The farmer suicides that have taken place in India since the 1990s constitute the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. While existing research largely focuses on explaining the causes that lead farmers to take their own lives, this paper examines the biopolitical governing function that the suicides have. The paper argues that the farmer suicides have functioned to legitimate intervention into the lives of those who remain by either treating them as subjects with mental health problems or educating them on how to embrace a neoliberal entrepreneurial mentality. The farmer suicides arguably also function to dispose of a population that has become surplus in the contemporary developmental vision of the Indian state. Furthermore, the paper contests biopolitical theorization that views suicide or death as resistance to biopower, arguing that such theorization fails to recognize both the particularity of biopolitics in a context where the presence of death is ubiquitous and the way in which the death of some may reinforce the biopolitical governing of life of others. The farmer suicides express rather than contest the devaluation of "unproductive" lives in neoliberal capitalism.On March 27, 2017, Lok Sabha, the lower house of the Indian parliament, passed a new Mental Health Care Bill, which has been welcomed as an important sign that India is adopting a more progressive position in the treatment of mental health issues. The previous year, the bill had been passed by Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the parliament, and on April 7, 2017, it received the assent of President Pranab Mukherjee, thereby becoming the Mental Health Care Act of 2017. The act includes provisions that revise various aspects of Indian mental health care policy. However, most attention has been paid to the fact that the act also effectively decriminalizes attempted suicide. Until now, attempted suicide has been subject to punishment by a one-year prison sentence, fines, or both, under the Indian Penal Code Section 309. 1 The new act states that "Notwithstanding anything contained in section 309 of the Indian Penal Code any person who attempts to commit suicide shall be presumed, unless proved otherwise, to have severe stress and shall not be tried and punished under the said Code" (Ministry of Law and Justice 2017, 46). This change in the Indian state's approach to suicide comes against the backdrop of the largest wave of recorded suicides in human history. The suicides in question have been committed by farmers, more than a quarter of a million of whom have taken their own lives in India between 1995 and 2009 (Center for Human Rights and Global Justice 2011, 1). In the current decade, the number of farmer suicides 1 The British introduced the criminalization of suicide to India as part of their colonial administration (Niehaus 2012, 223). The Indian Penal Code that contains the criminalization of suicide was developed during the British Raj Regime of 1860 (Ranjan et al., 2014, 5).
International development is one of the primary biopolitical problematics of the 21st century. Yet, biopolitical critiques of ‘human development’ tend to leave the framework’s ontological underpinnings largely unexplored. This article seeks to remedy this gap by problematising the notions of ‘capability’ and ‘choice’ in human development through an engagement with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of modernity. The article argues that underlying human development is an ontology that enframes human beings as a contingent, orderable, and calculable reserve of capabilities. The enframing of choice in turn conceals the limitedness of the conditions within which choice can happen. As opposed to such liberal choice, the article puts forward an ontological notion of ‘decision’, which entails understanding the world as an openness that resists any final determination of being. A politics that draws its involvement in the world from the openness of being entails the ability to question critically even benevolent and supposedly emancipatory projects when they lack recognition of their own ontological commitments and of the limitations that those commitments impose on people’s lives. A re-politicisation of human development thus requires exposing the paradigm’s ontological limits, but it also demands practical political engagement in the factical situations that beings inhabit.
The debate concerning Michel Foucault's relationship to neo-liberalism has recently rekindled. Despite some claims to the contrary, Foucault's alleged turn to (neo) liberalism during the final decade of his life is hardly a new discovery. As Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter point out, the idea that Foucault became a liberal in the mid-1970s is a recurring legend, one that the book seeks to put to rest. Most of the contributions to this volume are either explicitly or implicitly at odds with the contention that Foucault would have embraced any type of liberalism in his late work. As Roberto Nigro puts it, 'It would be highly misleading to suggest that Foucault's reading of liberalism was liberal' (p. 130). That said, the essays in this collection offer much more than simply a defence of Foucault against those who would brand him as one or another type of liberal. Divided into four parts, the book provides contributions on the normative orders of neo-liberalism, the genealogies of biopolitics, the relationship between law and liberal governmentality, and ethics and embodiment. The essays are not confined to discussing the texts where Foucault explicitly examines neo-liberalism or biopolitics. Rather, they draw on a wide range of his writings, from the texts on the Iranian Revolution to his final lecture courses at the Collège de France. Furthermore, Foucault's work is discussed here not only in relation to the contemporary biopolitical canon-Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negribut also in relation to the thought of such diverse figures as Friedrich Nietzsche, Georges Canguilhem, Friedrich Hayek, Jan Patočka and John Rawls. In addition to the breadth and depth of these engagements, the volume also deserves credit for acknowledging and drawing attention to existing readings of Foucault in languages other than English, most notably French, German and Italian. The editors suggest the concept of nomos, understood as 'normative order', as a way of bringing together the pastoral and the economic dimensions of social order (p. 6), thus hoping to draw attention also to the spiritual preconditions of power. This conception of nomos is proposed as the thread that weaves the chapters together. This is a welcome perspective considering that examinations of biopolitics often
Due to the emergence of the Anthropocene, the social sciences in general and international relations (IR) in particular will arguably need new ways of facing questions that have to do with both existence and extinction in the realm of the global (Burke et al. 2016). Not least among these questions is how human beings relate to what might be called 'the end of the world'. Questions concerning the end of things (i.e., eschatological questions; see Box 21.1) are central to the ways in which we exist in the world today. Depictions of life in the Anthropocene often envision a future of environmental catastrophe where natural resources have been depleted and the Earth has been ravaged by storms and drought, finally turning into uninhabitable wasteland; an Earth where coastal areas are becoming submerged under rising sea levels, causing death, destruction, mass migration, and conflict.Such imagery bears significant parallels to the Christian biblical tradition of depicting the apocalypse, that is, the unfolding of the end times that precede the second coming of Christ. Therefore, the term 'environmental apocalypse' (or 'ecological apocalypse' or 'climate apocalypse') has been coined
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