ENGL 74.02 Understanding Biopolitics
Biopolitics, loosely defined as the reciprocal incorporation of politics and life, describes not merely the dominant form that politics takes today but also, arguably, the form that politics has always taken. Healthcare, reproduction, immigration, security, racialization, risk management, emotional wellbeing, property and the common: There is no aspect of embodied existence that has not been affected, if not created (or at least grasped), by biopolitics. Nevertheless, the concept of biopolitics itself, introduced into the critical lexicon by Foucault and still subject to revision and working-through, remains far from settled. Accordingly, students in this seminar will read foundational texts of the burgeoning biopolitical canon — texts by Foucault, Arendt, Agamben, Esposito, Hardt and Negri, to name but a few — as a way of understanding biopolitics not as the basis for a new epistemology but as the term we accord a set of predicaments that emerge at the point where politics and life intercept one another. To facilitate that understanding, students will rely on the texts collected in Biopolitics: A Reader, supplemented by Esposito’s Terms of the Political and Melinda Cooper’s Life as Surplus. For their final paper, students will have the option of writing either an essay assessing the treatment of a biopolitical predicament across a range of texts or a biopolitical case study.
Department-Specific Course Categories
Senior Seminar: Course Group IV