Mills - Biopolitics

Biopolitics

The concept of biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used in recent years in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In Biopolitics , Mills provides a wide-ranging and insightful introduction to the field of biopolitical studies. The first part of the book provides a much-needed philosophical introduction to key theoretical approaches to the concept in contemporary usage. This includes discussions of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri. In the second part of the book, Mills discusses various topics across the categories of politics, life, and subjectivity. These include questions of sovereignty and governmentality, violence, rights, technology, reproduction, race and sexual difference.

This book will be an indispensable guide for those wishing to gain an understanding of the central theories and issues in biopolitical studies. For those already working with the concept of biopolitics, it provides challenging and provocative insights and argues for a ground-breaking reorientation of the field.

Catherine Mills is Associate Professor of Bioethics and an Australian Research Council Future Fellow at Monash University, Australia.

Biopolitics

Catherine Mills

First published 2018
by Routledge
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2018 Catherine Mills

The right of Catherine Mills to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mills, Catherine, 1972- author.
Title: Biopolitics / Catherine Mills.
Description: First edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017020758 (print) | LCCN 2017037629 (ebook) | ISBN 9780203732588 (E-book) | ISBN 9781844656042 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781844656059 (pbk.: alk. paper) | ISBN 9780203732588 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Biopolitics-Philosophy.
Classification: LCC JA80 (ebook) | LCC JA80 .M55 2018 (print) |
DDC 320.01-dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017020758

ISBN: 978-1-844-65604-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-844-65605-9 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-73258-8 (ebk)

Typeset in Sabon
by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

As I have been reading, thinking and writing about biopolitics for my entire academic career, too many people have contributed directly or obliquely to this project to thank them all by name. That said, I do wish to acknowledge my professional and intellectual debt to several people who have been especially supportive of or inspiring for me over the years. These are: Robert Bernasconi, Judith Butler, Penelope Deutscher, Rosalyn Diprose, Fiona Jenkins, Paul Patton, Catherine Waldby and Elizabeth Wilson. In addition, I have particularly enjoyed and benefited from conversations with, and the written work of, Melinda Cooper, Mick Dillon, Thomas Lemke, Chris Mayes, Daniel McLoughlin, Sergei Prozorov, Miguel Vatter and Jess Whyte. I am particularly indebted to Niamh Stephenson for her generosity and intellectual openness. My partner, Rob Sparrow, read the entire first draft a true labour of love in which there was little reward or pleasure for him. I am grateful for his critical comments; I am also grateful for his support and encouragement in (academic) life more generally. I wish to dedicate this book to my daughters, who interrupted it with their births and then every day henceforth. Because of them, this book is a testament to life rearranged.

incorporate material previously published in the following places: Mills, C. (2017). Biopolitics and Human Reproduction. The Routledge Handbook of Biopolitics , Eds. Prozorov, S. and Rentea, S. London, Routledge: 28194. Mills, C. (2016). Biopolitics and the Concept of Life. Biopower: Foucault and Beyond . Eds. Morar, N. and Cisney, V. Chicago, University of Chicago Press: 82101. Mills, C. Review of Agamben and Colonialism . Eds. Svirsky, M. and Bignall, S. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. in Critical Philosophy of Race, 4:1, pp.139142.

Finally, the completion of this book has been made possible by the grant of an Australian Research Council Future Fellowship (FT120100026).

Since Michel Foucaults crucial articulation in the 1970s, and the subsequent publication of Giorgio Agambens Homo Sacer (1998) in English, biopolitics has become indispensable as a theoretical point of reference in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Now, it seems that few fields are immune to the biopolitical. Further, derivations of the term, such as biolegalities, biocultures, biosociality and biocapital, are instigating and defining new fields of scholarship. This analytic fecundity no doubt arises at least partly from the fact that the concept seems to capture crucial aspects of the workings of the modern and, perhaps, pre-modern world. It is also enhanced by the fact that there are multiple theoretical accounts of biopolitics: the term itself may entail different theoretical commitments, different interpretive emphases and different problems to be resolved or overcome at the levels of philosophy and political activism. This allows for a certain analytic flexibility while also encouraging scholarship that attempts to resolve conflicts in favour of one view or another, or that attempts to redress and rectify the blind spots and shortcomings of the various and competing dominant theoretical approaches.

However, while undoubtedly productive, the dissemination of biopolitics and its cognate terms has also led to a situation of considerable conceptual confusion. With so many different inflections of the term in currency, it is difficult to know just what biopolitics actually refers to, what it means, and, indeed, just what kind of concept it is. To get a clearer sense of this, it is possible to broadly categorize the different ways of understanding and using the concept of biopolitics in contemporary literature as either empirical-descriptive or critical-normative in their basic orientation. These broad categorizations are not strictly mutually exclusive; rather, they inter-relate in various ways, in, for instance, the way that an empirical-descriptive account of biopolitics might also lead to or suggest some critical-normative conclusions or commitments. Even so, identifying these different inflections helps to articulate the theoretical commitments of various contributors to the contemporary debates, and, at times, provides leverage for a critical assessment of their contribution. Further, within each broad categorization, there are also several variant uses of the term.

The empirical-descriptive inflection of the concept rests on the claim that there is an identifiable historical phenomenon, or set of phenomena, that is well-described and analyzed with reference to the concept of biopolitics. While most, if not all, versions of biopolitics have some empirical resonance, the most well-known example of this approach is Michel Foucaults early formulation of biopolitics, and the related notion of biopower, in his work in the mid-1970s. Thus, in Will to Knowledge (1990) the first volume of the History of Sexuality series and contemporaneous lectures at the Collge de France, Foucault posits that biopower emerged as a particular rationality of power in the eighteenth century. This rationality of power is distinguished from sovereign power in various ways, but in particular, it places the new political subject of the population at the centre of governmental calculations, and one of its key problematics is the fostering of life through the political conjunction of the individual and the population. In this and other aspects, Foucault claimed that biopower was deeply integrated with the governmental rationality of liberalism. In this view, biopolitics or biopower is something that happened, and is perhaps still happening, and its machinations and effects can be traced through detailed historical, social and political studies.