Journal of International Political Theory, Ahead of Print. This article examines the intersection of biopolitics with diplomacy and engages its dynamic re-envisioning as biodiplomacy. It revisits Michel Foucault’s peripheral attention to diplomacy and his framing of the concept in his writings on raison d’état and the government of the living. The article suggests that biodiplomacy can help us understand better the complexity of global biopolitical projects, moving us beyond governmentality and sensitizing us about the continuous negotiation of the meaning and (...) materiality of particular ways of living vis-à-vis other ways of being. Specifically, the article addresses modes of existence peculiar to the postcolony or encompassing antithetical value systems and argues that biodiplomacy opens up a wider field of ethical and cosmopolitical possibilities by making visible the interconnected plurality of human and non-human forces. (shrink)

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our biopolitical era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, (...) and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these biopolitical entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis? (shrink)

Scientific and public discourses on the current mass extinction event tend to focus their attention on the decline of ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’. Drawing on insights from the humanities, this article contends that the processes of extinction also produce a diverse range of subjects. Each of these subjects, it argues, raises specific ethical challenges and creates opportunities for cosmopolitical transformation. To explore this argument, the article engages with several subjects of extinction: ‘species’ and ‘biodiversity’; ‘humanity’; ‘unloved’ subjects; and absent or non-relational (...) subjects. In each case, it examines how attention to these subjects can highlight the exclusions and inequalities embedded in dominant discourses, and to identify possibilities for plural ethico-political responses to mass extinction. (shrink)

During the last four decades, the general shift towards flexible accumulation of capital has led to a growing requirement for an increased mobility of labour which greatly affects the restructuring of post-industrial cities today. Using a historical perspective to enlighten the contrast with the period of industrialization when urban planning was, on the contrary, aimed at fixing a large workforce within the city, I argue that the current transformations of urban landscapes one can observe within French cities signal a consequent (...) shift in the regulation of mobilities in the French post-industrial cities. The tactics aiming at regulating the mobilities at a narrow scale have disappeared in favour of a strategy aiming at adapting the city to the requirements of time and space compression through a simultaneous acceleration and rescaling of the daily mobilities. This shift in the regulation of urban mobilities reflects the recent evolution of the nature of urban power of the French post-industrial cities. (shrink)

The starting point of this essay is that there is a contradiction at the heart of our current and hyperbolic understandings of life. To be more precise, on the one hand there is the historical novelty of biology as a modern science and set of technologies. On the other hand, life is simultaneously understood according to biological protocols that seem void of history.

Masturbation is a neglected topic in debates around biopower and biopolitics. This article takes Michel Foucault’s recasting of the idea of a regulatory, population-level form of biopower in terms of ‘mechanisms of security’ as its starting point for an investigation into the ways in which bodies enter into and are reshaped by biopolitical discourses on masturbation. While the notion of security faded from view in favour of Foucault’s better known focus on governmentality, this article argues that there is value in (...) recovering the concept of security in the context of a genealogy of modern bodies. Specifically, it explores the possibility that a biopolitical perspective on security operates not only above, but also below the disciplining of individual masturbating bodies. The article proceeds, initially, via an examination of contemporary studies of masturbation, arguing that they largely neglect the material dynamism of bodies. The main focus, however, is on rereading some of the key works in the historical anti-masturbation literature from a complexity perspective. It is shown that these texts engage with a ‘population’ of vital forces and affects that must be regulated if life is to remain secure, and which circulate below the level of individual bodies in relation to a complex milieu. Finally, the article claims that men’s bodies appear as crucial sites of biopolitics, and that normative forms of masculinity can be regarded as interventions into embodiment that are designed to nullify or regulate complexity. (shrink)

This article interprets Foucault’s intellectual project by analysing the relation between his understanding of critique and the political conditions of subjectivation out of which it emerged. After reviewing some of the most typical criticisms of Foucault’s work, the argument shows in what sense he conceived of critique as a form of resistance and how the latter, in turn, was theorised as a force co-extensive to the power it counters. The paper goes on to argue that his theory of resistance is (...) not necessarily to be viewed as a metaphysical representation of the immutable nature of political struggle, but might well be interpreted in performative terms, i.e. as a strategic re-inscription of existing political-discursive formations. More precisely, the analysis shows in what way Foucault’s articulation of critique represented an attempt to displace the forms of subjectivation that underpin anthropological thought and the government of the self in the modern age. (shrink)

This article argues that Foucault’s account of the intersection between population, liberal economy, and biopolitics needs to be reconstructed in light of Malthus’ Essay on the Principle of Population. Taking Malthus into account brings to the fore how deeply the question of population is tied to a colonial hierarchy that differentiates between dangerous ‘savage’ and economic ‘civilized’ life. ‘Savage life’ is depicted as a catastrophic form of life, which uses resources in a non-economic way due to its forgetfulness of the (...) future. The article shows how this notion of ‘savage life’ broadens the concept of liberal economic governmentality. Most importantly, it highlights the role of passions and futurity for liberal governmentality. As the discussion of Malthus’ texts demonstrates, the passions of hope and fear assume a crucial role for engendering futurity in the economic subject. As will be shown, while the more ‘savage life’ is considered to be made governable through fear, the more civilized life is supposed to be allured by hope. The article points out the implication of this analysis for Foucault’s notion of biopolitics in relation to liberal economy. (shrink)

This article examines the intersection of biopolitics with diplomacy and engages its dynamic re-envisioning as biodiplomacy. It revisits Michel Foucault’s peripheral attention to diplomacy and his framing of the concept in his writings on raison d’état and the government of the living. The article suggests that biodiplomacy can help us understand better the complexity of global biopolitical projects, moving us beyond governmentality and sensitizing us about the continuous negotiation of the meaning and materiality of particular ways of living vis-à-vis other (...) ways of being. Specifically, the article addresses modes of existence peculiar to the postcolony or encompassing antithetical value systems and argues that biodiplomacy opens up a wider field of ethical and cosmopolitical possibilities by making visible the interconnected plurality of human and non-human forces. (shrink)

This paper explores the distinctive features of the critical agenda associated with the ‘Social Life of Methods’. I argue that although this perspective can be associated with the increasing interest, often associated with scholars in Science and Technology Studies, to reflect on how methods can become objects of inquiry, it also needs to be rooted in the current crisis of positivist methods. I identify the challenge for positivism in terms of the decreasing ability of its procedures to effectively organize increasingly (...) ‘lively’ sources of standardized data, which can now be assembled using aesthetic registers. In developing this argument, I dispute the idea that this development is due to historical shifts linked to the way that methodological devices are playing an increasingly significant role in contemporary social life, which might be argued by writers such as Thrift or Castells. I also argue that by opening up issues of method to the aesthetic, we also recast the relationship between theory and method, pointing to the exhaustion of a certain kind of cultural theory within the social sciences. I contextualize these issues by considering how methods are implicated in the intellectual differentiation between scientific and humanities expertise. Rather than conceiving the ‘Social Life of Methods’ in terms of the rise of instrumentalist modes of governance, it is preferable to place it within the dialectic of transparency and the relationship between the implicit and explicit. These issues are addressed through introducing the papers in the special issue. (shrink)

This article engages with the fabrication of experiences in first-person shooter video games. On one hand, it explores the forms of affective and cognitive engagement this novel type of immersive imagery demands of the player. On the other hand, the article speculates on how video games images resonate and coincide with other key practices and imaginations defining the political reality of life today. What (at least according to some accounts) matters most in the politics of life today is a particular (...) locus of mediation – the brain. The ways we imagine ourselves are today characterized by a figure of the ‘cerebral subject’. The article presents an attempt to chart video games imagery in relation to this key contemporary image of who we are, and to consider how the rhythms of the console screen might be seen as emblematic of a more general anthropology of subjectivity today. (shrink)

The study of world politics in theoretical and empirical terms has recently witnessed an upsurge of interest in the question of complexity, drawing upon complexity theory; particularly, renewed interest in emergent properties and the aleatory nature of the political. This article seeks to demonstrate, primarily via an exploration of the work of Gilles Deleuze and Manuel DeLanda, the possibilities for a type of thinking about the ‘international’ that utilises the notion of social complexity as its primary mode of enframing the (...) major dimensions to world politics. As such it argues for a theoretical reconceptualisation of the system of states, markets and societies as individual and overlapping scale-entities, each possessing causal agency, with overlapping and enmeshed boundaries, situated in their historical and concrete manifestations. The reified concepts of polity, economy and society are re-cast in the language of assemblage theory as ordering, exchanging and cohering, thus highlighting process in world politics and providing a theoretical base better equipped to cope with complex social processes and practices. And this I conclude clears the way to re-situate international space theoretically as a complex adaptive system. (shrink)

In The Open, a series of reflections on the historical endeavours to define the essential features of the human figure in relation to the biological existence it shares with animals, Giorgio Agamben offers a detailed reading of Titian’s painting The Nymph and the Shepherd. He argues that the scene depicted enables the contemporary viewer to visualize the advent of radical freedom, the moment when the historical dialectic of nature and culture comes to a ‘stand-still’. In this article, I offer a (...) different reading of The Nymph and the Shepherd, whereby the advent of radical freedom and death become indistinguishable. This different reading, I argue, calls into question Agamben’s understanding of corporeal being. I conclude by suggesting more speculatively and tentatively that ‘bioart’, the field now emerging at the intersection of the creative arts and the bio-medical sciences, may provide a better site of reflection on the questions Agamben ultimately poses about the future of bio-political governmentality. (shrink)

By excavating the ambiguities of the helicopter’s machinic-prosthetic view, a perspective which may be distant and abstract, while also near and viscerally present, this article will explore how megacity security is increasingly waged and consumed. The article argues that megacity security marches to the rotator-beat of the police helicopter, fuelled by military technophilia and in a context of the biopolitical desertion of the megacities’ most vulnerable. The article takes three aspects, visually expressed and constituted through aerial-helicopter security. Drawing from several (...) megacity examples including Mumbai, Lagos, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the first resolves megacity confusion with legibility. In the following section the article examines the mobilization of the security gaze, and the final section explores how helicopter visuality may hold or territorialize megacity space. (shrink)