Biopolitics Archives - Public Seminar

Feature

Another Mother

Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism

April 8, 2019 • by Cesare Casarino and Andrea Righi

In recent years, the tradition of Italian biopolitical thought has become immensely popular and increasingly influential. Most interpreters, however, focus on thinkers such as Agamben, Esposito, and Negri, while the contribution of Italian feminist movement is most often neglected. Another Mother: Diotima and the Symbolic Order of Italian Feminism , brings to ...

Feature

Behrouz Boochani and the Biopolitics of the Camp

The New Primo Levi?

February 16, 2019 • by Dimitris Vardoulakis

Behrouz Boochani’s No Friend but the Mountains, a literary sensation upon its publication in Australia in August 2018, and soon to be released in the United States, deserves a place alongside classics of the prison writing genre. [1] At the same time, it contains important lessons for everyone thinking about power in the ...

Media

The Power of Platforms

How biopolitical companies threaten democracy

January 25, 2019 • by Janosik Herder

The 2010s will likely be remembered as the decade of the rise of platforms. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, Uber -- all of these companies have become more than just billion-dollar businesses. Over the last ten years they have started to play an essential role in the everyday life of most ...

Feature

From the Cyborg Manifesto to The User Unconscious

A Commentary by Patricia Ticineto Clough

August 16, 2018 • by Patricia Ticineto Clough

In the following commentary, psychoanalyst and professor for sociology and women studies Patricia Ticineto Clough reflects on how her recent work on the user unconscious expands on/differs from Donna Haraway’s groundbreaking essay “Cyborg Manifesto” in thinking about the human’s relation to/inevitable entanglement with the other-than-human and argues that her proposed ...

From the Cyborg Manifesto to The User Unconscious

Feature

Rethinking the Human in the Digital Age

An Excerpt from Patricia Ticineto Clough’s latest book

August 14, 2018 • by Patricia Ticineto Clough

A commentary by Ticineto Clough on her latest book, in which she puts her concept of the user unconscious in relation to Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”, can be found here. The turns in philosophy, media studies, and critical theory to the posthuman, the nonhuman, and the ahuman befit both a post-national ...

Feature

Bodies in Transition

Derailing gender in the liminal space of breast cancer treatment

May 24, 2018 • by Tara Mastrelli

According to political historian and gender theorist Paul Preciado, we are living in the pharmacapornagraphic era. In this era, claims his book Testo Junkie, gender is produced through the body’s constant interaction with images, imagery, and social norms that represent a naturalized sex ideal, and through technological and pharmeucuetical interventions. There is ...

Feature

Defending Abortion Without “Rights”

A Review of Penelope Deutscher, Foucault’s Futures: A Critique of Reproductive Reason

August 14, 2017 • by Juniper Alcorn

In Foucault’s Futures, Penelope Deutscher stages critical discussions between Foucault and his critics and intellectual descendants, bringing reproduction into focus as an issue of biopolitics. The “future” of Foucault is contained in two questions: first, in what sense is reproduction present in Foucault’s work and how has it eluded or ...

Feature

Totalitarianism

Historical Regime or Bio-Power Intimate Vocation?

February 28, 2017 • by Simona Forti

Coined in 1923 by Giovanni Amendola -- a strong opponent of Mussolini’s fascism -- the term has had a very interesting history. I retraced the genealogy of the concept, from Carl Friedrich and Zbigniew Brzezinki[1] in the first half of the 1950s, to Norman Davies[2] at the end of the ...

Education

Biopolitics And The Compulsion Of Being-Born

July 11, 2016 • by Dora Suarez

This post is part of the Gender and Domination Course in OOPS. Bringing the voices of Chiara Bottici and Paul B. Preciado together, my aim is to show there is a way in which their respective reflections on the nature of the biopolitical turn could be seen as complementary. I begin ...

Biopolitics And The Compulsion Of Being-Born

Theory & Practice

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

on Paolo Virno

July 2, 2016 • by McKenzie Wark

Paolo Virno offers a curious diagnosis of the times. In A Grammar of the Multitude (Semiotext(e), 2004), he writes of the communism of capital. It’s a thought that has some pedigree in Marx, who made a similar observation in his own time about the formation of the joint-stock company, which ...

As the veneer of democracy starts to fade…

Feature

Aeroplanes and Deportation

April 21, 2016 • by Douglas de Toledo Piza

The Zolberg Institute on Migration and Mobility at The New School presents a lecture by Wiliam Walters entitled “Aeroplanes and Deportation.” There can be no expulsion without the trains, planes, buses and ships that states use to transport deportees across borders and territories. There can be no deportation without an assortment of guards, pilots, doctors, ...

Multi Media

Chiara Bottici’s General Seminar Lecture: Rethinking the Biopolitical Turn

May 5, 2015 • by Jeffrey C. Goldfarb and Zeyno Ustun

“Let me begin, actually, by introducing the devil.” With these words, on March, 4, 2015, Chiara Bottici opened her presentation to the General Seminar of the New School for Social Research, founded by the original members of the University in Exile and continuously running ever since. Bottici, quoting the words ...