Tag Archives: biopolitics

Person Woman Man Camera (King)

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A look back at Catherine Malabou’s “The King’s Two (Biopolitical) Bodies”

If, as Foucault wrote, “we need to cut off the king’s head,” our further task, according to French philosopher Catherine Malabou in a 2014 essay, is to “situate the point where biology and history, the living subject and the political subject, meet or touch.”

Read Malabou’s short essay in Representations 127 now, and look forward to more on the King’s Two Bodies concept in Lorna Hutson’s “On the Knees of the Body Politic,” forthcoming in Representations 151, available in August.

Catherine Malabou is Professor of Philosophy at the European Graduate School/EGS and Professor of Modern European Philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, London. .

News of Calais

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Calais’s “Jungle”: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance

by Debarati Sanyal

This past spring, as the EU brokered its refugee deal with Turkey to “save lives” in theFig. 12 (Magnin - 'Dans le calme, le face à face entre migrants et CRS') Mediterranean, the French state razed a portion of Calais’s “jungle,” encampments that currently shelter 10,000 refugees, while building a container camp. In this essay, an analysis of recent film and photography highlights practices of resistance to the interplay of humanitarian compassion and securitarian repression, nuancing the view of borderscapes as sites of total biopolitical capture, and of refugees as bare life. Read the full advance version of this essay free of charge here.

A revised and updated version of this essay will be published in our Spring 2017 issue. This is unedited version is being posted in advance (October 24, 2016) in light of the swiftly changing circumstances in the Calais camps.  According to today’s Guardian, “Hundreds of migrants and refugees have left Calais on buses for accommodation centres elsewhere in France on the first day of an operation to clear and then demolish the refugee camp in the northern port town.”

DEBARATI SANYAL is a professor in the French Department at the University of California, Berkeley.

 

Upcoming UCB Workshop on Bodies and Political Configurations

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Rethinking Political Bodies: A Workshop

Oct 7 – Oct 8, 2016
Faculty Club, University of California Berkeley

14-65

Featuring Representations editorial board members Alexei Yurchak and David Bates, along with Camille Robcis, Nima Bassiri, Ethel Matala de Mazza, Danilo Scholz, Rebecca Gaydos, and Stefanos Geroulanos

The relationship between biological concepts and political concepts is longstanding — the “body politic” has always been a dominant metaphor for theorizations of political community. However, organicist models of the state have been thoroughly tainted by 19th and early 20th century ideas of unity, homogeneity, and racial purity. Today, bio-politics is a ubiquitous frame for analysis, yet the biological dimension is often underdeveloped. This workshop takes as its starting point the idea that modern biological concepts provide important resources for thinking about organization, order, control, and other key political problems. Papers will explore new links between bodies and political configurations, on the ground and within theoretical discourses. For more information, visit the workshop web page.

Supported by the UC Berkeley Department of Rhetoric

Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Conference

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Neoliberalism + Biopolitics | Conference

February 27-28, 2015

Maude Fife Auditorium, Wheeler Hall, UC Berkeley

Featuring Representations editor Colleen Lye and authors Christopher Newfield and James Vernon. (Lye, Newfield, and Vernon are also the editors of the Representations special issue The Humanities and the Crisis of the Public University, 2011.)

The Neoliberalism and Biopolitics conference investigates the role of neoliberalism and biopolitics as both contemporary objects of study and paradigms of analysis for humanistic and social scientific inquiry. Organized by Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory, the conference brings together diverse scholars to evaluate contemporary work on neoliberalism and biopolitics, while also interrogating the compatibility of different approaches seeking to deploy both concepts.

For the conference schedule, please visit nbpc.berkeley.edu.

Sponsors: Cultural Services-French Embassy in the United States, French American Cultural Society, and the University of California Humanities Research Institute along with UC Berkeley’s Program in Critical Theory, Divisions of Arts & Humanities and Social Sciences, Center for the Study of Law & Society, Class of 1936 First Chair of Political Science funds, Departments of English, Political Science, Rhetoric, and Sociology, Maxine Elliot Professor funds, and The Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities.