Dear all
One of the participants in the forthcoming session/s (3 in total) at the
AAG 2007 has had to pull out, so if you have a relevant paper in need of
session then please contact me ... now!
CALL FOR PAPERS:
Association of American Geographers Annual Meeting, 17-21 April 2007, San
Francisco, California
‘Always look on the dark side?’ The biopolitics of life and death
“[M]assacres have become vital” (Foucault 1998)
“[L]ife and death are not properly scientific concepts but rather
political concepts, which acquire a political meaning precisely only
through a decision” (Agamben 1999)
The past few years have witnessed a resurgence of interest in Foucault’s
formation of biopower - the power to make live and foster life. This, in
part, is a reflection of the ongoing publication of Foucault’s lectures at
the Collège de France, but has also arisen in the wake of unprecedented
shifts in biotechnology and the biosciences through, for example, the
Human Genome Project and, more recently, stem cell research. Yet, like the
power to foster life, Foucault’s original formation of biopower also
entails the power to disallow it to the point of death. Foucault’s own
particular take on this ‘puzzling’ life and death game was to be located
historically in the caesuras of twentieth century state racisms. Here
killing or the imperative to kill “was acceptable if it results not in a
victory over political adversaries, but in the elimination of biological
threats to and the improvement of the species or race” (Foucault 2003).
For Foucault this was not simply killing but exposure to death or
political death for biological ‘abnormalities’. If, however, the recent
work of Agamben is to be taken seriously then thanatopolitics, as the
politics of death, must not be restricted to twentieth century fascist and
totalitarian states but is rooted in the very metaphysical structure of
our politics - the ‘inclusive exclusion’ of bare or naked life. Today
through the paradoxical excesses of contemporary biopolitics we are all at
risk, it seems, of becoming forms of bare or naked life subject to a
sovereign decision on death. Indeed, beyond the oft cited examples of
contemporary warfare and states of exception, contemporary contestations
over life and death decisions, exemplified in legal cases such as that of
Terri Schiavo in the US and Diane Pretty in the UK, suggest that any
appeal to ‘quality of life’ or ‘human rights’ as an ethical commitment in
contemporary biopolitics shares its own necessary exceptions; even
palliative care cannot save us.
This session - which is inspired by, but certainly not restricted to,
different understandings of biopower and sovereign power in Foucault and
Agamben - aims, in the first instance, to draw on what Mitchell Dean
(2001) has termed the ‘dark side’ of contemporary biopolitics: ‘liminal
lives’ and ‘liminal zones’ in our contemporary biopolitics of health care,
disability, war, geopolitical borders, refugee camps, humanitarian aid and
in the enactment of human rights. Theoretical engagements with different
conceptions of biopolitics, biopower and thanatopolitics are also welcome,
as are historical and contemporary empirical papers addressing
biopolitical themes.
Topics for this session may include:
The bios of biopower
War and biopower
Security and pre-emptive biopower
States/spaces of exception
Detention, torture and confession
Necropolitics
Law and Sovereign power
Decisionism and/or undecidability
Human rights and humanitarianism
National and global governmentalities and biopower
Racism, genocide and caesuras within biopolitics
Eugenics and/or risk politics
Bare life
Care rationing
The life unworthy of being lived
The right to life and the right to die
Contestations over end of life decisions: in/capacity, assisted suicide,
assisted euthanasia, living wills, palliative care and the good death
Suicide and suicide prevention
The law, unpunishability and suicide
Abstracts (250 words max) should be submitted to [log in to unmask] by
Monday 16th October 2006.
Dr Louisa Cadman
Associate Lecturer in Human Geography
Faculty of Development and Society
Sheffield Hallam University
S1 1WB
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