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This anthology collects the texts that defined the concept of biopolitics, which has become so significant throughout the humanities and social sciences today. The far-reaching influence of the biopolitical-the relation of politics to life, or the state to the body-is not surprising given its centrality to matters such as healthcare, abortion, immigration, and the global distribution of essential medicines and medical technologies.Michel Foucault gave new and unprecedented meaning to the term "biopolitics" in his 1976 essay "Right of Death and Power over Life." In this anthology, that touchstone piece is followed by essays in which biopolitics is implicitly anticipated as a problem by Hannah Arendt and later altered, critiqued, deconstructed, and refined by major political and social theorists who explicitly engaged with Foucault's ideas. By focusing on the concept of biopolitics, rather than applying it to specific events and phenomena, this Reader provides an enduring framework for assessing the central problematics of modern political thought.
Contributors. Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Timothy Campbell, Gilles Deleuze, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt, Achille Mbembe, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, Jacques RanciÈre, Adam Sitze, Peter Sloterdijk, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek
Table des matières
Introduction. Biopolitics: An Encounter / Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze 1
1. Right of Death and Power over Life / Michel Foucault 41
2. "Society Must Be Defended," Lecture at the
Collége de France, March 17, 1976 / Michel Foucault 61
3. The Perplexities of the Rights of Man / Hannah Arendt 82
4. Selections from
The Human Condition / Hannah Arendt 98
5. Introduction to
Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life / Giorgio Agamben 134
6. The Politicization of Life / Giorgio Agamben 145
7. Biopolitics and the Rights of Man / Giorgio Agamben 152
8. Necropolitics / Achille Mbembe 161
9. Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the Universal / Warren Montag 193
10. Biopolitical Production / Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 215
11. Biopolitics as Event / Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri 237
12. Labor, Action, Intellect / Paolo Virno 245
13. An Equivocal Concept: Biopolitics / Paolo Virno 269
14. The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse / Donna Haraway 274
15. The Immunological Transformation: On the Way to Thin-Walled "Societies" / Peter Sloterdijk 310
16. Biopolitics / Roberto Esposito 317
17. The Enigma of Biopolitics / Roberto Esposito 350
18. The Difficult Legacy of Michel Foucault / Jacques Rancière 386
19. From Politics to Biopolitics . . . and Back / Slavoj Zizek 391
20. What Is It to Live? / Alain Badiou 412
21. Immanence: A Life / Gilles Deleuze 421
Acknowledgment of Copyright 427
Index 429
A propos de l'auteur
Timothy Campbell is Professor of Italian Studies and Chair of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi.
Adam Sitze is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. He is the author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
Résumé
A compilation of the primary texts—by Foucault, Arendt, Agamben, Badiou, and other theorists—that laid the ground for contemporary thinking about biopolitics, or the relations between life and politics.
