This essay addresses two questions. It first asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. It then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. In the process of addressing these two questions the essay provides an exegesis of Michel Foucault’s analytic of biopolitics as a dispositif de sécurité and contrasts this account of security with that given by traditional geopolitical security discourses. The essay also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what we now understand life to be. It concludes that ‘population’, which was the empirical referent of early biopolitics, is being superseded by ‘heterogenesis’. This serves as the empirical referent for the recombinant biopolitics of security in the molecular age.
This article revises Foucault's account of biopolitics in the light of the impact of the molecular and digital revolutions on `the politics of life itself'. The confluence of the molecular and digital revolutions informationalizes life, providing an account of what it is to be a living thing in terms of complex adaptive and continuously emergent, informationally constituted, systems. Also revisiting Foucault's The Order of Things and its interrogation of the modern analytics of finitude, the article argues that our contemporary politics of life is therefore distinguished by the quasi-transcendentals that now distinguish informationalized life: circulation, connectivity and complexity. Here, too, the article argues, the figure of Man, which once united the quasi-transcendentals of life, labour and language, is replaced by the contingency that now unites circulation, connectivity and complexity. Observing that a life of continuous emergence is also one in which production is continuously allied with destruction, such a life is lived as the continuous emergency of its own emergence. This account of contemporary biopolitics, together with its emergency of emergence, contrasts, in particular, with that offered by Agamben in his appropriation of Schmitt.
in late modern societies has spawned numerous analyses of the new governance of societies, the role of knowledge and the reshaping of modern subjects. From natural disasters and terrorism to health and finance, risk is now everywhere. While risk had long been a problem of thought, from antiquity to modernity (Maso, 2007), its relation to security and politics has now encountered renewed interest. From anthropology and criminology to cultural studies and sociology, the problem of risk has been rendered as the signifier of our present condition (Beck, 1992;Douglas & Wildavsky, 1982;Luhmann, 1991;Foucault, 2007). But, as risks come to constitute more and more areas of social and political life, it is necessary to ask ourselves, echoing Michel Foucault (1997), what difference today introduces with respect to yesterday.International relations scholars concerned with the concept of risk generally trace the notion back to the end of the Cold War, when major states and international organizations such as NATO, the UN and the EU began to refer to their security environment in terms of risks rather than dangers. This change in terminology has allowed for an understanding of the post-Cold War security environment as highly uncertain and characterized by an explosion of risks, including pandemics to organized crime, global warming, failed states, terrorism, poverty and nuclear proliferation.Given this representation of the security dynamics at play in the post-Cold War environment, early appropriations of risk in the field of international relations have tended to simply conflate the concept of risk with those of danger and threat (Rasmussen, 2001(Rasmussen, , 2004. Failing to spell out the conceptual difference between security and risk, these studies constitute the difference Special Issue on Security, Technologies of Risk, and the Political
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