Biopolitics

A lecture by the philosopher Giorgio Agamben which he gave as part of Fest van de filosofie in Leuven, Belgium on March 30, 2013 (lecture only)

Giorgio Agamben - Capitalism As Religion

The opening session of the Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Working Group provides a space for discussion of the lasting insights, limitations, and potential applications of Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Linking neoliberalism and biopolitics at both the historical and conceptual level, Foucault’s prescient lecture series lays the groundwork for the working group’s concern with the contemporary management of populations through diverse practices of economization, privatization, and financialization.

Hans Sluga is a Professor of Philosophy and William Callison is a Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.  More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Revisiting Foucault: The Biopolitics... | Hans Sluga | 9/17/14

In this session, we reflect on how norms and practices of neoliberal governmentality are disseminated and transformed across borders. Professors Rofel and Bargu’s extensive studies of China and Turkey respectively, offer new insights into how different forms of neoliberalism transform social and political life in various contexts, while also calling into question the enduring viability of neoliberalism as an analytic frame. We aim collectively to problematize and contest Eurocentric approaches to the study of neoliberalism, while also investigating the role under neoliberalism of NGOs, IGOs, corporations and state institutions. We hope to foster a comparative and interdisciplinary dialogue to reassess both how neoliberalisms function as practices in the contemporary world, and what limitations the overall framework of neoliberalism may pose for the analysis of contemporary transformations of social life. We consider questions concerning the privatization of public goods, international investment and development programs, the dissemination of norms of entrepreneurship, the role of experts in development projects, micro-lending, and the effects of such developments on “public culture,” sexual and gender norms, and kinship structures.

Introduction: William Callison, Ph.D. Candidate in Political Science, UC Berkeley. More information can be found at criticaltheory.berkeley.edu.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Globalizing Neoliberalism(s)? | Julia Elyachar | 10/8/14

Luca Follis, Lancaster University

Hunger and the Politics of the Impersonal

This paper examines the hunger strike as a stumbling block in law’s tacit withdrawal from incarceration and detention settings. Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s category of the dispositif and his ongoing critique of the biopolitics of personhood, I consider the recent cases at Guantanamo Bay, the hunger strikes in the California Prison system and older examples like the strikes of prisoners in Northern Ireland (of which Bobby Sands is perhaps the most emblematic). These acts push beyond the moral and legal terrain that surrounds them (e.g., whether and in what circumstances it is appropriate for administrators and medical personnel to violate prisoner rights); they represent tactical challenges to a form of power that despite its claims to impartiality and impersonality actively relies on maintaining a dense array of shifting biopolitical thresholds. I argue that the hunger strike through its open embrace of mortality and biological existence represents a powerful critique of this enduring logic and brings to the fore the gap between law’s claim to justice (as neutral arbiter) and its binary grounding.

Luca Follis (2014) Hunger Strike And The Politics Of The Impersonal

Animalities 
with Fahim Amir, Arianna Ferrari, Chris Wilbert; Moderation: Peter Hallward

People have always been in social relations with animals. In recent years, non-human animals are increasingly seen as part of sociality. New aspects of disciplines are emerging: multispecies ethnographies, anthrozoology, animal geographies, and cross-disciplinary areas rethinking agency. Yet to date, writing on biopolitics has given little attention to the human-animal relations. Can such concepts aid a radical politics or are new theories needed?

54321… Radical Philosophy Conference 2015- Animalities

Dr Médéric Martin-Mazé, Research Associate in the Department of War Studies, gives an assessment of the new report by the Intelligence & Security Committee of the British Parliament on mass surveillance.

Dr Lauren Wilcox, Deputy Director of the Cambridge University of Cambridge Centre for Gender Studies, talks about her new book: Bodies of Violence: Theorizing Embodied Subjects in International Relations (OUP 2015).

Jayne Peake provides details of next week's events.

Presented by Dr Peter Busch

DISCLAIMER: Any information, statements or opinions contained in this podcast are those of the individual speakers. They do not represent the opinions of the Department of War Studies or King's College London.

UK and Mass Surveillance / Bodies of Violence


The Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference is the culminating event in a series of working group meetings and presentations on neoliberalism and biopolitics that are also organized by graduate students William Callison and Zachary Manfredi.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference | Banu Bargu, Response by Judith Butler | 2/27/15

The Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference is the culminating event in a series of working group meetings and presentations on neoliberalism and biopolitics that are also organized by graduate students William Callison and Zachary Manfredi. 

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference | Michel Feher, Response by Albena Azmanova | 2/27/15

The Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference is the culminating event in a series of working group meetings and presentations on neoliberalism and biopolitics that are also organized by graduate students William Callison and Zachary Manfredi.

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference | Étienne Balibar | 2/28/15

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics Conference | Bernard Harcourt, Response by Jonathan Simon | 2/27/15

A conversation recorded with Banu Bargu in New York on August 10, 2015
http://the-archipelago.net/2015/08/11/banu-bargu-weaponization-of-life-human-shields-and-hunger-strikers/

BANU BARGU /// Weaponization of Life: Human Shields and Hunger Strikers

Zoey Hart

Biopolitics and Engagement: What Foucault Learned about Power from the Maoists

Dr Caroline Magennis gave this talk ‘”History exists in your body”: The Legacy of Nationalist Biopolitics in Culture’ at the 'Rethinking the 1980/81 Hunger Strike' symposium on 27 June 2016 at the University of Notre Dame's London Campus. This symposium was co-organised by Dr Alison Garden and Maggie Scull.

For more information on the symposium: https://rethinkingthehungerstrikes.wordpress.com/

Dr Magennis owns the copyright to this content.

Dr Caroline Magennis: 'The Legacy of Nationalist Biopolitics in Culture’

Marta Segarra’s lecture will consider how some beings are relegated to the external margins of the community and reduced to an anonymous mass, which is often more related to animality than to humanity. From an ecofeminist and posthuman perspective, it will also examine the possibility of a reformulation of the human community beyond the “family.” It will focus on how new kinship, understood as “modes of intimate alliance,” are established between nonhuman and human actors in two performances: Bartabas’ and Murobushi’s choreography, The Centaur and the Animal (2011), and Maud Alpi’s film, Still Life (2016).

Marta Segarra is a Research Professor at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), and a member of the Laboratoire d’études de genre et de sexualité‒Research Center on Gender and Sexuality Studies (LEGS). She is also a Professor of Gender Studies and French Studies at the University of Barcelona. Segarra co-founded in 1994 the Center for Women and Literature‒Gender, Sexualities and Cultural Criticism at the University of Barcelona, of which she was director until 2013. From 2004 to 2015, she also directed the UNESCO Chair on Women, Development and Cultures, by appointment of UNESCO. She has published articles (in English, French, Spanish and Catalan) in the fields of Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Francophone Maghrebi Studies, contemporary French literature and cinema, biopolitics and posthumanism, for journals such as Europe, New Literary History, Mosaic, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies/Sites, and Paragraph. Her books include: Teoría de los cuerpos agujereados (Holey Bodies: A Theory, Melusina, 2014), Differences in Common: Gender, Vulnerabilty and Community (co-ed. with J. Sabadell-Nieto, Rodopi, 2014), Demenageries. Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida (co-ed. with A. E. Berger, Rodopi, 2011), The Portable Cixous (ed., Columbia University Press, 2010), and Traces du désir (Traces of Desire, Campagne Première, 2008).

Dancing in a Posthuman World: Material Bodies and New Alliances | Marta Segarra | 9/5/17

Dr. Yolonda Yvette Wilson is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy at Howard University. Dr. Wilson does research in Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy, and Race Theory. Her current work centers on bioethics and race. She joins the program to discuss the growing topic of "Brain Death" as a classification of death and what it means in deeper cases regarding race, culture and spirituality.

Information is the Best Medicine 1.5.19 - Dr. Yolonda Y. Wilson talks ethics of Brain Death

Part one of a three part series on the Willowbrook institution in NY in the 60'-80's and the activism to shut it down, Leroy Moore analyzing this with a race & disability framework. With Puerto Rican professor and writer Jorge Matos Valldejuli, author of "The Racialized History of Disability Activism from the “Willowbrooks of this World'”. 

And also upcoming in part three with an interview with 80 year old Willie Mae Goodman, who shares her story and her activism, taking over the streets of NYC way before the 504 protest. May 7th, NOW, on KEXU 96.1 FM East Oakland, CA.

Biopolitics

PookTheDestroyer