Description
Book SynopsisTakes up Foucault's hypothesis that liberal "civil society," far from being a sphere of natural freedoms, designates the social spaces where our biological lives come under new forms of control, and are invested with new forms of biopower.
Trade Review"In this thrilling intervention into thinking about human life, Miguel Vatter rejects the usual turn towards bios and turns instead (using Agamben, Benjamin and many other interlocutors to do so) towards the physical, the local, and the body in all its vulnerability and desire. In this way the body as fetish can become a means for its own unraveling; a turn towards the body, towards zoe, can mean that the body becomes something other than a site upon which power is exercised (biopower) and become instead a site in which power is experienced, negotiated and often subverted (biopolitics)." -- -James Martel San Francisco State University
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part I. Biopolitics of the Economy 1. The Tragedy of Civil Society and Republican Politics in Hegel 2. Living Labor and Self-Generative Value in Marx Part II. Biopolitics of the Family 3. Reification and the Redemption of Bare Life in Adorno and Agamben 4. Natality, Fertility, Mimesis in Arendt's Theory of Freedom 5. The Heroism of Sexuality in Benjamin and Foucault Part III. Biopolitics of Rights 6. Free Markets and Republican Constitutions in Hayek and Foucault 7. Biopolitical Cosmopolitanism: The Right to Have Rights in Arendt and Agamben Part IV. Biopolitics of Eternal Life 8. The Unity of Biological Life and a Philosophical Life in Aristotle, Spinoza, and Heidegger 9. Eternal Recurrence and the Now of Revolution: Nietzsche and Messianic Marxism Notes Bibliography Index
