Community, Life, and Subjectivity in Italian Biopolitics

Vatter, Miguel

doi:10.4324/9781315612751-9

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 1 publication

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“…Within the horizon of the current crisis of political subjectivity, the hard task of reinvigorating and rebuilding a Marxist subjectivity, while in the meantime rejecting the paradigms of the twentieth century -party, class, state -is often assigned to messianic or, more widely, to political theology (Vatter 2017). Still, it is not clear what the extent and the limitations of such an approach are.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mystery of Return: Agamben and Bloch on St. Paul’s Parousia and Messianic Temporality

Filauri¹

2020

10.14746/prt

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During the last two decades, a sharp re-reading of St. Paul’s letters allowed several thinkers to embed a messianic element in their political philosophy. In these readings, the messianic refusal of the world and its laws is understood through the suspensive act of “subtraction” – a movement of withdrawal which nonetheless too often proved ineffective when translated into political practice. After analysing Agamben’s interpretation of subtraction in terms of “inoperativity”, this article focuses on the notion of Parousia as a key element to understanding his anti-utopian account of messianic time. In contrast to Agamben’s reading,Bloch’s interpretation of the Pauline Parousia envisages the messianic event as infra-historical, but at the same time opened to ultimate (meta-historical) purposes. Bloch’s messianic call – I argue – takes the form of mediation, a correction of subtraction towards the direction of a more committed political engagement. I conclude by suggesting that the concrete implementations of this mediation perform their emancipatory function in so far as they assume the character of practical ethics, with the attention directed to the underprivileged and marginalised.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Mystery of Return: Agamben and Bloch on St. Paul’s Parousia and Messianic Temporality

Filauri¹

2020

10.14746/prt

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“…However, the critique to Agamben's anthropocentrism (Lemke, 2005;Braidotti, 2015;Vatter, 2017), the disciplinary dilemmas and the expansion of biopolitical turns (Lemke, 2015;Pozorov, Rentea, 2017) Esposito understands affirmative biopolitics within the realm of political theory, aesthetics and political theology. Reflecting on Nazi biopolitics, he argues that "whereas biopower under Nazism thinks the relation between life and politics only 'biologically,' the aim of an affirmative biopolitics is 'to interpret life's relationship with politics philosophically" (Esposito, 2008: 150).…”

Section: Approaching Inhabitation As Affirmative Biopolitics With Esposito and Braidottimentioning

confidence: 99%

Inhabitation as more-than-dwelling. Notes for a renewed grammar

Boano

Astolfo

2020

International Journal of Housing Policy

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Bleak urban futures and the obscure perspective on housing calls for renewed attention across several disciplines, approaches and geographies. Michele Lancione (2019) recently pleaded to study 'radical housing' within everyday practices of dwelling for those living at the margins, where the latter are understood as the site where 'a politics of life' emerges from uncanny, uninhabitable places -with explicit reference to the work of Abdoumaliq Simone. Assuming the importance of dwelling and its immanence, can the political dimension ascribed by Lancione to the radical housing approach, be complemented with the affirmative politics of Esposito and Braidotti and Agamben's forms-of-life? Starting from these questions, this paper aims to engage with Lancione's dwelling as difference and offer a complementary readings suggesting the rubric of 'inhabitation' as the result of affirmative daily strategies of learning, navigating and governing the city. By expanding the notion of dwelling to include intersecting forms of caring, repairing and imagining the future, we will substantiate the concept we refer to as 'inhabiting' as a relational practice occurring in marginal and fragile environments, constituted by multiple incremental and transformative acts with the ultimate purpose to hold and resist marginalization.

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“…There is a fundamental antinomy that emerges out of Foucault's (1990) 'Right of death and power over life' between thanatopolitics, a politics of the negation of life elaborated in Agamben's (1998;2003) work on Nazi death camps, and an affirmative biopolitics, the radically emancipatory forces of biopolitical production that are '[n]ot over life but of life', about which Esposito (2008: 157) writes. Affirmative biopolitics has been addressed by a number of commentators engaging these theorists, including Campbell (2011), Lemke (2011), Bird and Short (2013), McVeigh (2013), Weir (2013), Ailio (2016), Vatter (2016), and Tierney (2016), among others. This article aims to supplement these interventions by way of a case study that illustrates how the resources of the postgenomic and post-Pasteurian moment have consequences for thinking about generative multispecies relations and microbiopolitics.…”

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confidence: 99%

Me, my self, and the multitude: Microbiopolitics of the human microbiome

Ironstone

2018

European Journal of Social Theory

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The human microbiome has become one of the dominant biomedical frameworks of the contemporary moment that may be understood to be post-Pasteurian. The recognitions the human microbiome opens up for thinking about the biological self and the individual have ontological and epistemological ramifications for considering what and who the human being is. As this article illustrates, the microbiopolitics of the human microbiome challenges the immunitarian Pasteurian model in which the organismic self shores itself up and defends itself against a microbial non-self or other. Instead, this theory presents the human organism as comprised of multiple ecosystems and as a multitude, suggesting that the thanatopolitical attempts to wipe out microbial others (evident in the overuse and misuse of antibiotics, for example) are giving way to an affirmative microbiopolitics grounded in generative multispecies relationality. This article sets out to make the case for this affirmative microbiopolitics.

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Community, Life, and Subjectivity in Italian Biopolitics

Cited by 4 publications

References 1 publication

The Mystery of Return: Agamben and Bloch on St. Paul’s Parousia and Messianic Temporality

The Mystery of Return: Agamben and Bloch on St. Paul’s Parousia and Messianic Temporality

Inhabitation as more-than-dwelling. Notes for a renewed grammar

Me, my self, and the multitude: Microbiopolitics of the human microbiome

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