Ingeborg Bachmann’s Malina ends with the nameless female first-person ­narrator withdrawing to a crack in the wall and disappearing. Bachmann leaves no ambiguity regarding the fact that the life of the disappearing woman, in its physical and linguistic expression outside the wall, was moulded by the patriarchal status quo of power relations crystallised into her relational...

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What is biopolitics? What kind of relationship does biopolitics establish between politics and biology? Although the etymology of the term ‘biopolitics’ seems to suggest a straightforward meaning resulting from the relationship between biological life and politics, the current literature is characterised by a wide variety of definitions. As the social theorist Thomas Lemke notes...

Biopolitics is analysed increasingly through the...

In Discipline and Punish Foucault articulates the emergence of disciplinary power in modern Europe.1 ~There is inconsistency in Foucault’s use of the terms disciplinary power, biopower and...

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Since early 2015, debate and discussion around the arrival of large numbers of refugees on European territory has become a stable part of the political discourse throughout the European Union (EU). In April 2015, it prompted right-wing UK columnist Katie Hopkins to declare that she, indeed, does not care. ‘Show me pictures of coffins, show me bodies floating in water, play violins and show...

In the literature on biopolitics a debate has emerged regarding the precise nature of the biopolitical division of life. How is the relationship between worthy, politically included and legally recognised life (bíos or proper life) and unworthy, politically excluded and legally unrecognised bare life (zoē or improper life) formulated? How is this division of life...

The proliferation of neologisms that take Michel Foucault’s articulation of biopolitics as their starting point—biocapital, biolabour, biovalue, bioeconomy and so on—are evidence of the profoundly influential place of this concept for analysing contemporary political cultures and for writing a ‘history of the present’. In this chapter I consider the role of the...

On 20 January 2017, with his fiery and virulence-laced inaugural speech, the forty-fifth president of the United States, Donald J. Trump, stunned the world. Hailing ‘America first’ from the western front of Capitol Hill, he painted a bleak picture of the United States and cast millions of Americans as immiserated victims of globalisation. Promising that ‘the American people’, under his aegis, would ‘be forgotten no longer’, Trump threw into relief a nationalist vision for remaking the country.1~1. President Trump’s Inaugural Address, Annotated. www.npr.org, 20 January 2017....

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Umut Erel’s poem evokes the brutal violence at the heart of the normalised operations of border and immigration control. Landscape descriptions (‘island’, ‘coastlines’, ‘pleasant cliffs’) and cultural references (such as the one to the BBC production Newsnight) suggest that the poem comments on the uncanny...

In The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, Rainer Maria Rilke writes about his first reflections of Paris and his encounters on its terrain, drawing from the mode of being of the underbelly. Strikingly, he portrays the terror of beauty or the terror underneath the beauty, as he withdraws himself from the beautiful landmarks of the city and is drawn to the sights of the vulnerable, the...

Looking at widely broadcast episodes of sexually and racially targeted policing in Greece between 2012 and 2013, I analyse the biopolitical dimensions of such governmental action in a context of deep political and economic crisis. Since 2009, the Greek state has struggled to manage this crisis and the imposition of a neoliberal restructuring under conditions of lost sovereignty over...

 

Hannah Richter is Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of Hertfordshire, UK, as well as PhD candidate in Political and Social Thought at the University of Kent, UK. In addition to her dissertation, which develops a political theory of sense drawn from the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Niklas Luhmann’s sociological systems theory, she is working...

This series brings together scholarship from leading and emerging scholars working on the intersections between gender and/or sexuality in political economy. It seeks to move beyond the ‘blindness’ of International Political Economy to feminist, gender, trans*, queer and masculinity studies in order to more fully capture the complex and contested transformations associated with...