1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Biopolitics
The problematic of biopolitics has become increasingly important in the social sciences. Inaugurated by Michel Foucault’s genealogical research on the governance of sexuality, crime and mental illness in modern Europe, the research on biopolitics has developed into a broader interdisciplinary orientation, addressing the rationalities of power over living beings in diverse spatial and temporal contexts.
The development of the research on biopolitics in recent years has been characterized by two tendencies: the increasingly sophisticated theoretical engagement with the idea of power over and the government of life that both elaborated and challenged the Foucauldian canon (e.g. the work of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito and Paolo Virno) and the detailed and empirically rich investigation of the concrete aspects of the government of life in contemporary societies. Unfortunately, the two tendencies have often developed in isolation from each other, resulting in the presence of at least two debates on biopolitics: the historico-philosophical and the empirical one. This Handbook brings these two debates together, combining theoretical sophistication and empirical rigour.
The volume is divided into five sections. While the first two deal with the history of the concept and contemporary theoretical debates on it, the remaining three comprise the prime sites of contemporary interdisciplinary research on biopolitics: economy, security and technology. Featuring previously unpublished articles by the leading scholars in the field, this wide-ranging and accessible companion will both serve as an introduction to the diverse research on biopolitics for undergraduate students and appeal to more advanced audiences interested in the current state of the art in biopolitics studies.
CONTENTS
Notes on Contributors
Introduction
Simona Rentea
Section One. Biopolitics: History of the Concept
1. Biopolitics in the Political Thought of Classical Greece
Mika Ojakangas
2. ‘The Government of a Multitude’: Hobbes on Political Subjectification
Marco Piasentier and Davide Tarizzo
3. Nietzsche and Biopolitics: Four Readings of Nietzsche as a Biopolitical Thinker
Vanessa Lemm
4. Biopolitics Before Foucault: On Benjamin’s Critique of Bare Life and Agamben’s Theological Genealogy of the ‘Apparatus’
Boštjan Nedoh
Section Two. Contemporary Theoretical Controversies
5. Foucault, Biopolitics and Aesthetics
Lauri Siisiäinen
6. Biopolitics and Socialism: Foucault, Agamben, Esposito
Sergei Prozorov
7. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri on ‘Postmodern Biopolitics’
Thomas Lemke
8. Community, Life and Subjectivity in Italian Biopolitics
Miguel Vatter
9. Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben and the ‘Nomos’ of Contemporary Political Life
Nick Vaughan-Williams
Section Three. Biopolitics and Economy
10. Gender Equality as Bioeconomic Governmentality in a Neoliberal EU
Jemima Repo
11. Nature Saved: From the Katechontic to the Eschatological in Contemporary Liberal Biopolitics
Simona Rentea
12. Cognitive Capitalism and the Governance of the Prefrontal Cortex
Warren Neidich
13. Bodies, Populations, Citizens: The Biopolitics of African Environmentalism
Carl Death
Section Four. Biopolitics and Security
14. The Biopolitics of European Border Security
Nick Vaughan-Williams
15. Biopolitics of the Global Governance of HIV/AIDS
Jaakko Ailio
16. The Biopolitics of Asylum Law in the United States
Ariadna Estévez
17. Beyond Biopolitics: Struggles over Nature
Lara Montesinos Coleman and Doerthe Rosenow
Section Five. Biopolitics and Technology
18. Biopolitics and Human Reproduction
Catherine Mills
19. Human Life Between Biology and Law in Germany
Ingrid Metzler
20. Genopolitics: Behavioural Genetics and the End of Politics
Martin G. Weiss
Conclusion: Whither Biopolitics?
Sergei Prozorov
Index
Biography
Sergei Prozorov is University Lecturer in Political Science at the Department of Political and Economic Studies, University of Helsinki, Finland and Principal Investigator in the Academy of Finland project Biopolitics and Democracy in Global Governance.
Simona Rentea is Assistant Professor in International Relations at Saint Louis University, Madrid Campus, Spain. Her research addresses the biopolitical inflections of the current articulations of international order, the relationship between science and politics, and the role of emotions in politics.
