Biopolitcs

Comunità, immunità, apertura verso l’alterità: una biopolitica affermativa e oltre-umana?

by Giacomo Pezzano

Published in "Trópos. Rivista di ermeneutica e critica filosofica”, IV, 2, 2011, pp. 167-184

Roberto Esposito claims that biopolitics characterizes the entire modernity, and that it is built on the immunity... more Roberto Esposito claims that biopolitics characterizes the entire modernity, and that it is built on the immunity dispositive. Im-munity is the negation of the munus which animates and builds com-munity: inside the immunitarian paradigm, thinking politics and ontology is considering men as ab-solutes beings, without any kind of engagement to each other, inhabited by a vacuum to deny. Esposito believes this means shaping an anthropological paradigm (systematized by philosophical anthropology in the 20th century) in which man is thought to be distinct from the animal since he is capable of denying his own nature and, more generally, his relationship with the world and the other beings – that is, a paradigm in which community has no ‘positive’ place. In order to overcome the immunitarian paradigm, we need to define the outlines of an affirmative biopolitics, a politics ‘of ’ life and not ‘on’ life. This biopolitical shift requires the understanding of the ‘flow of life,’ of its everlasting and unprotected openness: Esposito claims that life is impersonal and intrinsically normative, over-human and perpetually exposed to the ‘outside.’ Finally, this perspective leaves open a crucial question: can over-man exist without man?

From bio-power to psycho-power. The pharmacology of disciplinary technologies

by Nathan Van Camp

draft only; please do not cite

Policing Life and Thickening Delinquency at the New Frontier

by Gilberto Rosas

From sub- to super-citizenship: sex hormones and the body politic in Brazil

by Emilia Sanabria

(2010) in Ethnos, Journal of Anthropology 75(4): 377-401

Sex hormones in Brazil are mobilised as modes of regulatory control and to discipline subjectivites. Their packaging... more Sex hormones in Brazil are mobilised as modes of regulatory control and to discipline subjectivites. Their packaging effectively differentiates between two forms of citizenship. The first, available to those with private health, is founded on notions of personal autonomy, individual choice and self-enhancement, whilst the second frames decisions in terms of the individual's moral responsibility to the wider collectivity. Here, technical and biomedical interventions on middle class bodies have personalising tendencies, whilst those effected on the bodies of the urban poor can be read as modes of inclusion through standardisation. Personalisation, in the Brazilian sense, concerns the attribution of privileges which place a person above the undifferentiated mass of individuals. The paper critically engages with approaches to bio-citizenships developed in contexts where biological inclusion is predicated on patient activism and shows how, in Brazil, complying with medical regimes is an integral part of constituting oneself as a citizen.

Did somebody say liberal totalitarianism? Yes, and despite the 5½ (mis)uses of the notion

by Zeynep Gambetti

Revisiting the concept of totalitarianism, together with and in spite of Slavoj Zizek, has utmost importance at a time... more Revisiting the concept of totalitarianism, together with and in spite of Slavoj Zizek, has utmost importance at a time when the post-9/11 world takes on totalitarian forms. These forms seem to escape both the logic of ‘‘everyday totalitarianism,’’ as elaborated by Zizek, and that of ‘‘Empire,’’ described by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.