Politics Beyond the Biopolitical Subject
A Symposium
Brisbane, Australia, December 8-9, 2011
Hosted by Griffith University
Funded by the Finnish Academy
The theory of biopolitics has, in the years since Michel Foucault first deployed the concept, taken a decidedly affirmative turn. No longer is biopolitics theorized simply to expose the violence done to human beings in order to develop and secure the welfare of the species. Numerous theorists of biopolitics now claim, in different ways, to have discovered in ‘life itself’ the basis on which to build a subject capable of resisting biopolitical regimes of violence and security. The biophilosophical traditions of thought which have developed in Foucault’s wake have sought to invest in the biological life of the subject as the very foundation on which to build a politics of resistance to biopolitical modes of power. An ‘affirmative biopolitics’ in popular parlance.
Can life itself function as an ontological foundation for a political subjectivity of resistance to biopolitical regimes? How can the biological life of the subject be a sufficient condition on which to base a politics of contestation to such regimes when it is the first presupposition of liberalism, the tradition of thought and governance to which these regimes owe their origin? Can life itself be conceived as the foundation for a post-liberal theory of subjectivity, given its fundamentality for liberal biopolitics and its biologized subject? What alternative ways of theorizing life are available to us? Is it possible to articulate a concept of the political that attunes us to our vital capacities rather than our finite vulnerabilities? Can we remake the world or must we only strive to survive in it?
Sharing in the assumption that the political is a fundamentally affirmative category, this symposium goes in search of the forms of becoming that the political subject is capable of when freed from stultifying accounts of its being which revolve around the fears of what can be done to its biological life. The reduction, in other words, of political subjectivity to biopolitical subjectivity. The future of the political subject will not depend on its life as such, but on the deeds and bonds of which it is capable, some of which will compromise its mere life, and the very livability of its subjectivity. Our gambit is that political subjects do not merely live in order to fit in with and adapt to their existing conditions, or desire the sustainability of the conditions for their living the lives they do. In contrast they resist those conditions, and where successful, overcome them, transforming them into that which they were not, in the process establishing new conditions by which to live differently. Thus our task is to affirm the other side to the subject which entails not its experience of openness to injury but the ways by which it decides what it wants, asserts what it possesses, and celebrates what it is able to do, in accordance with truths which transcend its existence as a merely living entity.
We invite papers that address this thematic from across the disciplines.
Send your abstracts (200-300 words) to Gideon Baker (g.baker@griffith.edu.au)
and Julian Reid (julian.reid@ulapland.fi) by May 31, 2011.
Foucault News 