This article explores contemporary biopolitics in the light of Michel Foucault's oft quoted suggestion that contemporary politics calls `life itself' into question. It suggests that recent developments in the life sciences, biomedicine and biotechnology can usefully be analysed along three dimensions. The first concerns logics of control - for contemporary biopolitics is risk politics. The second concerns the regime of truth in the life sciences - for contemporary biopolitics is molecular politics. The third concerns technologies of the self - for (...) contemporary biopolitics is ethopolitics. The article suggests that, in these events, human beings have become `somatic individuals': personhood is increasingly being defined in terms of corporeality, and new and direct relations are established between our biology and our conduct. At the same time, this somatic and corporeal individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation and so to a politics of `life itself'. (shrink)

This is an interdisciplinary text. Its philosophical intent is pursued largely via the interpretation and analysis of material that is literary-theoretical and historical-political in character. The book sets out to analyse the thought of several leading figures in contemporary philosophy, literary theory and postcolonial literature in terms of the way they individuate the terms that populate the philosophical or literary universes they invent. The philosophical argument of the book is that contrary to its usual characterisation in terms of plurality, particularity (...) and resistance, the ‘postcolonial' is best understood as an ultimately singular, absolute or non-relational category, i.e. one that generates the medium of its own existence (roughly in keeping with Spinoza's conception of substance or Deleuze's conception of difference). Drawing on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Alain Badiou and guided by comparisons with Buddhism and Islam, Absolutely Postcolonial defends this approach through both a detailed critique of postcolonial theory and comparative readings of four very different contemporary writers: Edouard Glissant (Martinique), Charles Johnson (USA), Mohammed Dib (Algeria), and Severo Sarduy (Cuba). (shrink)

Drawing parallels between gender essentialism and cultural essentialism, I point to some common features of essentialist pictures of culture. I argue that cultural essentialism is detrimental to feminist agendas and suggest strategies for its avoidance. Contending that some forms of cultural relativism buy into essentialist notions of culture, I argue that postcolonial feminists need to be cautious about essentialist contrasts between "Western" and "Third World" cultures.

This article revisits Arendt’s and Foucault’s converging accounts of modern (bio)politics and the entry of biological life into politics. Agamben’s influential account of these ideas is rejected as a misrepresentation both because it de-historicizes biological/organic life and because it occludes the positivity of that life and thus the discursive appeal and performative force of biopolitics. Through attention to the genealogy of Arendt’s and Foucault’s own ideas we will see that the major point of convergence in their thinking is their insistence (...) upon understanding biological thinking from the inside, in terms of its positivity. Agamben’s assessment of modern politics is closer to Arendt’s than it is to Foucault’s and this marks a fascinating point of disagreement between Arendt and Foucault. Whereas Arendt sees the normalizing force of modern society as being in total opposition to individuality, Foucault posits totalization and individuation as processes of normation, which casts a light upon the relative import they place upon politics and ethics. (shrink)

A critical analysis of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference and Elizabeth Grosz's Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists.