Download or read book Enlightenment Biopolitics written by William Max Nelson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2024 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wide-ranging history tracing the birth of biopolitics in Enlightenment thought and its aftermath. In Enlightenment Biopolitics, historian William Max Nelson pursues the ambitious task of tracing the context in which biopolitical thought emerged and circulated. He locates that context in the Enlightenment when emancipatory ideals sat alongside the horrors of colonialism, slavery, and race-based discrimination. In fact, these did not just coexist, Nelson argues; they were actually mutually constitutive of Enlightenment ideals. In this book, Nelson focuses on Enlightenment-era visions of eugenics (including proposals to establish programs of selective breeding), forms of penal slavery, and spurious biological arguments about the supposed inferiority of particular groups. The Enlightenment, he shows, was rife with efforts to shape, harness, and "organize" the minds and especially the bodies of subjects and citizens. In his reading of the birth of biopolitics and its transformations, Nelson examines the shocking conceptual and practical connections between inclusion and exclusion, equality and inequality, rights and race, and the supposed "improvement of the human species" and practices of dehumanization.
Download or read book The Colonizing Trick written by David Kazanjian and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An illuminating look at the concepts of race, nation, and equality in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century America, The idea that "all men are created equal" is as close to a universal tenet as exists in American history. In this hard-hitting book, David Kazanjian interrogates this tenet, exploring transformative flash points in early America when the belief in equality came into contact with seemingly contrary ideas about race and nation. The Colonizing Trick depicts early America as a white settler colony in the process of becoming an empire--one deeply integrated with Euro-American political economy, imperial ventures in North America and Africa, and pan-American racial formations. Kazanjian traces tensions between universal equality and racial or national particularity through theoretically informed critical readings of a wide range of texts: the political writings of David Walker and Maria Stewart, the narratives of black mariners, economic treatises, the personal letters of Thomas Jefferson and Phillis Wheatley, Charles Brockden Brown's fiction, congressional tariff debats, international treaties, and popular novelettes about the U.S.-Mexico War and the Yucatan's Caste War. Kazanjian shows how emergent racial and national formations do not contradict universalist egalitarianism; rather, they rearticulate it, making equality at once restricted, formal, abstract, and materially embodied.
Download or read book Lu Xun s Affirmative Biopolitics written by Wenjin Cui and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-11-29 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores an extraordinary case of affirmative biopolitics through the study of Lu Xun (1881–1936), the most prominent cultural figure of modern China. Diverging from the Enlightenment-humanist framework in reference to which Lu Xun is commonly interpreted, it demonstrates how his thinking is defined by a naturalistic conception of culture that is best understood in the global context of what Foucault defines as the biological turn of modernity. In comparison to ontologically-grounded modern Western theories of life, it brings to light the deep connection between Lu Xun’s affirmative biopolitics and the epistemic ground of Chinese tradition―what is known as correlative thinking. Combining close readings of literary texts with a theoretical consideration of broader issues of culture, this book is an essential read for scholars and students who are interested in Lu Xun, modern Chinese intellectual history, comparative studies of Chinese and Western thought, and the question of affirmative biopolitics.
Download or read book The Biopolitics of Development written by Sandro Mezzadra and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-12-27 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault’s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence. While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies. Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault’s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of ‘development’, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault’s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.
Download or read book Placing the Enlightenment written by Charles W. J. Withers and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2008-09-15 with total page 358 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Enlightenment was the age in which the world became modern, challenging tradition in favor of reason, freedom, and critical inquiry. While many aspects of the Enlightenment have been rigorously scrutinized—its origins and motivations, its principal characters and defining features, its legacy and modern relevance—the geographical dimensions of the era have until now largely been ignored. Placing the Enlightenment contends that the Age of Reason was not only a period of pioneering geographical investigation but also an age with spatial dimensions to its content and concerns. Investigating the role space and location played in the creation and reception of Enlightenment ideas, Charles W. J. Withers draws from the fields of art, science, history, geography, politics, and religion to explore the legacies of Enlightenment national identity, navigation, discovery, and knowledge. Ultimately, geography is revealed to be the source of much of the raw material from which philosophers fashioned theories of the human condition. Lavishly illustrated and engagingly written, Placing the Enlightenment will interest Enlightenment specialists from across the disciplines as well as any scholar curious about the role geography has played in the making of the modern world.
Download or read book Foucault Biopolitics and Resistance written by Lauri Siisiäinen and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-11-26 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Political resistance is flourishing. In this context, there is a growing interest to reread Michel Foucault’s work, especially from the late period, from the perspective of resistance, social movements and affirmative biopolitics. Yet what has been missing so far is a book-length, comprehensive study focusing on this topic. This volume undertakes this task, providing an original typology of the resources of resistance discovered in Foucault’s late thinking: resistance as discursive protection of autonomy bodily and affective resistance the strategies, arts and practices of affirmative biopolitics or ‘politics of life’ The book shows how these different types of tools, arts and practices can be used in resistant politics, in struggles against various regimes and institutions of power and government, so that they mutually supplement and reinforce one another. The author embarks on advancing Foucault’s insights on resistance from where he stopped. Furthermore, the volume proposes a novel assessment of the Foucauldian political toolkit in the 21st century context, addressing its pertinence for struggles against neoliberalism and post-Fordist capitalism. Foucault, Biopolitics and Resistance will be an important resource for students and scholars interested in Foucault, resistance and 21st century politics within many fields, including political science, international relations, contemporary and continental philosophy as well as sociology. The work elaborates fresh methodological insights, fruitful for further empirical research on social and political movements.
Download or read book Systems of Life written by Richard A. Barney and published by Fordham Univ Press. This book was released on 2018-11-06 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.
Download or read book The Sciences in Enlightened Europe written by William Clark and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1999-07 with total page 586 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Radically reorienting our understanding of the Enlightenment, this book explores the complex relations between "englightened" values and the making of scientific knowledge. Here monsters and automata, barometers and botanical gardens, polite academics and boisterous clubs, plans for violent wars and for universal peace, are all relocated in the landscape of enlightened Europe. The contributors show how changing forms of discipline, machinery, and instrumentation affected the emergence of new kinds of knowledge; consider how institutions of public rate taste and conversation helped provide a common frame for the study of human and nonhuman natures; and explore the regional operations of scientific culture at the geographical fringes of Europe. Covering a wide range of scientific disciplines, both in the principal European countries and in areas peripheral to Europe, the book also includes ample illustrations and an extensive bibliography. Implicated in the rise of both fascism and liberal secularism, the moral and political values that shaped the Enlightenment remain controversial today. Through careful scrutiny of how these values influenced and were influenced by the concrete practices of its sciences, this book gives us an entirely new sense of the Enlightenment. -- from back cover.
Download or read book Equality written by Darrin McMahon and published by Bonnier Books UK. This book was released on 2024-04-11 with total page 506 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equality is in crisis. Our world is filled with soaring inequalities, spanning wealth, race, identity, and nationality. Yet how can we strive for equality if we don't understand it? As much as we have struggled for equality, we have always been profoundly sceptical about it. How much do we want, and for whom? Darrin M. McMahon's Equality is the definitive intellectual history, tracing equality's global origins and spread from the dawn of humanity through the Enlightenment to today. Equality has been reimagined continually, in the great world religions and the politics of the ancient world, by revolutionaries and socialists, Nazis and fascists, and post-war reformers and activists. A magisterial exploration of why equality matters and why we continue to reimagine it, Equality offers all the tools to rethink equality anew for our own age. 'Fascinating' - New York Times
Download or read book Sexual Biopolitics in the Age of the Enlightenment written by 戴志岡 and published by . This book was released on 2021 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture written by Sven-Olov Wallenstein and published by Princeton Architectural Press. This book was released on 2012-11-28 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biopolitics and the Emergence of Modern Architecture concerns the dissolution of the classical paradigm of architecture as imitative form in the context of the French Enlightenment, and analyzes the emergence of a new logic of architecture based on a biopolitical process of subject formation. Published shortly after the release of the first English translation of Foucault's The Birth of Biopolitics, this is the first volume that specifically relates the biopolitical concept to architecture.
Download or read book Habeas Viscus written by Alexander Ghedi Weheliye and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2014-08-20 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of "racializing assemblages," taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye's argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the "bare life and biopolitics discourse" exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.
Download or read book Biopolitics written by Ferenc Fehér and published by Ashgate Publishing. This book was released on 1994 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "1989 marked not only the end of communism but also the beginning of a drastic change of pattern in modern politics. The authors analyse an emerging new type of political activity which they call "biopolitics". They trace back its origins, first, to the promises modernity made about the "liberation of the Body" and the fusion of the corporeal and the spiritual which have never been kept. In the second place, they connect it with certain failed hopes and perspectives of the Enlightenment and the dominant models of politics in the nineteenth century as well as with the "end of the grand narrative". In the main, they derive the rise of biopolitics from the weakening of class politics and its vocabulary, the transition from a class-based politics to the politicization of the Body (as well as from additional contingent factors, such as the appearance of the AIDS epidemics and the petering out of the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s)." "They investigate the difficult coexistence of the values of freedom and life in biopolitics in four major areas: health, environment, sex (gender) and race. On the basis of a rich material, taken from both the major analysts of modernity and the present-day discussion of biopolitics in the media, the authors try to set up a preliminary balance of the pros and cons presented by the new phenomenon." "Although they accept the "language of difference" in which the movements of biopolitics predominantly articulate their programme, the authors argue for a minimalist conception of universalism and for dialogue, against the self-closure of the movements which inevitably generates violence and closes the avenues of reconciliation."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature written by Jen E. Boyle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-03-02 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anamorphosis in Early Modern Literature explores the prevalence of anamorphic perspective in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in England. Jen Boyle investigates how anamorphic media flourished in early modern England as an interactive technology and mode of affect in public interactive art, city and garden design, and as a theory and figure in literature, political theory and natural and experimental philosophy. Anamorphic mediation, Boyle brings to light, provided Milton, Margaret Cavendish, and Daniel Defoe, among others, with a powerful techno-imaginary for traversing through projective, virtual experience. Drawing on extensive archival research related to the genre of "practical perspective" in early modern Europe, Boyle offers a scholarly consideration of anamorphic perspective (its technical means, performances, and embodied practices) as an interactive aesthetics and cultural imaginary. Ultimately, Boyle demonstrates how perspective media inflected a diverse set of knowledges and performances related to embodiment, affect, and collective consciousness.
Download or read book Reclaiming the Enlightenment written by Stephen Eric Bronner and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2004-10-06 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book tackles an obvious yet profound problem of modern political life: the disorientation of intellectuals and activists on the left. As the study of political history and theory has been usurped by cultural criticism, a confusion over the origins
Download or read book Biopower written by Vernon W. Cisney and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-12-28 with total page 387 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” has been a highly fertile concept in recent theory, influencing thinkers worldwide across a variety of disciplines and concerns. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault famously employed the term to describe “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” With this volume, Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar bring together leading contemporary scholars to explore the many theoretical possibilities that the concept of biopower has enabled while at the same time pinpointing their most important shared resonances. Situating biopower as a radical alternative to traditional conceptions of power—what Foucault called “sovereign power”—the contributors examine a host of matters centered on life, the body, and the subject as a living citizen. Altogether, they pay testament to the lasting relevance of biopower in some of our most important contemporary debates on issues ranging from health care rights to immigration laws, HIV prevention discourse, genomics medicine, and many other topics.
Download or read book Archaeology of Colonisation written by Carlos Rivera-Santana and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-08-20 with total page 203 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book rethinks the history of colonisation by focusing on the formation of the European aesthetic ideas of indigeneity and blackness in the Caribbean, and how these ideas were deployed as markers of biopolitical governance. Using Foucault’s philosophical archaeology as method, this work argues that the European formation of indigeneity and blackness was based on aesthetically casting Aboriginal and African peoples in the Caribbean as monsters yet with a similar degree of Western civilisation and ‘culture’. By focusing on the aesthetics of the first racial imageries that produced indigeneity and blackness this work takes a radical departure from the current Social Darwinian theorisations of race and racism. It reveals a new connection between the global origins of colonisation and local post-Enlightenment histories.
