The Biopolitics of Feeling

Abstract

In the early spring of 2013, I became suddenly and extravagantly ill. Each day I lost another basic faculty: the strength to lift a fork, the concentration to find and attach a file to an email, the short-term memory and physical stamina to speak with a friend. I thought I was dying, and that if I could hold on another three months, it would be more than enough time to finish this book-as clear a sign of impaired cognition as could be. While I had previously been feeling overwhelmed by the enormity of the task of completing The Biopolitics of Feeling, when late-stage, neurological Lyme Disease struck it was this proj ect, and the community which has made it pos si ble, that first reminded me there was work I desperately wanted to continue. I am deeply grateful to the many people who have helped this proj ect become something to be proud of and who have helped me stabilize, and restabilize, during what is now a chronic, enduring illness. I thank Abena Busia and the Rutgers-New Brunswick Department of Women's and Gender Studies for arranging leave and for covering my courses during weeks and semesters I have been unable to teach: thanks in par tic u lar to

“They love death as we love life”: The “Muslim Question” and the biopolitics of replacement

“…These kinds of representations, we argue, call for a closer scrutiny of and engagement with the technology of power centered on the production of the population as a political problem, that is, biopower (Foucault, ), and one of the myriads of techniques deployed by it: eugenics (Schuller, ). We now turn to a more elaborate discussion of how biopolitics and biopower can be understood as shaping and informing the population replacement palimpsest to then return to and offer a second reading of the images against the background of biopolitics and eugenics.…”

“…Ever since its Foucaultian elaboration, the concept of biopower has taken a life of its own, it has become a traveling theory (Willaert, ), subjected to further elaborations, amendments, and critiques. These critiques have expanded not only the Eurocentric architecture of the concept by taking into account how colonial history and the colonies “as laboratories of modernity” were crucial in the formation of this technology of power (Stoler, , p. 15), but also amendments have appeared engaging with some of the precepts upon which Foucault built the concept, namely: his Eurocentric location of the “birth of racism” in the 19th century (Stoler, ; Weheliye, ); his limited and problematic conceptualization of race and racism (Weheliye, ); the insufficiency of biopower to capture contemporary forms of subjection of life to the power of death (Mbembé, , p. 39), the sudden break between sovereign power and biopower (Sheth, ), as well as the preponderance of race over sexuality in Society must be defended (Schuller, ). In this sense, while we consider Foucault's concepts of biopower and biopolitics to be crucial in accounting for the appearance and proliferation of the population replacement discourse, it is also the case that questions of race, colonization, and dehumanization, which are central to the workings of biopower, remain undertheorized in Foucault's writings (see Bracke & Hernández Aguilar, ) and need to be brought to the fore when considering a discourse of population replacement, which, as mentioned, mobilizes different layers and categories of analysis.…”

“…It seeks to “treat the population as a set of coexisting living beings with particular biological and pathological features, and which as such fall under specific forms of knowledge and techniques” (Foucault, , p. 367). Biopower, in other words, operates at the level of the production, control, and regulation of populations, and it does so by further crafting (racial) caesuras within the continuum of the population and by recruiting and proliferating racial differentiations with long histories (Weheliye, ) as well as sex and sexual categories of differentiation (Schuller, ). Biopower transformed the race war discourse in significant ways: the race war discourse transmuted into the idea that “We have to defend society against all the biological threats posed by the other race, the subrace” (Foucault, , pp.…”

“…First, we offer a concise and schematic account of the rise of the “replacement” discourse through a brief discussion of some of its major articulations. Borrowing from Kyra Schuller () we propose reading this discourse as a palimpsest , a discourse that accumulates layers through time, a discourse in which every (re)iteration adds layers of meaning (fiction, statistical, racial, conspiratorial, theological), while still bearing traces of or keeping intact the core idea (a deliberated Muslim plan to replace “native” European populations). Second, we do a close reading of two recent images that juxtapose life and death as imagined within the replacement discourse, and that capture that discourse in powerful albeit disturbing ways.…”

Fusing Race: The Phobogenics of Racializing Surveillance

“…In addition to Arun Saldanha, Simone Browne (2015), Mel Y. Chen (2012), Jasbir Puar (2007;, Kyla Schuller (2018), and Alexander Weheliye (2014) theorize biopolitics and race, which means departing from how Foucault and Deleuze articulate discipline, biopower, and control. 3 Rather than rely on the exemplar of Jeremy Bentham's panopticon to theorize discipline and control, as Foucault does in Discipline and Punish (1977), Browne's (2015) reinterpretation of power diagnostics positions the Brooks slave ship as an example of surveillant capture.…”