Month: July 2025

🧬 Introduction: The Emergence of Biopolitics

• Biopolitics is an evolving subfield in political science that examines how biological factors influence political behavior, theory, and policy.
• The essay outlines three historical categories of biopolitical thinking:
  1. Metaphor
  2. Evolutionary/genetic explanations of behavior
  3. Public policy implications
• Peterson explains the value of historical inquiry:
  “An inquiry into the intellectual ancestors of the present effort provides a context for criticizing and evaluating this renewed interest” (p. 355).

📈 Indicators of Growing Interest in Biopolitics

• Academic visibility: 13 out of 30 international politics textbooks (1971–1975) referenced biology’s political relevance.
• Conference presence: Panels held at IPSA, APSA, MPSA from 1970–1976.
• Journal publications: Journal of Politics, Polity, American Political Science Review featured biopolitics articles.
• Elite endorsement: David Easton emphasized the relevance of biological factors:
  “The biological nature of man has a significant place” in political systems (p. 356).

🧠 🧩 Category 1: Biopolitics as Metaphor

• Political thinkers have historically used organic metaphors to describe the state.

Key Examples:

• Plato viewed the state as a body with interdependent parts:

“The auxiliaries, the producers, and the philosopher-kings must each perform their own proper functions” (p. 358).

• Aristotle linked political revolutions to imbalance in state parts:

“Every member ought to grow in proportion, if symmetry is to be preserved” (p. 358).

• Thomas Hobbes described the state as an “artificial animal”, likening sovereignty to the soul and money to blood (p. 359).
• Woodrow Wilson declared:

“Government is not a machine but a living thing…accountable to Darwin, not to Newton” (p. 360).

• Herbert Spencer emphasized society as an organism:

“Functional interdependence of parts…is scarcely more manifest in animals than in nations” (p. 359).

🧬 🐒 Category 2: Evolutionary and Genetic Theories

• Inspired by Darwin, this category links natural selection to politics and society.

Main Points:

• Walter Bagehot: Natural selection occurs among nations:

“The best nations conquered the worst” (p. 361).

• Social Darwinism became a dominant explanation for racial and national superiority (p. 357).
• Ludwig Gumplowicz emphasized group struggle as a motor for social evolution.

🌎 🌡️ Category 3: Racial-Genetic & Environmental Theories

• These explanations attributed political traits to race, genetics, and climate.

Examples:

• Plato believed some are born to be rulers; Aristotle claimed:

“From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule” (p. 363).

• Arthur de Gobineau ranked races, placing Aryans at the top (p. 363).
• Francis Galton measured racial intelligence and claimed:

Africans were less fit for civilization than Europeans (p. 364).

• Montesquieu connected climate to temperament:

“Cooler climates produce vigor and courage” (p. 363).

• Treitschke argued harsh winters encouraged strength and introspection.

📜 Policy Implications of Biopolitical Theories

• Many thinkers used biology to justify inequality, eugenics, and colonialism.

Key Cases:

• John W. Burgess claimed:

“The Teuton really dominates the world by his superior political genius” (p. 364).

• Madison Grant influenced immigration policy with his racial hierarchy model (p. 364).
• Herbert Spencer warned against welfare:

“If benefits go to the inferior… progressive degradation would result” (p. 365).

• William Graham Sumner wrote:

“Root, hog, or die” – defending laissez-faire and natural selection in society (p. 365).

⚠️ Three Major Problems in Biopolitical Thought

1. ❗ Reductionism: Oversimplifying political behavior by attributing it solely to biology.
   • Example: Davies’ theory of political unrest triggered by “energy in memory cells” is critiqued as biologically dubious (p. 366).
2. 🧪 Uncritical Use of Biological Concepts:
   • Ardrey’s territoriality theory and Master’s riot explanations are considered speculative and flawed (pp. 366–367).
3. 📉 Lack of Empirical Support:
   • Much of the historical work lacks data. Peterson notes this weakens the field’s scientific legitimacy (p. 366).

✅ Conclusion: Learning From the Past

• Peterson calls for a rigorous, empirically grounded biopolitics:

“Otherwise, the fate of contemporary biopolitics will be as dismal as previously” (p. 366).

• He encourages caution, interdisciplinary validation, and theoretical refinement to fulfill biopolitics’ potential.

🧬 1. Biopolitical Theory (Foucault, Agamben, Esposito)

Biopolitics as a literary theory analyzes how power operates through the biological regulation of life. Peterson’s work historically situates this dynamic long before Foucault’s formulation.

• 🧠 Peterson provides a genealogical account of how biology became intertwined with political meaning—paralleling Foucault’s “genealogy of biopower.”
• 📚 He exposes how scientific discourse (e.g., Darwinism) shaped political narratives about race, progress, and governance.
• 💬 “An inquiry into the intellectual ancestors of the present effort provides a context for criticizing and evaluating this renewed interest.” (p. 355)
• 🔍 This aligns with Agamben’s concern about life’s politicization and Esposito’s critique of immunitary paradigms in governance.

🏛️ 2. Structuralism & System Theory

Structuralist theory sees society and texts as composed of interrelated structures. Peterson traces how biological analogies helped shape structuralist political thought.

• 🧩 The organismic metaphor of the state as a body reflects structural interdependence, mirroring literary structuralism’s reliance on interrelated functions.
• 📘 “Plato noted that the auxiliaries, the producers, and the philosopher-kings must each perform their own proper functions…” (p. 358)
• 🔁 Systems thinkers like Lowell and Wilson, cited by Peterson, conceptualize government as a living structure, not unlike how texts are analyzed as coherent systems in structuralism.

💣 3. Postcolonial Theory

Postcolonial theory critiques how Western ideologies, including science, have justified imperialism and racial hierarchies. Peterson critiques this within biopolitical racial-genetic discourse.

• ⚖️ He shows how biological determinism justified colonialism, eugenics, and racial superiority in political thought.
• 📘 “The Teuton really dominates the world by his superior political genius.” – Burgess (quoted on p. 364)
• 📚 This directly supports postcolonial critiques of scientific racism and imperialist knowledge systems in literary narratives (cf. Edward Said’s Orientalism).

🧠 4. Psychoanalytic Theory

Psychoanalytic literary theory often addresses instincts, drives, and unconscious behavior, all of which appear in Peterson’s historical examples.

• 🌀 Peterson discusses theories about political behavior rooted in instinctual drives (e.g., crowd behavior, herd instinct).
• 💬 “One of the primary bases of the state was the herd instinct in man.” (p. 363)
• 🧬 This overlaps with psychoanalytic emphasis on pre-rational forces (e.g., Freud’s death drive or Lacan’s Real) as determinants of political/subjective behavior.

📜 5. Metaphor and Rhetoric in Political Discourse (Literary Formalism)

Peterson reveals how metaphor functions not just poetically, but ideologically—serving as a tool for naturalizing political structures.

• ✍️ The use of the state-as-body metaphor exemplifies the rhetorical strategies analyzed in literary formalism.
• 💬 “Government is not a machine but a living thing…accountable to Darwin, not to Newton.” – Wilson (p. 360)
• 🔍 Peterson’s study becomes a literary rhetorical analysis of political language and how metaphors shape ideological perception.

🚨 6. Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)

Critical theorists (Adorno, Horkheimer) caution against uncritically adopted scientific rationality. Peterson echoes this concern in his critique of early biopolitical theories.

• ⚠️ He critiques reductionism, uncritical adoption of biology, and lack of empirical evidence in biopolitical claims.
• 💬 “Many of the studies mentioned reflect the deadly sin of reductionism.” (p. 366)
• 📚 This supports critical theory’s argument that biologically framed ideologies can serve oppressive systems.

🧩 7. Discourse Analysis & Ideology Critique

Peterson’s historical tracing of political-biological discourse fits within discourse theory, especially in showing how language and science construct power.

• 🧠 The article shows how biological terms—e.g., “fitness,” “instinct,” “degeneration”—became political tools.
• 📘 Example: “Social Darwinists supposed that human progress demands a struggle and competition…between races.” (p. 357)
• 📚 This contributes to literary discourse analysis by mapping how seemingly neutral scientific language acquires ideological force.

❗ Over-Reliance on Historical Survey

• Too Descriptive, Not Analytical: The essay largely catalogs historical instances rather than engaging in deep critical analysis of their theoretical validity.
• Lack of Theoretical Innovation: It presents historical antecedents but doesn’t sufficiently build a new theoretical framework for contemporary biopolitics.

❗ Weak Empirical Foundation

• Insufficient Empirical Support: Peterson himself acknowledges that “little solid support has been marshalled” (p. 366).
• Anecdotal References: The examples given are often literary or speculative, without rigorous data or scientific testing.

❗ Conceptual Ambiguity

• Unclear Definition of Biopolitics: The essay loosely defines biopolitics without anchoring it in contemporary theoretical frameworks, such as those by Foucault or Agamben.
• Vague Categorization: The three-part division (metaphor, genetic/evolutionary influence, public policy) lacks interconnectivity or philosophical depth.

❗ Absence of Ethical and Philosophical Engagement

• Ignores Bioethics: There’s minimal attention to normative or ethical questions, despite discussing race, eugenics, and pharmacological control.
• No Critical Evaluation of Power Structures: Unlike Foucault’s concept of biopower, Peterson doesn’t explore how biopolitical control operates through institutions or discourse.

❗ Eurocentric and Gender-Blind Perspective

• Dominated by Western Thinkers: The essay focuses almost exclusively on Western male theorists, omitting non-Western or feminist perspectives on biopolitics.
• Lack of Intersectionality: It fails to address gender, class, or postcolonial dynamics, all crucial in modern biopolitical discourse.

❗ Reductionism Critique Not Fully Resolved

• Contradictory Stance on Reductionism: Peterson criticizes reductionism but still adopts biological determinism in parts of his analysis.
• Fails to Offer Alternatives: The work doesn’t provide a clear integrative model balancing biology, culture, and political agency.

🎯 1. Definition and Emergence of Biopolitics

• Biopolitics is defined as the study of the biological foundations of political behavior.
• The field emerged from interdisciplinary interest, especially after advances in biology post-World War II.
• Somit emphasizes the need to bridge biology and political science:

“These several approaches are usually subsumed under the heading of ‘biopolitics’” (Somit, 1972, p. 211).

• Early examples include theories that saw the state as a living organism (e.g., John of Salisbury, Woodrow Wilson) (p. 209–210).

🔬 2. Ethology and Political Behavior

• Ethology (the study of animal behavior) is used to understand human political instincts.
• Emphasis on aggression, territoriality, crowding, and male bonding as biologically rooted behaviors:

“Important aspects… of human behavior are rooted in man’s biological (i.e., genetically transmitted) constitution” (p. 211).

• Somit surveys scholars like Konrad Lorenz and Lionel Tiger, who argued that political tendencies like dominance and bonding have evolutionary roots (p. 215–219).

🧠 3. Physiological and Psychopharmacological Influences

• Political behavior can be altered by changes in physiological state — e.g., drugs, fatigue, diet.
• Examples:
  • Experiments with electric shocks to alter political responses (Tursky & Lodge, cited p. 226).
  • Hypotheses linking pubertal timing and political attitudes (Ferguson et al., p. 225).
• Somit sees psychopharmacology as confirmation of ethology’s view:

“Psychopharmacologists have been able to induce profound behavioral changes by altering the physiological or biological functioning of the human body” (p. 211–212).

⚖️ 4. Implications for Public Policy

• Advances in genetics and biology pose major ethical and political dilemmas (e.g., eugenics, mind-control drugs, population control).
• Biopolitics encourages proactive thinking in policy design:

“The great issues already upon us are largely biological in nature—pollution, atomic and biological warfare, population control, drugs…” (p. 234).

• Emphasizes the urgency of developing a “biopolitics equal to all of these tasks”, requiring an “extraordinary fusion of understanding, audacity, and humility” (Caldwell, as cited, p. 230).

📚 5. Critical Reception and Challenges

• Some scholars caution against simplistic applications of biology to politics (e.g., Stephens, 1970):

“The addition of a biological level must be approached with the greatest methodological and empirical caution” (p. 214).

• Somit acknowledges the controversial legacy of Social Darwinism, and insists that biopolitics must avoid past errors of determinism (p. 221–222).

🌱 6. Call for a New Political Science

• Biopolitics is not intended to replace traditional approaches but to supplement and enrich them.
• Argues that political science must include biological realities in its models:

“Ethology will have performed a service… if it forces upon us the same ‘open-mindedness’ with regard to biological factors” (p. 233).

• He calls for training political scientists in biology to enable deeper, responsible integration (p. 234).

📌 Conclusion

• Biopolitics opens a frontier where biology, ethics, politics, and policy intersect.
• Despite its infancy in 1972, Somit envisions it as crucial for addressing complex modern issues like war, violence, inequality, and governance:

“It will be far better for biopolitics if it eschews… larger objectives for more modest and hopefully attainable goals” (p. 235).

🤖 1. Posthumanism: Challenging the Liberal Humanist Subject

• 🔍 Somit’s emphasis on biological determinism and evolutionary pressures undermines the Enlightenment notion of an autonomous, rational, culture-only subject—central to liberal humanist and structuralist traditions.
• 📖 “Ethologists insist that important aspects… of human behavior are rooted in man’s biological… constitution” (Somit, 1972, p. 211).
• 🧠 Relevance to Theory: Posthumanist theorists like Donna Haraway and Cary Wolfe argue that subjectivity is biologically entangled, not purely symbolic or cultural.
• 🔖 (Somit, 1972, p. 211)

🧬 2. Biocriticism / Literary Darwinism: A Foundational Anchor

• 🔍 Somit’s review of biological metaphors—“birth,” “death,” “sickness,” “organism”—links biological structures with political language, mirroring how biocriticism reads texts through an evolutionary or bio-adaptive lens.
• 📖 “The language employed is rich in biologic metaphor—lebensraum, birth, death, growth, decay…” (Somit, 1972, p. 209).
• 🧠 Relevance to Theory: Biocritics like Joseph Carroll and Nancy Easterlin argue literature encodes evolved cognitive patterns; Somit’s work bridges political behavior with these same instincts.
• 🔖 (Somit, 1972, p. 209)

🧠 3. Psychoanalytic Literary Theory: Reconsidering Drives & Instincts

• 🔍 Biopolitics contributes empirical grounding to theories of unconscious aggression, repression, and instinct seen in Freud, Lacan, and Žižek.
• 📖 “Man is… a predator whose natural instinct is to kill with a weapon” (Somit, 1972, p. 217).
• 🧠 Relevance to Theory: Freud’s “death drive” and Lacan’s Real can be revisited through the lens of ethological aggression and neurobiology.
• 🔖 (Somit, 1972, p. 217)

🌱 4. Ecocriticism: Reframing Human-Nature Relationships

• 🔍 Somit insists on biospheric interdependence, confronting anthropocentric models of power and state—core concerns in ecocriticism.
• 📖 “There must be a profound change in man’s perception of his relationship to nature” (Somit, 1972, p. 230).
• 🧠 Relevance to Theory: Ecocriticism explores how literature and theory challenge the nature/culture binary—Somit provides political-scientific reinforcement.
• 🔖 (Somit, 1972, p. 230)

🧪 5. Foucauldian Biopolitics: A Scientific Precursor to Power/Knowledge Theories

• 🔍 While Foucault later redefines biopolitics in terms of state control over life, Somit’s version emphasizes the scientific potential of regulating life through biological insight.
• 📖 “The great issues already upon us are largely biological in nature—pollution, atomic and biological warfare, population control, drugs…” (Somit, 1972, p. 234).
• 🧠 Relevance to Theory: Foucauldian theorists can see Somit’s work as proto-biopolitics—raising ethical alarms about control of bodies before “biopower” became a mainstream literary concern.
• 🔖 (Somit, 1972, p. 234)

🧩 6. Structuralism/Semiotics: Political Behavior as Bio-Encoded Sign System

• 🔍 Somit’s integration of genetic programming and instinctive “signals” parallels Saussurean notions of sign systems—except based in biology rather than language.
• 📖 “Species… develop genetically transmitted modes or responses” akin to “behavioral patterns” (Somit, 1972, p. 215).
• 🧠 Relevance to Theory: Literature can be read as mimicking or resisting these evolutionary “codes” or signals embedded in characters, plots, and genres.
• 🔖 (Somit, 1972, p. 215)

🧬 7. Critical Theory / Frankfurt School: Biological Limits of Ideology

• 🔍 Somit critiques both utopian ideologies and positivism, warning that ignoring biology may result in misguided political models.
• 📖 “Efforts would be better invested in trying to make the concept [survival] empirically meaningful” (Somit, 1972, p. 223).
• 🧠 Relevance to Theory: Critical Theorists like Adorno or Marcuse focus on ideology; Somit reminds us ideology is bounded by the biology of the body.
• 🔖 (Somit, 1972, p. 223)

🧭 8. Narrative Studies / Archetypes: Instinctual Foundations of Storytelling

• 🔍 Somit notes that aggression, territory, and dominance have cross-species expressions, supporting the idea that narrative structures might mirror evolutionary survival themes.
• 📖 “Aggressive behaviors are a product of evolution… they must have had adaptive value” (Somit, 1972, p. 218).
• 🧠 Relevance to Theory: Literary archetypes (hero, enemy, exile) may reflect encoded survival logic, not just cultural imagination.
• 🔖 (Somit, 1972, p. 218)

❌ 1. Risk of Biological Determinism

• Critics argue that Somit’s emphasis on genetic and evolutionary traits may lead to deterministic explanations of human behavior, ignoring culture, agency, and historical variability.
• This echoes concerns about reviving social Darwinism under a scientific guise.
• 🗣️ “Reductionist biopolitics may revive discredited theories of racial superiority or fixed human nature.”

⚠️ 2. Ethical Concerns About Eugenics and Control

• By acknowledging topics like eugenics and psychopharmacological control, the theory risks normalizing state-level manipulation of biology.
• Raises questions about who decides what is “natural” or “fit,” especially in policymaking.
• 🗣️ “The mention of population control and eugenics inevitably evokes dark historical precedents” (Somit, 1972, p. 230).

🔍 3. Methodological Vagueness

• Critics question the empirical rigor of biopolitical claims, particularly the extrapolation from animal behavior (ethology) to complex human societies.
• Political behavior may not map cleanly onto instincts like “territoriality” or “aggression.”
• 🗣️ “The addition of a biological level must be approached with the greatest methodological and empirical caution” (Somit, 1972, p. 214).

🧠 4. Undermining of Free Will and Moral Responsibility

• Biopolitics can be seen as dehumanizing, reducing individuals to biological mechanisms.
• Raises philosophical questions about moral agency, especially in politics, ethics, and literature.
• 🗣️ “A purely biological model risks denying the role of reflective judgment and ethical choice.”

🧪 5. Overreliance on Emerging Sciences

• Somit’s reliance on fields like psychopharmacology and neurobiology was speculative at the time and may overstate scientific maturity.
• Some feared the weaponization of ‘new’ sciences in political discourse.

👥 6. Fear of Politicizing Science (and Scientizing Politics)

• Critics are concerned that biopolitics might be used to justify existing inequalities or institutionalize prejudice under the guise of “natural law.”
• Risk of technocratic authoritarianism where biology replaces debate.

🧬 7. Tension with Constructivist Theories

• Cultural theorists, feminists, and poststructuralists critique the idea that political behavior is inborn or universal.
• It conflicts with social constructivism, which emphasizes language, ideology, and discourse over biology.

🧬 Conceptual Framework: Biopolitics and the State

• Definition of Biopolitics: The entry of biological life into political control systems—“a quintessential feature of a normalizing state” (Tripathy, 2013, p. 26).
• Body as Political Construct: The body is no longer sacred or natural but becomes meaningful only within political legitimacy.
• ➤ “Body is not seen as worth living…if it is not politically viable” (p. 27).

🧭 Two Conflicting Views of the Body in Antigone

• Creon’s View: The body is a state-regulated entity, with rights conferred only by citizenship and loyalty.
  • ➤ “Polyneices is denied burial…for hungry birds of prey to swoop and feast” (Sophocles, lines 27–29).
• Antigone’s View: The body holds inherent sanctity, inseparable from human dignity.
  • ➤ “Body as a sacred site which…cannot be separated from rights” (Tripathy, p. 26).

🏛️ Aristotle’s Political Animal and State Primacy

• Human worth is tied to state existence: “he who is without a state…is either a bad man or above humanity” (Aristotle, Politics, p. 5).
• Tripathy highlights how Aristotle privileges the state over individual or family: “The state is by nature clearly prior to the family and to the individual” (p. 6).

⚖️ Foucault and Sovereign Power

• Power over life and death defines the sovereign. Foucault: “by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing” (Foucault, p. 136).
• Creon as Sovereign-Judge: Decides life/death based on political loyalty:
  • ➤ “He who disobeys…shall be put to death” (Sophocles, lines 34–35).
  • ➤ “It is not I, but death, that stops this wedding” (line 565).

📚 Agamben’s Homo Sacer and the Ancient Origin of Biopolitics

• Bare life vs. political life: Tripathy brings Agamben to argue that biopolitical control is ancient, not just modern.
  • ➤ “The production of a bio-political body is the original activity of sovereign power” (Agamben, p. 11).
• Antigone’s cave = Agamben’s camp: A site where one is biologically alive but politically dead.

🧟 Living Death and Denial of Political Identity

• Antigone in the cave: Denied political life but kept biologically alive— “so much food—no more” (Sophocles, lines 761–762).
  • ➤ “The cave is both home and tomb…home for the beast and tomb for the rational citizen” (Tripathy, p. 29).
• Polyneices: Biologically dead, but politically undeclared—his body retains semiotic power in state propaganda.

💥 Mourning as Political Resistance

• Judith Butler’s “Grievability”: Humanity is recognized through the capacity to mourn and be mourned.
  • ➤ “Each of us is constituted politically…by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies” (Butler, p. 20).
• Antigone’s Grief: “Like a bird returning to its nest and finding it despoiled” (Sophocles, lines 415–417) becomes an act of resistance.

🔄 Reversal of Sovereign Power through Death

• Antigone’s suicide subverts Creon’s plan of control through life-in-death.
• Creon himself collapses into private kinship and grief, stating: “My life is now death” (line 1270).

🧬 Biopolitical Literary Theory

• Expansion of Biopolitical Analysis to Classical Texts
  • Tripathy applies Foucault and Agamben’s biopolitical frameworks to Sophocles, showing that control over life and death is not only modern but rooted in ancient political drama.
  • ➤ “The production of a bio-political body is the original activity of sovereign power” (Agamben, p. 11).
• States as Manufacturers of Meaning for Bodies
  • The state determines the meaning and legitimacy of human life by dictating burial, punishment, and mourning.
  • ➤ “Biological body has no meaning outside the state…exhibited as a political commodity” (p. 27).

🏛️ Political Philosophy in Literature

• Literature as a Medium to Reflect Sovereignty
  • Creon represents sovereign power that “exercises his right to kill or refrain from killing” (Foucault, p. 136), turning literature into a mirror of juridical modernity.
  • Antigone becomes a platform to examine how states regulate life/death through political rationality.
• Creon = Political Rationality | Antigone = Ethical Subject
  • Tripathy repositions Antigone not only as a familial rebel but as someone challenging the ontological link between state and humanity.

🧞 Posthumanism and Corporeal Theory

• Deconstructing the Human/Animal Divide
  • Antigone, punished and placed in a cave, becomes “less than human”—a beast in the eyes of the polis.
  • ➤ “Living inside a cave is like living the life of a beast…outside his or her politics” (p. 28).
• Body as Text
  • Tripathy draws on corporeal inscription, treating Polyneices’s and Antigone’s bodies as canvases of state ideology.
  • ➤ “Creon uses Polyneices’s body and Antigone’s punishment as texts upon which to inscribe…authority” (Pritchard, p. 88).

⚖️ Ethics and Sovereignty (Agamben and Butler)

• Reframing Antigone through Homo Sacer and the Camp
  • Antigone’s confinement in a cave parallels Agamben’s idea of homo sacer: a life outside law that can be sacrificed but not murdered.
  • ➤ “This is like Agamben’s detention camp…a homo sacer who can be sacrificed without being killed” (p. 28).
• Judith Butler’s Grievability in Mourning and Resistance
  • Mourning becomes a radical ethical act; grief as resistance to state dehumanization.
  • ➤ “Each of us is constituted politically…by virtue of the social vulnerability of our bodies” (Butler, p. 20).
  • ➤ Antigone mourns “like a bird returning to its nest and finding it despoiled” (Sophocles, lines 415–417).

📚 Classical Reception Theory

• Recontextualizing Greek Tragedy in Modern Political Thought
  • Tripathy shows that Antigone is more than tragedy—it’s a proto-theoretical text reflecting the tension between life, law, and power.
  • It reinforces how ancient texts can anticipate modern debates on citizenship, sovereignty, and exclusion.

🗣️ Narrative Theory and Power Discourse

• The State as Narrator of Bodies
  • By denying Polyneices burial, Creon controls the narrative of death, showing how narrative is a tool of sovereignty.
  • ➤ “State does not simply produce the body…but is produced at the same moment of power and glory” (p. 27).

🧩 Humanism and its Limits

• Critique of State-Based Humanity (Aristotle’s Legacy)
  • Tripathy interrogates the classical foundation of humanism—where humanity equals political citizenship.
  • ➤ “He who…is without a state, is either a bad man or above humanity” (Aristotle, p. 5).
  • The article thus undermines traditional Western notions of rational subjectivity grounded in statehood.

🪦 Thanatopolitics (Politics of Death)

• How Death Becomes a Tool of Control
  • Creon regulates death (burial rights, execution, confinement), making it an administrative category.
  • ➤ “Creon cannot grant life the same way he can take life—which creates an asymmetry between life and death” (p. 27).
• Semiotic Potential of Death
  • Polyneices continues to “live in death” as a political symbol—highlighting death as a mode of political meaning.

📉 Overextension of Modern Biopolitical Theory onto Ancient Texts

• Criticism: The application of modern theorists like Foucault, Agamben, and Butler to a 5th-century BCE text risks anachronism—imposing contemporary frameworks onto a contextually distant work.
• ➤ While Tripathy acknowledges Agamben’s view that biopolitics “is as old as political organizing,” critics might argue that this retroactive application blurs historical specificity (p. 28).

🧩 Limited Exploration of Antigone’s Gendered Agency

• Criticism: The article foregrounds political sovereignty and the state’s relation to the body but offers little engagement with feminist readings of Antigone as a defiant woman challenging patriarchal norms.
• ➤ Judith Butler is invoked in the final section, but Antigone’s gendered resistance is treated primarily in biopolitical rather than feminist terms (p. 30).

🪵 Neglect of Tragic Form and Literary Aesthetics

• Criticism: Tripathy approaches Antigone more as a political allegory than as a work of literature with dramatic structure, poetics, and catharsis.
• ➤ The focus on sovereign logic overshadows Sophocles’ dramatic art, mythic resonance, and emotional complexity of characters like Haemon, Ismene, or Teiresias.

🏛️ Over-identification of Creon with Sovereignty

• Criticism: Creon is portrayed almost exclusively as a sovereign archetype, which may flatten his character’s internal conflict, tragic error (hamartia), and transformation by the end.
• ➤ “Creon and death become almost indistinguishable” (p. 27) reflects a symbolic reduction, potentially undermining the humanism within Sophocles’ portrayal of rulers.

🌀 Binary Between State and Humanity May Be Too Rigid

• Criticism: Tripathy’s dichotomy between state reason and human vulnerability risks being overly binary, overlooking the nuances where state actors (e.g., Haemon) express empathy, or where Antigone wields her own form of authority.
• ➤ Antigone’s cave as a zone of non-life suggests a deterministic reading with little room for ambiguity or resistance beyond martyrdom.

📚 Insufficient Engagement with Classical Scholarship

• Criticism: The article leans heavily on contemporary continental theory and offers limited dialogue with classical scholars who have long debated Antigone‘s politics, theology, and ethics.
• ➤ Scholars like Bernard Knox, Martha Nussbaum, or H.D.F. Kitto are absent from the analysis, despite their relevance to Sophoclean tragedy.

⏳ Underexplored Theme of Time and Afterlife

• Criticism: While Tripathy emphasizes the state’s control over life and death, he leaves underexplored the theological and temporal stakes in Antigone’s burial act—especially the role of the underworld and divine law.
• ➤ The spiritual dimension of burial (“honour in the world below,” line 24) is mentioned but not deeply analyzed in relation to Greek metaphysics or divine justice.

🧱 Determinism in Political Readings

• Criticism: The reading risks reducing Antigone’s fate to a function of biopower, underemphasizing individual choice, tragic agency, and the ethical drama at the heart of Sophocles’ play.
• ➤ For example, Antigone’s suicide is read as a political disruption of Creon’s plan, but its ethical, spiritual, or personal dimensions remain less examined (p. 29).

🔍 1. Introduction: Framing the Political Through Film

• The authors open with Those Who Feel the Fire Burning (Knibbe, 2015) as an affective and poetic lens into the European refugee crisis.
• Key Quote: The film “blurs existential boundaries… between life and death, truth and fiction… or subjectivity and objectivity” (p. 2).
• This cinematic metaphor introduces the bio/necro/cosmopolitical triad by revealing “the matter of life and death in this contemporary climate” (p. 2).

⚖️ 2. Biopolitics: Managing Life

• Rooted in Foucault’s theories, biopolitics is the modern state’s power to “make live and let die” (Foucault, 2003).
• It regulates populations and disciplines bodies through diffuse mechanisms of control.
• Key Quote: Biopolitics governs “a new body, a multiple body… that cannot necessarily be counted” (Foucault, 2003, p. 245; cited on p. 3).

💀 3. Necropolitics: The Power to Let Die

• Building on and critiquing biopolitics, Mbembe’s necropolitics centers the state’s power “to make die,” especially through warfare and border control.
• Key Quote: Necropolitics creates “death-worlds… forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life” (Mbembe, 2003, p. 40; cited on p. 4).
• Exposes racialized, gendered, and class-based “zones of abandonment.”

🌀 4. Cosmopolitics: Beyond the Humanist Political

• Borrowed from Isabelle Stengers, cosmopolitics challenges liberal, anthropocentric definitions of politics and knowledge.
• Key Quote: Cosmopolitics emphasizes “the unknown constituted by the multiple, divergent worlds and to the articulations of which they could eventually be capable” (Stengers, 2005, p. 995; cited on p. 5).
• It refuses easy political solutions and calls for thinking with complexity and indeterminacy.

🌍 5. Feminist and Queer Interventions

• The article brings queer and feminist theory into biopolitical and necropolitical discourse.
• It foregrounds marginalized bodies excluded from normative political life: “those who do not – or cannot – conform to a white, middle-class, heteronormative… existence” (p. 5).
• Key Quote: “Biopolitics and necropolitics are not opposites. Rather, they are ‘two sides of the same coin’” (Braidotti, 2013, p. 122; cited on p. 4).

🔗 6. The Role of Race, Affect, and Assemblage

• Authors highlight the work of:
  • Kyla Schuller (2018): Biopolitics shaped through race and sentimental regulation.
  • Alexander Weheliye (2014): Racializing assemblages differentiate full humans from not-quite-humans.
  • Mel Y. Chen (2012): The animacy hierarchy interrogates who/what counts as living.
• Key Quote: “Race… disciplines humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014; cited on p. 4).

🏳️‍🌈 7. Queer Necropolitics and Trans Resistance

• The issue builds on Jasbir Puar’s (2007, 2017) analysis of queer necropolitics and how LGBTQ+ visibility coexists with systemic violence.
• Trans and queer bodies, particularly of color, are exposed to intensified state violence while being instrumentalized by neoliberal tolerance.
• Key Quote: “Queer subjects invited into life and queerly abjected populations marked for death” (Haritaworn et al., 2014, p. 2; cited on p. 4).

🌌 8. Cosmopolitics as Posthumanist and Decolonial Intervention

• Cosmopolitics is presented as a posthumanist and decolonial reorientation of politics.
• It disrupts modernity’s claim to objectivity, allowing for relational, more-than-human ways of knowing and being.
• Key Quote: “Equality does not mean… all have the same say… but that they all have to be present in the mode that makes the decision as difficult as possible” (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003; cited on p. 5).

📚 9. Contribution of the Special Issue

• The issue collects interdisciplinary works bridging literary analysis, posthumanism, environmental justice, and queer of color critique.
• Examples include:
  • Yoon on “cosmo-poetics” via Margaret Rhee’s poetry.
  • Tai on environmental illness and decolonial healing.
  • Marten and Cielemęcka on biodiversity, gender, and ecological purity.
  • Tucker on homonationalism in South Africa.
  • Winnubst on anti-Blackness and neoliberal fungibility.
• Each article explores forms of resistance to biopolitical/necropolitical violence and gestures toward cosmopolitical futures.

🕯️ 10. Concluding Thought: The Specter of Haunting

• Quinan and Thiele return to the ghost metaphor from Those Who Feel the Fire Burning and Avery Gordon’s (2008) Ghostly Matters.
• Key Quote: “Haunting… registers the harm… and produces a something-to-be-done” (Gordon, 2008, p. xvi; cited on p. 7).
• The articles respond to this haunting, insisting that we cannot remain indifferent.

📚 1. Contribution to Biopolitical Literary Theory

• Integration of Governance and Narrative: The article shows how biopolitics shapes the stories we tell and whose stories are told in literature and culture.
• Key Quote: “Biopolitics governs ‘a new body, a multiple body’… a social subject who willingly self-implements the basic rules of Law” (Foucault, 2003, p. 245).
• Literary Impact: Encourages close reading of characters and populations in texts as biopolitically regulated subjects—e.g., whose lives are managed or surveilled by systemic power.

⚰️ 2. Contribution to Necropolitical Literary Criticism

• Reframing Death in Literature: It extends literary analysis to account for how death and dying are politically structured, particularly in marginalized communities.
• Key Quote: “Necropolitics uncovers how certain bodies are cultivated for life and others are systemically marked for death” (p. 4).
• Literary Impact: Promotes attention to death-worlds in literature, such as refugee narratives, racialized death, and queer precarity—as seen in ghostly narrators and post-apocalyptic figures.

🌌 3. Cosmopolitics and Posthumanist Literary Theory

• A Non-Human-Centric Approach to Literary Worlds: The text reorients literary theory away from Enlightenment humanism toward more-than-human entanglements.
• Key Quote: “A cosmos detached from politics is irrelevant… a politics not attached to a cosmos is moot” (Stengers, 2005, p. 995).
• Literary Impact: Invites literary scholars to read for planetary relationality, multispecies entanglements, and poetic indeterminacy, especially in eco-criticism and speculative fiction.

🏳️‍🌈 4. Queer Theory and Queer Necropolitics

• Challenging Homonormative and Homonationalist Narratives: The article highlights the contradictions between queer visibility and queer disposability.
• Key Quote: “Queer necropolitics as a tool to make sense of the symbiotic co-presence of life and death” (Haritaworn et al., 2014, p. 2).
• Literary Impact: Supports readings of literature that interrogate how queer and trans characters are either integrated into neoliberal celebration or sacrificed within narrative logics of violence.

🧬 5. Critical Race Theory and Racializing Assemblages

• Race as a Structuring Principle in Literature: The article draws on Alexander Weheliye’s concept of “racializing assemblages” to show how race configures subjectivity.
• Key Quote: “Race disciplines humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans and nonhumans” (Weheliye, 2014; p. 4).
• Literary Impact: Enables literary critics to analyze how racialized bodies are rendered legible or illegible in texts, especially through embodiment, law, and death.

🌿 6. Environmental Humanities and Eco-theory

• Cosmopolitics and Environmental Illness: Through discussions of healing, ecology, and transcorporeality, the article contributes to reading environments as politicized spaces.
• Example: Aurora Levins Morales’s writings are analyzed as “cosmopolitical re-worlding” (p. 5).
• Literary Impact: Deepens the ecological reading of texts by centering affective and embodied relationships between bodies and land, pollution, or toxicity.

🧠 7. Affect Theory in Literary Studies

• Affect as Aesthetic and Political Force: Emphasizes how cinema and literature provoke affect as a means of critique and transformation.
• Key Quote: “Affect… is intimately tied up in the film experience… as that which forces us to feel” (p. 2).
• Literary Impact: Invites analysis of emotional responses in literature—not as private feelings but as political and embodied affects shaped by structures of power.

🧪 8. Posthumanism in Literary Theory

• Undoing the Human as Literary Norm: The article contributes to posthuman literary studies by troubling Enlightenment views of humanity and rational subjectivity.
• Key Quote: Cosmopolitics demands “a most complex constellation of various participating perspectives and (non-)agencies” (Stengers, 2005, p. 1003).
• Literary Impact: Enriches readings of literature that feature machines, animals, ghosts, or spirits as narrative agents or ethical participants.

🔗 9. Feminist Literary Criticism and Decolonial Theory

• Foregrounding Marginalized Voices and Ways of Knowing: The article mobilizes Black feminist thinkers like Sylvia Wynter and Hortense Spillers.
• Key Quote: “Participating politically in a foundationally bio- and necropolitically structured world requires complicating the political equation” (p. 5).
• Literary Impact: Supports readings of feminist and decolonial literature that challenge Eurocentric and patriarchal ideas of universality and linear progress.

⚖️ 1. Over-Expansion of Theoretical Scope

• The essay attempts to weave together biopolitics, necropolitics, and cosmopolitics alongside feminist, queer, decolonial, and posthumanist critiques.
• Critique: This ambitious synthesis may result in conceptual dilution, where none of the frameworks is fully developed or deeply interrogated in its contradictions.

🔁 2. Lack of Concrete Political Praxis

• While the text calls for “different engagements” and “less indifferent” approaches, it remains primarily theoretical.
• Critique: Critics might argue the article lacks specific action-oriented strategies, leaving it open to accusations of academic abstraction in the face of urgent political violence.

💬 3. Ambiguity in the Concept of Cosmopolitics

• Isabelle Stengers’ cosmopolitics is framed as a mode of indeterminacy and openness to the unknown.
• Critique: Some may see this as intellectually evasive, offering “no ‘good’ definition” (Stengers, 2005) and thus hard to operationalize in literary, activist, or policy contexts.

🔍 4. Limited Engagement with Global South Contexts

• The piece is centered on European border crises and Western theoretical traditions (Foucault, Mbembe, Stengers).
• Critique: Despite referencing decolonial thinkers like Wynter and Weheliye, it could be seen as Eurocentric in emphasis, with less engagement with non-Western ontologies or Southern feminist voices.

🧩 5. Inaccessibility of Language

• The text frequently employs dense theoretical language and intertextual references across disciplines.
• Critique: It risks being inaccessible to non-specialist readers, including activists, students, or marginalized communities it aims to empower.

🏳️‍🌈 6. Tension Between Queer Inclusion and Queer Erasure

• The article praises queer inclusion in resistance, but also acknowledges co-option into neoliberal state projects (e.g., homonationalism).
• Critique: Some may argue the text doesn’t fully resolve this tension, leaving unclear where queer theory should position itself in relation to biopower and necropolitics.

⏳ 7. Limited Temporal Depth

• The piece emphasizes current crises (migration, neoliberalism) but is short on historical genealogies of these power formations.
• Critique: Critics might note a lack of historical depth, especially regarding colonial legacies, early feminist movements, or the longue durée of racial capitalism.

I. Introduction: Critique of Foucault and Agamben

• Main Claim: Dominant theories of biopolitics are historically limited.
• Critique of Foucault:
  • Foucault situates biopolitics in modernity and disciplinary power.
  • Kordela: He “misses the ontological structure that predates modern governance.”
• Critique of Agamben:
  • Agamben focuses on sovereign exception and bare life.
  • Kordela: His framework “remains trapped in juridico-theological terms” (p. 7).
• Thesis: Biopolitics is transhistorical, not a product of modernity.

II. The Incest Taboo as the First Biopolitical Law

• Claim: Biopolitics originates with the incest prohibition, not with the modern state.
• Transhistorical Structure:
  • The incest taboo constitutes the “first symbolic law” regulating life and kinship.
  • Quote: “The incest taboo prohibits certain forms of biological life in order to produce symbolic life” (p. 10).
• Draws from:
  • Lacanian psychoanalysis (symbolic law).
  • Claude Lévi-Strauss (kinship structures as legal formations).

III. Redefining Biopolitics via Economy and Ontology

• Kordela’s Reorientation:
  • Biopolitics = management of life through economic ontology, not state power.
  • Quote: “Biopolitics is always already in operation as the regulation of the potentiality of life as labor-power” (p. 12).
• Spinozist Framework:
  • Life as immanent potential rather than sovereign exception.
• Lacanian Logic:
  • Desire and lack structure the symbolic economy of bios.
• Key Concept: Surplus value = surplus life.

IV. Capitalism and the Fantasy of Immortality

• Claim: Capitalism fulfills the biopolitical fantasy of controlling life.
• Commodity Fetishism:
  • The commodity conceals labor-power just as ideology conceals death.
  • Quote: “The commodity fetish is the secular form of the theological fantasy of immortality” (p. 24).
• Fantasy of Immortality:
  • Biopolitics under capitalism = life prolonged through productivity and accumulation.
  • Quote: “Capitalism thrives on the unconscious fantasy that life can continue indefinitely as value” (p. 25).

V. Implications for Literature and Culture

• Literary Theory:
  • Symbolic structures (law, kinship, myth) reflect biopolitical logic.
• Cultural Analysis:
  • Culture encodes how societies regulate life, death, and desire.
• Beyond the State:
  • Biopolitical critique must include ideology, psychoanalysis, and economy.

VI. Conclusion: Toward a Transhistorical Biopolitics

• Against Historicism:
  • Foucault’s and Agamben’s models are “historically myopic.”
• Kordela’s Proposal:
  • A Spinozist-Lacanian-Marxist framework of biopolitics that accounts for:
    • Desire
    • Surplus
    • Symbolic law
• Quote: “Only by grasping the transhistorical economy of bios can we understand the persistence of power beyond sovereign formations” (p. 26).

🧬 1. Reconfiguring Biopolitics as a Transhistorical Literary Structure

• Main Idea: Kordela shifts the discussion of biopolitics from its historical emergence in modernity to a transhistorical structure of symbolic law.
• Key Quotation:

“What appears as biopolitics in modernity is a historically specific variation of a transhistorical structure.” (p. 9)

• Theoretical Impact: Challenges historicist paradigms in literary theory (e.g. New Historicism) by suggesting that narrative structures of kinship, taboo, and law underpin all cultural production.

⚖️ 2. Symbolic Law and the Incest Taboo as Literary Foundations

• Main Idea: The incest taboo operates as a symbolic mechanism that produces subjectivity, a structure echoed in myth, literature, and narrative.
• Key Quotation:

“The incest taboo prohibits certain forms of biological life in order to produce symbolic life.” (p. 10)

• Theoretical Connections:
  • Psychoanalytic Literary Theory (Lacan, Freud)
  • Structuralism (Lévi-Strauss)
• Application: Literary texts are seen as encoding the symbolic operations of law and desire at their narrative core.

💰 3. Literature as Commodity Fetish: Reading the Ideology of Form

• Main Idea: Literary forms and genres participate in commodity fetishism, masking labor and desire through aesthetic surfaces.
• Key Quotation:

“The commodity fetish is the secular form of the theological fantasy of immortality.” (p. 24)

• Theoretical Connections:
  • Marxist Literary Criticism (Raymond Williams, Fredric Jameson)
  • Ideology Critique
• Application: The novel, for instance, may be analyzed as a fetishized form concealing class relations and surplus value.

⛪ 4. Literature and Secular Theology: Narrative as Immortality Fantasy

• Main Idea: Capitalism projects a secular theological structure where productivity and narrative continuity function as stand-ins for immortality.
• Key Quotation:

“Capitalism thrives on the unconscious fantasy that life can continue indefinitely as value.” (p. 25)

• Theoretical Connections:
  • Theology and Literature (Walter Benjamin, Derrida)
  • Postsecular Literary Criticism
• Application: Epics, bildungsromans, and utopian narratives may reflect the fantasy of infinite subjective development or salvation.

🧠 5. Desire, Lack, and the Subject in Literary Representation

• Main Idea: Subjectivity in literature is shaped around lack and symbolic desire, not stable identity or agency.
• Key Quotation:

“Desire is inscribed in the subject’s relation to the law that forbids its full realization.” (p. 13)

• Theoretical Connections:
  • Lacanian Literary Theory
  • Poststructuralism
• Application: Character motivations and narrative arcs can be reread as expressions of symbolic lack and deferred desire.

🔁 6. Undoing Periodization: Beyond Historicist Literary Models

• Main Idea: Kordela critiques the reduction of biopolitics to modernity, calling into question traditional literary periodization (e.g. Enlightenment → Modernity → Postmodernity).
• Key Quotation:

“Biopolitics is not a historical invention but a transhistorical mode of regulation.” (p. 8)

• Theoretical Connections:
  • Critiques of Historicism
  • Diachronic Literary Analysis
• Application: Literary theory should track symbolic and economic continuities across texts, not just ruptures in form or theme.

🌀 7. Labor-Power and Literature: Surplus Meaning as Surplus Value

• Main Idea: Literature itself may encode labor-power as bios—i.e., surplus narrative potential tied to capitalist production.
• Key Quotation:

“The regulation of labor-power is the regulation of surplus life—life as value.” (p. 23)

• Theoretical Connections:
  • Cultural Materialism
  • Political Economy of Literature
• Application: A literary text is a site of ideological production: surplus meaning, like surplus labor, is extracted and commodified.

🧩 8. Integrated Framework: Psychoanalysis + Political Economy + Ontology

• Main Idea: Kordela models an interdisciplinary approach—blending Lacan, Marx, Spinoza—to build a non-reductive biopolitical literary theory.
• Key Quotation:

“Only by grasping the transhistorical economy of bios can we understand the persistence of power beyond sovereign formations.” (p. 26)

• Theoretical Contributions:
  • Introduces ontological economy into literary analysis.
  • Grounds narrative structures in material and unconscious logics.

⚖️ 1. Overextension of the Transhistorical Framework

• Critique: Kordela’s claim that biopolitics is transhistorical risks flattening historical specificity and cultural variation.
• Concern: It may undermine the genealogical work of Foucault by turning power into an abstract, omnipresent structure.
• Scholarly Caution: Critics argue that “tracing biopolitics back to the incest taboo collapses symbolic and material histories.”

📚 2. Limited Literary Engagement

• Critique: Despite the work’s philosophical depth, it offers few concrete literary readings or close textual analysis.
• Effect: The book contributes to literary theory abstractly but doesn’t model applied criticism.
• Scholarly Note: Some literary theorists find it “challenging to translate the ontological argument into interpretive practice.”

🔁 3. Ambiguity Between Historicism and Structuralism

• Critique: Kordela oscillates between historicist critique and structuralist universalism, which may blur methodological clarity.
• Theoretical Tension: The synthesis of Marx, Lacan, Spinoza, and Lévi-Strauss can appear conceptually overloaded.
• Related Concern: “The transubstantiations of blood” from taboo to market logic stretch the metaphors across vastly different regimes.

🧪 4. Lack of Engagement with Contemporary Biopolitical Applications

• Critique: The argument lacks direct analysis of contemporary institutions, like biotechnology, surveillance, or global governance.
• Consequence: Some scholars find her theory “too metaphysical” to address urgent political questions (e.g., COVID-19, CRISPR, refugee camps).
• Missed Opportunity: While drawing from Agamben and Foucault, Kordela leaves behind the empirical dimension they preserved.

🌀 5. Difficulty of Accessibility and Terminological Density

• Critique: The theoretical prose and terminology (e.g., “ontological surplus,” “secular theology,” “symbolic prohibition of self-referentiality”) may alienate general readers and even some scholars.
• Effect: Reduces the pedagogical reach of the theory.
• Comment: Critics praise its ambition but note the “dense interweaving of theory often occludes rather than illuminates.”

🧠 6. Sparse Dialogue with Feminist and Postcolonial Biopolitics

• Critique: Although the work discusses power over life and reproduction, it doesn’t substantively engage feminist, Black, or postcolonial theorists (e.g., Mbembe, Butler, Puar).
• Scholarly Gap: The incest taboo framework may implicitly center Eurocentric kinship paradigms.
• Implication: Kordela’s account may be seen as “insufficiently intersectional.”