General Information
Course Description
After Biopolitics - Joshua Schuster
Foucault’s notion of biopolitics is still the dominant framework in the humanities when it comes to thinking how the combination of biology and politics is to be considered. Briefly, biopolitics understands the increasing political stakes of biology as a question of how to contain and control issues of concentrated life (overpopulation, disease, healthcare) while at the same time promoting life practices that contribute to the creation of wealth and social welfare. But while biopolitics offers a sweeping and daring assessment of how life itself is both stimulated and subdued by modern power, what this argument also risks is a radically de-political view where there are no actors or agencies. One of the basic disappointments of the explanatory power of biopolitics is that it cannot distinguish between any modern political doctrines or institutions; it thus risks rendering useless any talk at all of politics if the reality of biopolitics is the only game in town. Nor has biopolitics proposed any new political practices to replace the society of control it describes.
What this approach obscures is the possibility of considering how modern biology, which has been open to repeated recasting of theories of life, might actually offer a critique to the politics of harnessing life to regimes of national wealth. Extending from Darwin and post-Darwinian interpretations of the role of contingency and change in life, this course will be about locating new metaphors and models of social change within the fully expanded horizon of the biological condition. Some recent fields of inquiry we might examine will be new materialisms and new media capitalism, ecocriticism, animal studies, utopian studies, affect studies, and disability studies.
We will likely study some of the following philosophers and critics:
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Vol. I
Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer or The Open
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Gilles Deleuze, selections
Elizabeth Grosz, selections
Rosemarie Garland Thomson, from Extraordinary Bodies
Donna Haraway, selections
Eugene Thacker, selections
We will also look at the some of the following writers:
Mark Twain
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Helen Keller
Arakawa and Gins, Architectural Body
J.M. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals
Grading:
60% final essay and annotated bibliography
25% class presentation
15% class participation
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