Eugene Thacker on Wed, 21 Jan 2004 01:47:55 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing |
Hi all - maybe some nettimers can sort some of this out... I really like Agamben's work on biopolitics, especially his point regarding the 'state of exception' that his definition of sovereignty represents. And, I have to say, as someone living in the US, it is embarassing to witness the (technological) extremes to which the federal gov't goes in the name of 'national security'. It's hard not to read Agamben without thinking about the biopolitical - even biomedical - war on terror and disease (often the Bush White House makes little distinction between them). But a part of me is also wondering if this isn't always the case; if the notion that political sovereignty functions through a permanent state of exception/emergency is simply a constitutive part of the way that 'the body politic' has been formulated since Plato (I was thinking of Plato's description of democracy as indigestion/disease in the Republic). What I miss from _Homo Sacer_ is two things: a historicizing of the "bio" part of biopolitics (is biopolitics different in the era of Darwin that it is in the era of genetics?), and then I also miss an economic critique in the formulation of sovereignty-as-exception, or at least some explicit link between politics and political economy (the globalism of biotech, GM foods, drugs/health care, seem to be good case studies in this regard)... -Eugene ************************************** Eugene Thacker, PhD Literature, Communication, & Culture Georgia Institute of Technology eugene.thacker@lcc.gatech.edu http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/~ethacker ************************************** Quoting miguel leal <ml@virose.pt>: > Dear Louise: > > What a mess! And I think you are a little bit confused about > bio-politics and agamben's writings. Agamben a revisionist? Did you > really read it? <...> # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net