguishes from βίος (bios), finite life. In Kerenyi's view, the meaning and sensual experience of zoe was expressed in its richest form in the Cretan beginnings of the cult of Dionysos. The major characteristics of this cult, as Kerenyi describes, were beyond the cultural, political, and sexual limits of the Christian interpretations of life and nature. Searching for modern analogies to zoe, Kerenyi explains the idea in relation to molecular biology's minimum definition of life. Despite the fact that Kerenyi's book contains only minor…
What is a child? Childhood’s images and narratives in Lucía Puenzo
2016
La producción de la escritora y cineasta Lucía Puenzo (Argentina, 1976) indaga insistentemente sobre el estatuto de la infancia a partir de personajes marcados por la anomalía o el exceso: desde la monstruosidad que asoma en los cuerpos de Alex (en XXY, 2007) y Lilith (Wakolda, 2013), la extraña naturaleza de la leyenda y el narrador de El niño pez (2009) hasta los chicos bordelines de La maldición de Jacinta Pichimahuida (2007). De un modo u otro, la “rareza” de estos niños no se acomoda a la distribución de especies, géneros, familias e identidades que establecen los dispositivos disciplinarios del poder en nuestra época y salta allí donde la vida no se contiene o no se define bajo el sig…
Emotions and political rhetoric: Perception of danger, group conflict and the biopolitics of fear
2016
Abstract In the present article I shall argue that human emotion is multifaceted and has a cognitive dimension in virtue of its intricate connections with beliefs, memories, imagination, and other products of human rationality. Human emotion also has a social and political dimension. When we think about fear we cannot characterize it as a mere stimulus-response phenomenon: it is, due to its cognitive facet, more complex and related to our ideas about survival and well-being. This leaves fear exposed to political rhetoric, and thus to political manipulation. Fear can be aroused, guided and nourished amongst the population, giving rise to a biopolitics of fear. In this article, I will conside…