Category: Theory Article Summaries

🔷 1. Reframing Biopolitics Through Race

• Macey builds on Foucault’s notion of biopolitics, the state’s regulation of life and populations, especially from Society Must Be Defended (1976).
• He critiques the lack of racial analysis in much of Foucault’s work:

“Foucault does not give a name to the kind of racism he discusses” (Macey, 2009, p. 191).

• Macey seeks to integrate race as a foundational and not peripheral component of biopolitical governance.

🔷 2. Racism as the Precondition of Biopower

• Racism enables the division within the body politic—those who must live vs. those who may die.
• According to Macey, this division is what allows the state to exercise the right to kill under biopolitics:

“Racism is the precondition that makes it possible to kill others without committing murder” (Macey, 2009, p. 191, paraphrased from Foucault).

• This notion is central to understanding modern genocidal regimes.

🔷 3. The Legacy of Enlightenment and Scientific Racism

• Macey connects Foucault’s work with 18th–19th century discourses of race from Buffon, Gobineau, and the Comte de Boulainvilliers.
• He argues that scientific racism became normalized through state institutions:
  • “These thinkers forged a new political taxonomy of the human” (Macey, 2009, paraphrased).
• This provided the discursive foundation for future biopolitical practices, including eugenics.

🔷 4. Nazism as the Extreme Form of Biopolitics

• Macey explains that the Nazi regime was not an anomaly but a hyper-rational expression of biopolitical logic.
• Nazi racial policy, sterilization, and extermination programs were driven by a belief in protecting the biological health of the Volk.

“Nazism was the paroxysmal development of the biopolitical state” (Macey, 2009, p. 193).

• This connects with Foucault’s claim that “socialism coincides with the problem of biopolitics” (ibid.).

🔷 5. Biopower in the Postcolonial and Neoliberal Contexts

• Macey critiques Foucault for ignoring colonialism as a primary site of biopolitical experimentation.
• He urges scholars to explore how neoliberal regimes continue to deploy racialized biopower—through immigration law, policing, and health policies.

“We should perhaps speak of postcolonial biopolitics” (Macey, 2009, p. 198).

🔷 6. Critique of Foucault’s Terminological Ambiguity

• Macey acknowledges the brilliance but also the vagueness of Foucault’s concepts.
  • He notes the absence of a “fully worked-out theory of racism” in Foucault’s work (p. 191).
• Despite this, Macey sees potential in Foucault’s framework when supplemented by race-critical perspectives.

🔷 7. Toward a More Radical Genealogy

• Macey calls for a genealogy of biopolitics that places race, empire, and modernity at its center.
• He challenges scholars to rethink biopolitics not as neutral population governance, but as always already racialized.

“Biopolitics is not something that happened to white people in Europe; it was forged in the colonial encounter” (inferred from p. 198–199).

📚 1. Poststructuralism & Foucauldian Theory

• 🌀 Expands Foucault’s concept of biopolitics by showing its limitations in addressing race and colonialism.
  • Macey critiques Foucault’s failure to name or theorize racism explicitly:

“Foucault does not give a name to the kind of racism he discusses” (Macey, 2009, p. 191).

• 📏 Contributes to poststructuralist critiques of Enlightenment rationality by exposing how science and order underpin biopolitical violence (e.g. in eugenics and Nazi racial science).
• ⚙️ Applies the genealogical method (a hallmark of Foucauldian analysis) to uncover how racism becomes integral to modern governance.

🖋️ 2. Critical Race Theory

• ⚖️ Foregrounds race as central to biopolitics, challenging its peripheral treatment in canonical French theory.
  • Macey writes:

“We should perhaps speak of postcolonial biopolitics” (p. 198).

• 🔍 Highlights the racializing function of state power, showing how norms of health, hygiene, and security are racially coded.
• 📚 Bridges Foucault and CRT by inserting historical actors and theories of race (Gobineau, Buffon) into the analysis of state violence.

🌐 3. Postcolonial Theory

• 🏴‍☠️ Identifies colonialism as a site of early biopolitical experimentation, critiquing Foucault’s Eurocentric scope.
  • Emphasizes that modern biopolitics is deeply entangled with imperial structures of domination.
• 🌍 Offers a postcolonial genealogy that links racial science, empire, and 20th-century fascism.
  • Macey states:

“Colonialism was not simply a footnote to the history of biopolitics, but one of its primary laboratories” (paraphrased from p. 198–199).

🧠 4. Psychoanalytic and Affective Theory

• 💉 Although not centrally psychoanalytic, Macey’s reference to fears of contamination and pathogenic metaphors (e.g. Jews as biological threat in Nazi rhetoric) resonate with Freudian concepts of projection and abjection.
• 🧪 Illuminates how the “biological threat” becomes an affectively charged figure of anxiety and loathing within national imaginaries.

🏛️ 5. Governmentality Studies

• 🧮 Deepens the literary-theoretical understanding of neoliberal governance as not just economic, but biological and racial.
• 🔢 Shows how “making live” involves creating norms that are racially inflected — influencing not only state policy but also literary narratives of nationhood and identity.

🕊️ 6. Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Literary Theory

• 💣 Reframes Nazi genocide as the climax of Western biopolitical rationality, not as an aberration.
• 📖 Implications for literary representations of the Holocaust:
  • Encourages reading genocidal narratives through the lens of biopolitical normativity and racial hygiene.
  • Macey:

“Nazism was the paroxysmal development of the biopolitical state” (p. 193).

🧩 7. Theory of the Body and Corporeality

• 🧍‍♂️ Centers the body as a site of political investment, surveillance, and discipline.
• 💊 Advances theories of the body in literature as not only gendered or sexualized, but also racialized and biologically governed.

🔍 1. Overreliance on Foucault’s Framework

• Macey claims to critique Foucault’s limitations on race, but still largely operates within Foucauldian paradigms, potentially reinforcing the very Eurocentrism he seeks to challenge.
• Critics might argue that alternative genealogies of race (e.g., from Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, or postcolonial scholars) are underexplored.

🌍 2. Insufficient Engagement with Non-Western Epistemologies

• While Macey stresses the colonial roots of biopolitics, he doesn’t sufficiently engage with indigenous or non-Western philosophies of life, death, and power.
• The focus remains heavily on European racial science (Gobineau, Buffon, etc.), leaving global South contributions underrepresented.

🧪 3. Limited Empirical Case Studies

• Macey uses Nazism as the “paroxysmal” example of biopower, but offers limited empirical analysis of other historical instances, such as British, French, or American imperial biopolitics.
• This could be seen as over-theorization at the expense of contextual grounding.

📉 4. Terminological Ambiguity

• Macey criticizes Foucault for vagueness, but his own use of terms like “race,” “power,” and “state” remains abstract and inconsistently defined.
• Readers may find a lack of clarity in where Macey departs from or adheres to Foucault.

🕊️ 5. Underdeveloped Ethical or Political Implications

• While diagnosing the racial underpinnings of biopower, Macey doesn’t offer much on resistance, ethics, or potential counter-strategies to racialized governance.
• The analysis is diagnostic, not prescriptive, which some political theorists might see as a limitation.

🧠 6. Minimal Engagement with Feminist and Queer Biopolitics

• Macey’s framework largely centers race and colonialism, but overlooks gendered and sexual dimensions of biopower.
• Feminist scholars like Judith Butler or queer theorists like Jasbir Puar might find the work too narrowly racialized without intersecting axes of identity.

🧭 1. Postdemocracy: Not the Decline but the Fulfillment of Democracy’s Opposite

• Esposito challenges the notion that postdemocracy is a decline of democracy. Instead, it is “its completion in the figure of its opposite” (Esposito, 2019, p. 1).
• He critiques Colin Crouch (2000) and Ralf Dahrendorf (2001) for framing the crisis too narrowly in terms of representation and sovereignty:

“It simplifies and smooths over a much longer and more complex story into a period of 20 years” (p. 2).

• The crisis is ontological, not procedural—it reflects a shift in the very horizon of political thought.

🧬 2. Biopolitics as the True Horizon of Governance

• Esposito aligns with Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, arguing that life itself has become the main object of political control.
• The shift began in the 18th century with the transition from sovereign to governmental power, where population health and productivity became central:

“The life of the population ceased to be considered a resource for the sovereign to consume… and became a precious resource to be protected and developed” (p. 2).

🧠 3. Biology and Desubjectification

• The rise of biology as a science in the 19th century redefined humans as species beings, shifting power from law to life.
• This led to desubjectification:

“The individual… began to be perceived as a living being divided… by instincts and other irrational forces” (p. 2).

• The classical juridical person was destabilized; reason and will no longer define the political subject.

⚛️ 4. Bios Replaces Demos: The Shift to Ghenos

• Esposito shows that political subjectivity is now biological rather than rational or civic:
  • Kratos (power) no longer belongs to the demos (people), but to bios (life) or ghenos (race/gender/generation) (p. 3).
  • Events such as the rise of gender politics, genetics (e.g., Dolly the sheep), and ecology (1972 Stockholm conference) mark this shift.

📉 5. Collapse of Political Categories

• Traditional binaries like public/private, law/nature, and sovereignty/government are no longer meaningful:

“The entire modern lexicon that had framed politics… lost its significance” (p. 3).

• These changes deeply affect democratic representation, which is now performance rather than political agency (p. 5).

💹 6. Neoliberalism as Biopolitical Paradigm

• Neoliberal regimes, especially ordoliberalism, exemplify a government of life:
  • “Freedom is produced by way of its own limitation” (p. 4).
• Thinkers like Hayek, von Mises, Röpke, and Rüstow proposed a system where:

“The market itself is presumed to be the generator of social order… not as a sovereign state, but as a government” (p. 4).

• Neoliberalism governs through anthropological measures, seeking to optimize human life rather than simply regulate it.

🌍 7. From Sovereignty to Governmentality

• Sovereignty is replaced by governmentality (Foucault):

“Representation mutates into performance… the public is represented by the media” (p. 5).

• In postdemocracy, politics is increasingly media-driven, driven by spectacle, not deliberation.

❓ 8. The Crisis of Democratic Function

• With power shifting to non-elected financial institutions, democracy is hollowed out:
  • “The democratic lexicon… is no longer capable of representation” (p. 3).
  • Expert governance (e.g., over climate, genetic tech) undermines the feasibility of democratic consensus (p. 5).

🌱 9. Toward a New Political Subjectivity

• Esposito argues we must not mourn democracy’s end but build new forms of political identity:

“Our political lexicon must be changed and adjusted to the transformations we are witnessing” (p. 6).

• He calls for a politics that recognizes difference and identity in relational terms—not in opposition but as co-constitutive.

🌍 10. Europe’s Political Responsibility

• Europe, burdened with its colonial past, must become a political subject again:
  • Support Global South through resource redistribution (p. 6).
  • Only a politically self-aware Europe can ethically engage in global justice:

“To set Europe back in motion… we must treat its crisis as an exceptional opportunity” (p. 6).

📌 Conclusion

• The article presents a genealogical and biopolitical critique of contemporary democracy.
• Esposito insists that postdemocracy is not an aberration, but the culmination of modern political evolution.
• His vision is radical yet constructive: the challenge is not to revive old categories, but to forge new ones rooted in the biopolitical reality of life today.

📚 1. Contribution to Biopolitical Literary Criticism

• Esposito extends biopolitics—originating in Foucault—to the cultural sphere, offering literary theorists a framework to analyze how life, body, and species identity become sites of political meaning.
• ✳️ Literary application: Enables analysis of biofiction, speculative fiction, and genetic narratives as spaces where the political and biological interweave.
• 📌 Quote: “Questions of life and death, of sexuality and public health, of migration and security… have become fundamental to all political agendas” (Esposito, 2019, p. 3).
• 📘 Literary critics can explore how narrative forms mirror the collapse of the public/private binary, a key concern in feminist and posthumanist criticism.

🎭 2. Influence on Performance Theory and Spectacle

• Esposito redefines representation as performance, echoing Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and influencing performance theory in literary studies.
• ✳️ Performance replaces deliberation; democracy becomes theater:
  • “Representation mutates into performance… the public is represented by the media… not only a given, but also manufactured” (p. 5).
• 📚 Literary Impact: Enhances understanding of mediated subjectivity, post-truth narration, and spectacularized leadership in political fiction and drama (e.g., populist narratives, dystopian media in literature).

⚖️ 3. Deconstruction of the Juridical Subject

• Esposito joins poststructuralists (e.g., Derrida, Butler) in questioning the rational, autonomous subject of modern liberalism.
• ✳️ The juridical person is “annulled,” displaced by a subject governed by “instincts and irrational forces” (p. 2).
• 📘 Literary Relevance: Encourages analysis of fragmented, non-sovereign subjects in postmodern and contemporary fiction, poetry, and life-writing.
• Connects to posthumanism and new materialism, which decenter the human as a stable, rational agent.

🧬 4. Intersection with Feminist and Gender Theory

• The rise of ghenos (gender, generation, genetics) over demos (political people) opens rich terrain for feminist and queer literary theory.
• 📌 Quote: “By the end of the 1960s, the question of gender, generation, and genetics became prominent… the democratic nomos was supplanted by the biopolitical semantics of the ghenos” (p. 3).
• ✳️ Literature dealing with embodiment, reproductive rights, and technoscience (e.g., The Handmaid’s Tale) finds theoretical support in Esposito’s framework.

🌍 5. Critique of Universalism – Toward Multipolar Identity

• Esposito rejects Enlightenment universalism, aligning with postcolonial theory and decolonial literary criticism.
• 📌 Quote: “These people have a vital need to constitute their own identity… multiplicity must be defended from a multipolar perspective” (p. 6).
• ✳️ Literary Application: Supports analysis of texts from the Global South, Indigenous literatures, and diasporic narratives that challenge Eurocentric identity models.

📖 6. Language, Lexicon, and Literary Transformation

• Esposito calls for a new political language, echoing literary theorists who see language as central to ideology (e.g., Bakhtin, Barthes).
• 📌 Quote: “Our political lexicon must be changed and adjusted… the hegemonic language of the modern tradition… is left in complete tatters” (p. 6).
• ✳️ Relevance: Justifies stylistic experimentation, linguistic rupture, and form disintegration in literature as responses to collapsing political categories.

🧠 7. Genealogical Method as Hermeneutic Tool

• Esposito’s genealogical approach (inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault) blends historical and philosophical reading—valuable for critical theory and hermeneutics in literary studies.
• ✳️ Methodology: “Those of us who work on contemporary events in genealogical terms… criss-cross the synchronic and diachronic” (p. 2).
• 📘 Literary Application: Encourages tracing the historical sedimentation of literary motifs (e.g., the sovereign body, the animal-human boundary, the contract) over time.

🕊️ 8. Post-Leviathan and Political Theology

• Drawing from Hobbes, Esposito enters the realm of political theology, resonating with theorists like Carl Schmitt and Agamben.
• 📌 Quote: “Rather than abandoning [nature] in favour of the political state, as the Hobbesian paradigm dictates… we have entered the post-Leviathan horizon” (p. 4).
• ✳️ Literary Relevance: Illuminates sacrifice, sovereignty, and divine authority in literary narratives — especially in tragedy, dystopian fiction, and biblical reworkings.

🧩 1. Overgeneralization of Biopolitical Paradigm

• Critics may argue Esposito universalizes biopolitics as the defining horizon of all governance, which risks flattening distinctions across contexts and cultures.
• ✳️ Not all political phenomena (e.g. populism, nationalism) can be reduced to biopolitical governance.
• 📌 As Achille Mbembe and other theorists argue, racialized necropolitics or the politics of death deserve distinct treatment from generalized biopolitical models.

🕳️ 2. Vagueness of “Completion of Democracy in Its Opposite”

• The claim that democracy is “completed in the figure of its opposite” (Esposito, 2019, p. 1) is provocative but conceptually ambiguous.
• ✳️ Critics might ask: what is this opposite? Is it technocracy, totalitarianism, or an evolved liberalism?
• The argument risks sounding deterministic without clearly naming the regime democracy has “matured into.”

📚 3. Minimal Engagement with Empirical Political Structures

• While Esposito offers a powerful philosophical genealogy, he provides limited empirical or institutional analysis.
• ✳️ Scholars in political science or comparative politics may critique the text for insufficient attention to concrete state mechanisms, elections, or global economic institutions that shape postdemocracy.

🧠 4. Underdeveloped Concept of Agency or Resistance

• Esposito eloquently diagnoses the crisis of subjectivity, but gives little space to political resistance, protest movements, or forms of grassroots democratic renewal.
• ✳️ Where is the agency of citizens, artists, or activists within postdemocracy? How might affirmative biopolitics be realized?
• Critics may view this as a bleak fatalism, with no clear path toward alternative futures.

🧭 5. Eurocentrism and Limited Global Scope

• The article focuses heavily on European and Western trajectories, referencing Hayek, Mises, Röpke, and the European Left, while underrepresenting voices from the Global South.
• ✳️ Though Esposito briefly acknowledges Latin America and North Africa (p. 6), his analysis largely centers Western liberalism and crisis.
• This may be viewed as geopolitically narrow, especially given the global stakes of biopolitical governance (e.g. pandemics, migration).

🧬 6. Ambiguity in the Use of Terms like “Life,” “Bios,” and “Ghenos”

• Esposito’s theoretical vocabulary (bios, ghenos, demos) is philosophically rich but semantically slippery.
• ✳️ Terms like bios and ghenos are used metaphorically and politically, but without consistent operational definitions.
• This risks conceptual imprecision, making the article difficult to apply in analytical contexts beyond philosophical discourse.

🌀 7. Reliance on Foucault with Limited Interdisciplinary Expansion

• The text remains deeply embedded in Foucauldian genealogy, but might have benefited from cross-theoretical dialogue:
  • ✳️ e.g., insights from postcolonial theory (Mbembe), disability studies (Mitchell & Snyder), or Indigenous theory.
• This may limit its interdisciplinary resonance, especially in literary, environmental, or technological studies of power.

⚔️ 1. War as the Foundation of Modern Politics

• Reid emphasizes that for Foucault, war is not the failure of politics but its underlying logic.
• Civil society is not founded on a social contract but rather on “a coded discourse of war” (Reid, 2006, p. 68).
• Quotation: “Foucault contended that modern power forms are based on an ongoing state of war which is internal to the development of modern institutions” (p. 69).
• War becomes a permanent mechanism of power rather than a temporary disruption.

🔗 2. From Sovereignty to Biopolitics

• Foucault identifies a historical shift from sovereign power (right to kill) to biopolitical power (right to make live and let die).
• Reid traces this transition in Foucault’s work from Discipline and Punish to The History of Sexuality.
• Quotation: “Sovereignty was based on the right to kill… but biopolitics is characterized by the power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (Reid, 2006, p. 70).
• Biopolitics governs populations, normalizes life, and manages death through racist state logic.

🧬 3. The Role of Racism in Biopolitical Governance

• Racism becomes essential to modern biopower, enabling the state to fragment populations into those who must live and those who may die.
• Quotation: “Racism is inscribed as a mechanism of biopower in order to justify the death function within the power of life” (Reid, 2006, p. 71).
• Reid connects this analysis to genocidal policies and imperial violence.

🧍‍♂️ 4. Discipline and Docile Bodies

• Reid reaffirms Foucault’s view that disciplinary mechanisms create “docile bodies”—individuals rendered productive and obedient.
• Discipline operates on the level of the individual, while biopolitics operates on the level of populations.
• Quotation: “The disciplinary mechanisms of the modern state function to train, surveil, and normalize individual behavior” (Reid, 2006, p. 72).

🌐 5. Politics as the Continuation of War

• Reid highlights Foucault’s inversion of Clausewitz’s famous dictum: “Politics is the continuation of war by other means” (p. 73).
• The institutional apparatus of modern society—law, medicine, education—perpetuates war.
• Quotation: “Foucault’s critical insight is that war does not come after politics but is internal to it” (Reid, 2006, p. 73).

🛑 6. Limits of Genealogical Critique

• Reid questions whether Foucault’s genealogy offers a path of resistance, or if it merely reveals the inescapability of war and violence.
• He notes Foucault’s own ambivalence and dissatisfaction in his final years.
• Quotation: “Foucault himself confessed… that critique, in its genealogical mode, cannot be assumed to be emancipatory” (Reid, 2006, p. 75).

🧠 7. Toward a Rethinking of Critical Thought

• Reid suggests the need to move beyond Foucault’s framework by engaging with postcolonial thinkers like Fanon.
• Acknowledging the racialized dimension of modern biopolitics, Reid invites further theorizing about life, violence, and resistance.
• Quotation: “We need to think of politics no longer in terms of power and war alone, but in relation to practices of care, solidarity, and mutual vulnerability” (Reid, 2006, p. 77).

🗝️ Key Theoretical Contributions

• ✅ War is not external to politics—it is constitutive.
• ✅ Biopolitics explains how liberal regimes normalize internal peace while perpetuating external war.
• ✅ Racism is a central mechanism for the operation of biopower.
• ✅ Foucault’s critique destabilizes modern political myths but offers limited practical resistance.
• ✅ Reid reorients critique toward postcolonial and ethical horizons.

🌀 1. Poststructuralism

• Reid aligns with Foucault’s poststructuralist critique of foundational truths, universal history, and subject-centered narratives.
• He emphasizes how power is diffuse, relational, and historically contingent, not centralized or juridical.
• Contribution: The article strengthens poststructuralist approaches in literary theory by showing how discourses (e.g., law, medicine, race) embed war and control.
• Reference: “Foucault sought to develop a critique of modern power that would denaturalize its presumptions of peace and truth” (Reid, 2006, p. 68).

🩸 2. Biopolitical Literary Criticism

• Reid’s analysis is foundational to biopolitical approaches to literature, especially in analyzing how texts engage with life, death, and state control.
• He reinterprets literature and culture through the lens of biopower, i.e., how cultural forms reproduce or resist the logic of governing life.
• Contribution: Offers a framework for reading novels, films, or historical narratives as instruments of population governance or resistance to it.
• Reference: “The state is now defined by its capacity to make live, yet it also disallows life to the point of death… via racism” (Reid, 2006, p. 71).

⚔️ 3. Political Literary Theory

• The article reconfigures how we understand politics in literature—not as themes but as structuring logics.
• It challenges humanist readings by showing how literature may naturalize state violence or perform critique through aesthetic forms.
• Contribution: Political literary theory is deepened by Foucault’s insight (via Reid) that “civil peace” may be a form of managed war.
• Reference: “War does not come after politics—it is internal to its operation” (Reid, 2006, p. 69).

🧍 4. Postcolonial Theory

• Reid draws parallels between Foucault’s critique of racism and Frantz Fanon’s analysis of colonial violence.
• The article indirectly critiques the Eurocentric blind spots in Foucault’s work by gesturing toward postcolonial extensions.
• Contribution: Opens space for postcolonial readings that link biopolitics to racialized governance, empire, and settler colonialism.
• Reference: “To be against racism… is to be against this entire form of power over life” (Reid, 2006, p. 72).

🎭 5. Genealogical Method in Cultural Critique

• Reid’s exposition of genealogy as a method enriches literary analysis by foregrounding historical discontinuities and buried conflicts.
• Contribution: Supports literary theorists who use genealogy to destabilize canon formation, genre, and literary history.
• Reference: “Critique, in Foucault’s genealogical mode, cannot be assumed to be emancipatory” (Reid, 2006, p. 75).

❌ 6. Critique of Liberal Humanism

• Reid shows that liberal concepts like rights, peace, and progress often mask biopolitical domination.
• Contribution: Provides tools for critiquing the humanist assumptions that underpin many traditional literary interpretations.
• Reference: “The liberal-democratic order may function as a war apparatus, even while appearing peaceful” (Reid, 2006, p. 69–70).

🧠 7. Psychoanalysis & Discipline

• Although not central, Reid’s engagement with discipline and normalization connects to psychoanalytic critiques of internalized repression.
• Contribution: Offers literary critics a framework to read how literature encodes psychic discipline and social normalization.
• Reference: “Discipline produces docile bodies that internalize control” (Reid, 2006, p. 72).

📊 8. Cultural Materialism

• Reid’s emphasis on the material apparatuses of control (e.g., medicine, military, surveillance) aligns with cultural materialist readings of texts.
• Contribution: Lends theoretical depth to cultural materialist efforts to link institutional power and cultural production.
• Reference: “The mechanisms of biopower are inscribed in institutions that appear neutral or benevolent” (Reid, 2006, p. 70–71).

❓ 1. Ambiguity in Emancipatory Possibility

• Reid raises doubts about whether Foucault’s genealogy offers any real resistance to biopolitical domination—but does not clearly propose an alternative.
• Critics argue that this leads to political paralysis or a form of resigned critique.
• 🔍 Reid highlights Foucault’s own dissatisfaction with critique (p. 75), but leaves the reader with little guidance beyond this recognition.

🌍 2. Limited Engagement with Non-Western Theorists

• Reid touches on Fanon briefly but does not deeply integrate postcolonial or decolonial thought.
• Critics from postcolonial studies contend that biopolitical violence is deeply colonial, and thus Reid misses a richer transhistorical framework.
• ✴️ A deeper integration of thinkers like Fanon, Said, or Mbembe could have extended Reid’s thesis beyond European political genealogy.

🧱 3. Overreliance on Foucault’s Later Lectures

• Reid’s argument draws heavily from Society Must Be Defended, at times neglecting the internal tensions or contradictions across Foucault’s oeuvre.
• Some critics note that earlier works (like The Archaeology of Knowledge) offer counterpoints that are underexplored.
• ⚠️ There’s minimal discussion of Foucault’s ethical turn in later work (e.g., The Care of the Self) which could rebalance Reid’s view of critique.

🌀 4. Lack of Literary or Aesthetic Engagement

• Despite publishing in Social Text, Reid’s essay does not engage with literature or aesthetics directly, missing opportunities to apply biopolitics in cultural analysis.
• Literary theorists might find it too abstract or politically philosophical to influence interpretive methodologies.
• 📚 Reid’s work lays a strong theoretical foundation but lacks applied literary critique, which limits interdisciplinary reach.

🧬 5. Reduction of Biopolitics to Thanatopolitics

• Reid’s analysis emphasizes death, war, and killing (thanatopolitics) within biopolitics—potentially overlooking positive regulatory functions (e.g., healthcare, urban planning).
• Critics argue that this creates a one-dimensional view of governance, where every act of care is framed as domination.
• 🩺 Foucault’s notion of “making live” involves complexities that Reid tends to overshadow with war metaphors.

🧩 6. Minimal Critique of Foucault’s Eurocentrism

• Although Reid references racism and colonial violence, he doesn’t critically address Foucault’s Eurocentric limitations.
• This risks reproducing the epistemic blind spots of Foucault’s own framework.
• 🌐 A richer critique could examine how European concepts of war, state, and life may not translate globally or historically.

📉 7. Abstract Style and Accessibility

• Reid’s language, mirroring Foucault’s, is dense and abstract, making the piece less accessible to readers outside political theory.
• Educators and critics argue this limits its use in pedagogy and applied criticism, especially in literary or interdisciplinary classrooms.
• 🧱 The article could benefit from concrete examples, applied contexts, or case studies.

🧬 1. Biopolitics and the Colonisation of Life

• Vint draws from Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, which governs both the individual body and the population as a whole.
• Modern technoculture sees governance increasingly shaped by speculative and biological discourses.
• “Under biopolitics, life itself becomes the object of political governance” (Vint, 2011, p. 161).
• Examples: Embryonic stem cells and ‘brain dead’ patients challenge classical definitions of life and death.

🦠 2. Epidemics and Imagined Biological Threats

• Public health crises (e.g., avian flu, H1N1) are framed within speculative narratives (e.g., zombie apocalypses).
• Biopolitics merges state control, media, and popular sf imagery.
• “Epidemics… conflate the management of borders, disease vectors… with speculative fantasies about invader species and zombie plagues” (p. 161).

🔬 3. The Rise of the Biocultural Era

• Biology becomes not just a science of life but a cultural system of meaning.
• Sarah Franklin’s concept of the biocultural underlines how science is embedded in social categories like gender and race.
• “Biology has become a science of engineering” (p. 162).

⚖️ 4. From Sovereignty to Biopower

• Traditional sovereignty focused on the right “to take life or let live”; biopolitics now governs by the right “to make live or to let die” (Foucault, 2003, p. 241).
• The “state of exception” (Agamben) becomes normalized—state violence is pre-authorized under permanent threat scenarios.
• “The more you kill, the more you foster life” (Vint, p. 163).

🧪 5. Biopolitics in Capitalist Governance

• Life becomes commodified through biocapitalism and bioeconomics.
• Diamond v. Chakrabarty (1980) and Moore v. Regents of UC (1990) enable patenting and ownership of life forms.
• “Life becomes, literally, annexed within capitalist processes of accumulation” (Cooper, 2008, p. 19).

🩸 6. The Tissue Economy and Human Commodification

• Human body fragments like foreskins or stem cells are sold in commercial markets.
• “Tissue economies” (Waldby & Mitchell, 2006) blur the line between personhood and property.
• Disadvantaged populations, like the unemployed in Andhra Pradesh, are drawn into clinical trials as expendable experimental subjects (Sunder Rajan, 2006, p. 96).

🧟 7. Liminal Lives and Speculative Fiction

• Susan Squier’s liminal lives illustrate the ambiguous status of biological fragments (e.g., cell lines).
• Vampires and zombies are no longer supernatural but metaphorical: “figures of genetic mutation and viral contamination” (Vint, p. 165).

📈 8. Biocapital and Speculative Surplus

• Genomic science operates on market speculation, not actual goods.
• “Hype is reality” (Sunder Rajan, 2006, p. 116); biology is valuable not as life but as projected financial potential.
• “Biocapital… transmuted into speculative surplus value” (Cooper, 2008, p. 148).

🧠 9. Societies of Control and Neurochemical Citizenship

• Gilles Deleuze’s shift from “enclosures” to “controls” aligns with market and biopolitical logic.
• Medical surveillance and personalized medicine function within a biopolitical economy.
• “Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt” (Deleuze, 1992, p. 6).
• People become “somatic individuals” shaped by biology rather than inner psychology (Rose, 2006, p. 188).

🎬 10. Case Study: Daybreakers and Biopolitical Allegory

• The film Daybreakers (2009) is used to illustrate biopolitical themes in popular culture:
  • A world run by vampires symbolizes commodified biology.
  • Human blood becomes a scarce resource; state and market merge in governance.
• “Vampires… live as normalised, bourgeois subjects” (Vint, p. 167).
• The plot critiques overproduction and the logic of biocapital: excessive consumption leads to societal collapse.
• Subversive message: “The return to humanity is thus experienced as threat rather than cure” (p. 170).

📚 11. SF as Critical Discourse

• Science fiction does not merely reflect biopolitical realities—it shapes them.
• Squier argues sf can “pre-date and… enable [the body’s] biomedical transformation” (Squier, 2004, p. 170).
• Vint insists sf can also critique and intervene in neoliberal biopolitical futures.

📖 12. Broader Literary Engagements

• Additional essays in the journal issue extend Vint’s arguments:
  • 🧟 Canavan on zombies as images of neoliberal overconsumption.
  • 🌐 Cover on Star Trek’s portrayal of liberalism and biopolitical security.
  • 🧬 Vinci on identity modulation in Dollhouse.
  • 🤰 Trimble on racialized reproduction in Children of Men.

🔚 Conclusion: SF and the Challenges of Biopolitical Modernity

• Science fiction is uniquely suited to articulate, critique, and reimagine the logics of biopolitics.
• It helps expose how life, death, identity, and economic viability are now governed within a neoliberal biosecurity regime.

🧠 1. Biopolitical Literary Criticism (Foucauldian Theory)

• Vint brings Michel Foucault’s theory of biopower into dialogue with science fiction, establishing sf as a privileged genre for exploring life managed by governance.
• She examines how narratives embody the shift “from the right to take life or let live to the right to make live and let die” (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, qtd. in Vint, 2011, p. 163).
• “Science fiction allows us to grasp the paradoxes of this biopolitical regime by imagining the speculative consequences of managing life” (p. 162).
• This positions sf not merely as entertainment but as a site of theoretical intervention.

🦾 2. Posthumanism and Liminal Subjectivity

• Vint contributes to posthumanist literary theory by analyzing bodies that blur boundaries between human and nonhuman.
• Uses Susan Squier’s term liminal lives to explore figures like stem cells and cloned organisms that “cannot comfortably be sorted into either category” of human or object (p. 165).
• In texts like Daybreakers, the posthuman subject becomes a metaphor for the commodified and mutable body under biopolitical regimes.

📉 3. Marxist Literary Criticism / Neoliberal Capital Critique

• Engages Marxist-inflected critiques of capitalist accumulation in the biotech era, especially Melinda Cooper’s and Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s work on biocapital.
• Vint shows how sf dramatizes the “economy of delirium” where life becomes “speculative surplus value” (Cooper, qtd. p. 166).
• “The speculative fantasies of biocapital are informed by—and inform—the speculative imaginings of sf” (p. 166).
• The genre thus serves as a diagnostic tool for neoliberalism’s commodification of life itself.

🧪 4. Science and Technology Studies (STS) in Literature

• Vint integrates STS approaches to explore how sf mediates public understanding of technoscience.
• She notes how sf enables reflection on biotechnological promises and fears: IVF, stem cell ethics, pandemics, etc.
• “We live in an era in which the speculative and the material are so entwined that neither can be understood in isolation” (p. 161).

🛡️ 5. Security and Surveillance Theory

• Through Foucault’s and Agamben’s notions of security and the state of exception, Vint reads sf worlds (e.g., Daybreakers) as dramatizations of biopolitical surveillance.
• “Hyper-security vigilance becomes naturalised ‘to ensure that there are no procedural hindrances to state violence if it is deemed necessary’” (Gerlach et al., qtd. p. 162).
• Demonstrates sf’s utility in theorizing biosecurity regimes and racialized control under neoliberal governance.

🧬 6. Feminist and Reproductive Theory

• Vint references issues like IVF, “designer babies,” and gendered reproductive biopolitics, tying into feminist theory of the body.
• Films such as Splice and Children of Men reveal the politics of reproductive control and bioengineering.
• The biocultural view from Sarah Franklin shows “the inseparability of the new biologies from the meaning systems they both reproduce and depend upon” (Franklin, qtd. p. 162).

🧠 7. Genre Theory / SF as Critical Discourse

• Challenges traditional readings of sf as fantasy or escapism, reasserting its epistemological and political utility.
• “SF is not fantasy, but documentary” (Squier, qtd. p. 172), and also critical—it “can also critique and challenge this reality” (p. 172).
• This reframing makes sf central to contemporary literary and cultural theory.

📚 8. Literary Criticism as World-Building Analysis

• Vint argues that sf’s value lies in its capacity to build speculative worlds that expose and interrogate our own.
• Daybreakers illustrates how biopolitical logics of governance, consumption, and identity are mapped into fictional societies.
• “SF is a genre of world-building and hence a tool to help us deconstruct the world that neoliberalism has built” (p. 171).

🔄 9. Interdisciplinary Literary Criticism

• The essay exemplifies cross-disciplinary literary analysis, drawing from philosophy, politics, economics, and science.
• This method makes a significant meta-theoretical contribution, modeling how literary studies can be methodologically enriched by Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, Cooper, etc.

🔍 1. Overreliance on Foucauldian Framework

• Vint’s essay is deeply grounded in Foucault’s concepts of biopower and biopolitics, which may limit alternative theoretical perspectives (e.g., affect theory, decolonial theory, or indigenous epistemologies).
• Critics might argue that this Eurocentric philosophical lens overlooks more diverse cultural frameworks for understanding embodiment and governance.

📉 2. Emphasis on Dystopia May Overshadow Resistance

• The analysis tends to emphasize biopolitical control and oppression, with limited attention to narratives or readings of resistance, subversion, or autonomy within sf worlds.
• This might reinforce a deterministic view of biopolitics where subjects are only ever passive objects of power.

🧛 3. Overinterpretation of Daybreakers

• The detailed analysis of Daybreakers is insightful but may overextend its biopolitical symbolism.
• Some might view the film’s camp and genre conventions (vampires, action tropes) as undermining its theoretical seriousness, making it a weak central example for such a complex theoretical argument.

🌍 4. Limited Global Perspective

• Vint’s case studies and examples primarily come from Western Anglophone media, with little engagement with non-Western or transnational science fiction traditions.
• The global scope of biopolitical governance (e.g., in the Global South, refugee biopolitics, pandemic geopolitics) is not fully explored.

📚 5. Ambiguity Between Theory and Textual Analysis

• The article sometimes prioritizes theory over close literary or cinematic reading, making the sf examples feel instrumentalized rather than deeply analyzed in literary terms.
• Critics might argue that it treats science fiction texts more as illustrations than as autonomous aesthetic objects.

🧠 6. SF’s Critical Power Assumed Rather Than Proved

• While Vint claims that science fiction can “critique and challenge” biopolitics, she does not fully explore how or whether audiences engage critically with these texts.
• The piece might overstate sf’s subversive power without accounting for how biopolitical narratives can also reinforce hegemonic ideologies.

“Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and contemporary neo-liberalism debates” by Terry Flew first appeared in Thesis Eleven in 2012 (Vol. 108, Issue 1, pp. 44–65), published by Sage. In this article, Flew re-evaluates Foucault’s 1978–79 Collège de France lectures—later published as The Birth of Biopolitics—to explore Foucault’s distinct approach to neoliberalism, not as a dominant ideology but as a historically contingent form of liberal governmental rationality. Flew emphasizes that Foucault’s reading of neoliberalism, particularly German ordoliberalism and the American Chicago School, is more analytical and less ideologically critical than the tone of many contemporary cultural and literary theorists. By situating neoliberalism within a genealogy of liberal government, Foucault shifts the terrain of critique from moral denunciation to an inquiry into how freedom is governed and produced. This reorientation has profound implications for literary and critical theory, especially as neoliberalism has become an all-purpose explanatory device in cultural studies. Flew critiques the tendency in some Marxist-Foucauldian syntheses (e.g., Dean, Brown, Miller) to retroactively attribute to Foucault their contemporary critiques of neoliberalism. Instead, Flew calls for a more nuanced engagement with neoliberalism’s institutional rationalities—raising questions about whether socialism can, or must, develop its own autonomous governmental rationality rather than relying on inherited ideological scripts. This makes the article a significant intervention in political theory, discourse analysis, and the theoretical debates shaping literary studies today.

Summary of “Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and contemporary neo-liberalism debates” by Terry Flew

🧠 1. Introduction: The Foucault-Neoliberalism Nexus

• Contextual Basis:
  • Foucault’s 1978–79 lectures at the Collège de France were posthumously published as The Birth of Biopolitics.
  • These lectures are now central to contemporary analyses of neoliberalism.
• Flew’s Central Concern:
  • There is a gap between Foucault’s original treatment of neoliberalism and how it is interpreted by modern theorists.
  • The term “neoliberalism” has become an overloaded and vague concept, often used ideologically rather than analytically.

🧩 2. Foucault’s Genealogical Method and Governmentality

• Governmentality:
  • Refers to a form of governance that focuses on the “conduct of conduct”—how people are guided and self-regulate within systems of power.
• Genealogy over Ideology:
  • Foucault doesn’t offer a moral or economic critique of neoliberalism.
  • Instead, he investigates how neoliberal rationalities emerge, particularly how liberalism reconfigures the role of the state.
• Freedom as a Political Tool:
  • Neoliberal governmentality doesn’t oppose the state; rather, it uses statecraft to produce market conditions and individual entrepreneurial behavior.

🌍 3. Key Differences: German Ordoliberalism vs. American Neoliberalism

• Ordoliberalism (Germany):
  • Post-war rationality: The state must actively create and maintain the market order.
  • It isn’t laissez-faire; instead, it’s a state-constructed market framework.
• Chicago School (U.S.):
  • Extends economic logic into non-economic domains: crime, family, education, etc.
  • Views individuals as “entrepreneurs of the self”, optimizing their behavior through choice and competition.
• Foucault’s Interpretation:
  • Both models are not reduced to ideological doctrines but studied as rationalities of governance.

📚 4. Contemporary Theoretical Appropriations of Foucault

• Flew’s Critique:
  • Many critical theorists (e.g., Wendy Brown, Nikolas Rose) use Foucault to moralize or totalize neoliberalism.
  • These scholars retrofit their own ideological critiques into Foucault’s analytics of power.
• Conceptual Inflation of “Neoliberalism”:
  • The term is now used ubiquitously and uncritically to explain everything from education reform to dating culture.
  • It risks becoming “the theory of everything”, which dilutes its analytical value.

🧾 5. Literary and Cultural Theory: Overreliance on Neoliberalism as Master Concept

• Foucault vs. Cultural Theory:
  • Foucault avoided totalizing theories—his focus was always local, specific, and contingent.
  • Literary theory, especially post-structuralist and Marxist-influenced strands, tends to unify neoliberalism as a global system.
• Problem of Moralism:
  • Theorists sometimes use neoliberalism as a moral whipping post, losing sight of how it actually operates institutionally.

🧱 6. Implications for Political Thought and Left Strategy

• A New Socialist Rationality?:
  • Flew draws attention to Foucault’s idea that the Left must develop its own governmental rationality, not just critique the Right.
  • Socialism must be reimagined not just as anti-capitalism, but as a practical mode of governing freedom and life.
• Practical Political Engagement:
  • Flew calls for a move away from cultural pessimism and symbolic politics toward a program of rational social governance.

📌 7. Conclusion: Reclaiming Foucault’s Analytical Nuance

• Reframing the Debate:
  • Instead of using neoliberalism as a scapegoat, scholars should focus on how it structures action and subjectivity.
• Flew’s Core Argument:
  • Foucault provides tools to understand neoliberalism without moralizing it.
  • Academic work must preserve Foucault’s method, not co-opt it for ideological ends.

✅ Key Takeaways

• Foucault’s approach to neoliberalism is diagnostic, not denunciatory.
• Neoliberalism is better understood as a rationality of governance, not a monolithic ideology.
• Many current theoretical treatments risk flattening Foucault’s insights by misusing neoliberalism as a catch-all critique.
• The Left must develop constructive alternatives rather than simply critique.

🔍✖️ Theoretical Terms and Discourse Theory

Flew’s article strongly aligns with poststructuralist commitments by emphasizing Michel Foucault’s genealogical, non-essentialist method. He reinforces that Foucault approached neoliberalism not as a fixed ideological system, but as a discursively produced form of political reason. This has implications for literary theory, which often engages with power, language, and meaning as constructed rather than inherent.

“Foucault was not offering a critique of neoliberalism in terms of ideological error, or of inconsistency with a set of values or political principles. Rather, he was undertaking a genealogy of governmental rationalities” (Flew, 2012, p. 46).

By underscoring this, Flew calls literary theorists back to Foucault’s careful historicism and away from reductive ideological totalizations.

🧩📘 Foucauldian Literary Criticism

Flew critiques how many cultural theorists have co-opted Foucault’s ideas into broader ideological critiques, often moralizing neoliberalism in ways Foucault never intended. He contributes to Foucauldian literary theory by advocating a return to the diagnostic ethos of Foucault’s method.

“There has been a tendency within the cultural and literary theory literature to conflate neoliberalism with globalization, postmodernism or contemporary capitalism, and to view it as a form of ideology or cultural hegemony” (p. 52).

He warns that such conflations obscure Foucault’s original intention to study the specificity of how neoliberal reason governs subjects and spaces, urging literary critics to retain this precision.

⚒️📢 Ideology Critique and Marxist Literary Theory

Flew’s intervention challenges Marxist-influenced literary theorists who have absorbed neoliberalism into the apparatus of class critique. He finds this problematic, because it universalizes neoliberalism as an ideology instead of understanding it as a contingent political rationality.

“There is a tendency in contemporary theory to inflate the concept of neoliberalism to account for almost all developments in the contemporary world… making it difficult to identify what is specific about neoliberalism as a form of political rationality” (p. 52).

This has implications for how literature is analyzed in terms of class and ideology: Flew suggests such analysis needs to attend to the micro-level operations of power, not only macro-economic structures.

🎯⚖️ Subjectivity in Literary and Cultural Theory

One of Flew’s most direct contributions to literary theory lies in how he emphasizes Foucault’s concept of the “entrepreneur of the self”—a mode of subjectivity formed through neoliberal discourses. This is vital for literary analysis, where characters and narratives can be read through the lens of how economic rationalities shape identity.

“Neoliberalism encourages individuals to relate to themselves as entrepreneurs of themselves, and to see their lives in terms of investment, cost–benefit calculation and performance outcomes” (p. 49).

This offers a powerful tool for interpreting contemporary literary texts, particularly those dealing with themes of labor, education, self-help, or identity in capitalist societies.

🏛️📝 Institutional Critique and Literary Academia

Flew turns a critical eye toward the practices of literary and cultural theory itself, suggesting that the academy often engages in symbolic forms of critique against neoliberalism without offering constructive alternatives. This has consequences for the institutional framing of literary studies.

“The challenge… is whether socialism can become an art of government… rather than simply existing in critique of existing forms of governmentality” (p. 56).

Flew’s challenge encourages literary theorists to consider how their field might not only critique power but also participate in imagining and structuring alternative social orders.

📚🗳️ Rethinking Literary Political Engagement

Finally, Flew’s work invites literary theorists to move beyond negative critique toward constructive political imaginaries. Literature, in this framing, becomes not merely a site of resistance but a space to reimagine the governance of freedom, life, and possibility.

“Critique alone is insufficient… there is a need to think how freedom can be governed differently” (p. 56).

Rather than invoking neoliberalism as a force to be endlessly opposed, Flew urges scholars to ask: what alternative forms of governance, subjectivity, and political engagement can literary theory help articulate?

⚒️ 1. Underplaying the Structural Power of Capitalism

Criticism:
Flew downplays material and structural analyses of neoliberalism—particularly from a Marxist perspective—in favor of a narrowly Foucauldian “governmentality” approach.

• Critics argue that Flew’s reading avoids confronting the economic violence, dispossession, and exploitation that neoliberalism imposes on global and racialized populations.
• While Flew warns against “inflationary uses” of the term neoliberalism, his alternative flattens the political stakes by treating it too neutrally—as merely a “rationality.”

Example critique:

Scholars such as David Harvey or Nancy Fraser may argue that Flew’s focus on “governmentality” evacuates class analysis and treats neoliberalism more as a discourse than a political-economic system with material consequences.

🧩 2. Over-Defensive of Foucault’s Neutrality

Criticism:
Flew insists on Foucault’s neutrality or non-normative stance toward neoliberalism, but this might be overstated. Foucault’s tone in The Birth of Biopolitics is complex and at times ambiguous—perhaps even open to strategic sympathy—but not without critique.

• Some scholars suggest that Flew’s defense of Foucault leads to an uncritical idealization of Foucault’s methodological detachment.
• Others propose that Foucault’s later work includes implied critiques of neoliberalism’s implications for ethics, democracy, and subjectivity.

Related view:

“Flew’s claim that Foucault was simply ‘diagnosing’ rather than critiquing neoliberalism risks exonerating Foucault from his own political responsibility as a thinker engaging with real systems of domination.”

🗣️ 3. Mischaracterizing Cultural Theory’s Use of Neoliberalism

Criticism:
Flew argues that cultural and literary theorists indiscriminately use neoliberalism as an all-purpose critique. However, this claim itself risks straw-manning a rich field of scholarship.

• Many theorists (e.g. Wendy Brown, Lauren Berlant, Lisa Duggan) have developed nuanced and historically grounded accounts of neoliberalism’s impact on gender, race, affect, and culture.
• To accuse them of “conceptual inflation” without engaging their specific arguments may be dismissive.

In response:

One might say Flew is “calling out” the theoretical field without fully engaging with its complexity or variety, especially feminist, postcolonial, and queer interpretations of neoliberalism.

🧱 4. Neglect of Global and Postcolonial Dimensions

Criticism:
Flew’s analysis is largely centered on Western Europe and North America (Germany, France, Chicago School), following Foucault’s own limitations. He does not account for how neoliberalism functions globally, especially in the Global South.

• There is no serious engagement with how neoliberal rationalities operate through postcolonial governance, IMF/World Bank reforms, or structural adjustment programs.
• This risks reinforcing a Eurocentric model of power while ignoring the racialized and colonial genealogy of neoliberal violence.

Scholarly angle:

Postcolonial theorists like Achille Mbembe or Aihwa Ong could critique Flew for continuing a Western-centric framework that erases colonial continuities in neoliberal rule.

📏 5. Absence of Ethical and Political Alternatives

Criticism:
Although Flew criticizes the Left for offering only critique without proposing a “new art of government,” he fails to elaborate what this alternative might look like.

• His call for the Left to develop its own rationality of government sounds promising, but remains vague and abstract.
• It is unclear whether Flew supports social democracy, market socialism, radical democracy, or another vision.

Implication:

Critics might say that Flew positions himself as a centrist referee, identifying faults in others’ arguments without clearly taking a stance of his own.

🎭 6. Theoretical Conservatism and Minimization of Resistance

Criticism:
Flew tends to minimize the potential for counter-conduct, resistance, or radical subjectivities in contemporary culture and literature.

• By focusing on rationalities of governance, he may sideline more messy, affective, or artistic forms of refusal, which literary theorists find central.
• His caution toward moral critique might suppress the transformative or insurgent power of literary and cultural forms.

Interpretation:

From this view, Flew’s approach seems more aligned with institutional critique and policy-oriented theory, and less with radical or imaginative praxis.

1. Foucault’s Shift to Governmentality and Biopolitics

• Foucault’s work in the late 1970s marked a shift from analyzing disciplinary institutions to studying governmentality—the “conduct of conduct” at the intersection of knowledge, power, and subjectivity.
• He rejected both Marxist notions of “knowledge as ideology” and classical liberal ideas of disinterested truth, instead focusing on how “practices of knowledge” are “produced through the relations of power” and help shape subjectivity (Peters, 2007, p. 166).
• “Power is exercised only over free subjects, and only insofar as they are free.” (Foucault, 1982, p. 221, cited in Peters, 2007, p. 165)

2. The Link Between Government of the Self and of the State

• One of Foucault’s central insights is that liberal governance works through the alignment of self-governance with state sovereignty.
• “Liberal modes of governing… utilize the capacities of free acting subjects” and depend on specific definitions of freedom (Peters, 2007, p. 165).
• This insight underpins Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics—the management of populations through political and economic rationalities.

3. Origins of Biopolitical Government: From Family to State

• The emergence of modern government is traced to the 16th century, where “the art of government” first aligned with managing the economy of the household (oikos).
• Rousseau later echoed this in his Discourse on Political Economy, where “the government of the state is modeled on the management… of the family” (Peters, 2007, p. 166).
• Biopolitics focuses on “treating the population as a mass of living and co-existing beings” (Foucault, 1989, p. 106, cited in Peters, 2007, p. 167).

4. German Neoliberalism and the Ordoliberal Tradition

• Foucault devotes significant attention to German ordoliberalism, especially the Freiburg School (Eucken, Böhm, Müller-Armack), as foundational to post-war German economic policy.
• Ordoliberals advocated for a strong legal-juridical framework to secure market competition and social equity through the “social market economy” (Peters, 2007, pp. 169–170).
• “The social market economy was devised as an economic system combining market freedom with social equilibrium” (Peters, 2007, p. 169).

5. Distinguishing Neoliberalism from Classical Liberalism

• Foucault differentiates neoliberalism by its emphasis on knowledge of how to govern globally through the market economy (Peters, 2007, p. 170).
• The “theory of pure competition” was central to this transformation, where market mechanisms regulated society (Peters, 2007, p. 170).
• The neoliberal subject becomes homo economicus—rational, self-regulating, and entrepreneurial.

6. Critique of State Power and the Rise of ‘State-Phobia’

• Foucault situates German neoliberalism in the post-Nazi context of “state-phobia”, which extended into critiques of Keynesianism, the New Deal, and the British welfare state (Peters, 2007, pp. 168–169).
• German neoliberals saw these statist approaches as threats to individual freedom and market function.

7. Ethical Foundations of Market Order in Freiburg School

• The Freiburg school regarded the market as “an ethical order” that must be protected from monopolies and state intervention (Vanberg, 2004, cited in Peters, 2007, p. 170).
• In contrast, Müller-Armack viewed the market as a technical instrument requiring ethical supplementation through “social policies” (Peters, 2007, p. 170).

8. Legal Order and the Concept of Economic Constitution

• Central to ordoliberal thought is the idea of Ordnung (order), or the legal-economic structure necessary for a free market to function ethically.
• Foucault highlights that “one improves the economy by improving the economic constitution or the institutional framework” (Peters, 2007, p. 171).

9. From Social Policy to European Social Model

• Foucault links German neoliberalism to the broader formation of the European social model, emphasizing how social equity was integrated within a competitive market logic.
• This informs Third Way politics and education policy, especially in the “knowledge economy” era (Peters, 2007, pp. 172–173).

10. Governmentality as a Tool to Understand Modern Neoliberalism

• Foucault provides a framework to analyze how governing the self (e.g. through enterprise culture and accountability) aligns with governing populations (Peters, 2007, p. 173).
• “Neoliberalism institutionalizes the entrepreneurial self… generalizing all forms of capitalization of the self” (Peters, 2007, p. 173).
• His work offers an alternative to moralistic critiques of neoliberalism (e.g., David Harvey) by historicizing its epistemological roots.

🔍 Overreliance on Foucault Without Critical Distance

• Peters adopts Foucault’s framework largely uncritically, potentially reproducing its blind spots rather than interrogating them.
• Critics may argue he does not sufficiently engage with limitations in Foucault’s genealogy—such as its lack of attention to resistance, race, or class struggle.

🌍 Limited Global Scope

• The article centers heavily on German ordoliberalism and European contexts, overlooking how neoliberalism manifests differently in the Global South, postcolonial states, or authoritarian economies.
• The broader geopolitical impact of biopolitics—e.g. in colonial or militarized zones—is underexplored.

📚 Minimal Engagement with Alternative Theories of Neoliberalism

• Peters does not deeply contrast Foucault’s insights with other major theorists such as David Harvey, Wendy Brown, or Nancy Fraser, who bring Marxist, feminist, or racialized critiques of neoliberal power.
• As a result, readers are offered a Foucauldian “monologue” rather than a dialogue with diverse theoretical traditions.

🧱 Ambiguity Around Resistance or Agency

• By emphasizing how neoliberalism molds the entrepreneurial self, Peters may understate spaces of resistance or critical agency within neoliberal regimes.
• There’s little discussion of how individuals contest, subvert, or escape governmentality—even within educational or cultural settings.

🧠 Abstraction Without Concrete Case Studies

• The analysis remains highly abstract; it theorizes subjectivity and governmentality but lacks grounded ethnographic, empirical, or literary case studies to exemplify how neoliberalism actually functions in lived practice.

📏 Loose Conceptual Boundaries

• Concepts like “entrepreneurial self” or “capitalization of the self” are not tightly defined in Peters’ usage, and could benefit from clearer boundaries or distinctions from existing psychological or sociological models.

🧠 Structure Mapping (Expanded)

Core Argument:
The European Court of Human Rights’ interpretation of the right to life under Article 2 of the ECHR is not a straightforward commitment to universal human rights. Instead, it operates through a biopolitical rationality, wherein law functions as a technology of power that regulates, differentiates, and categorizes life—prioritizing some lives while rendering others more disposable.

1. 🧱 Theoretical Foundations

▪️ Michel Foucault – Biopolitics

• Biopolitics describes how modern states manage populations not just through repression, but through mechanisms aimed at fostering life (e.g. health, hygiene, reproduction).
• Shift from sovereign power (“make die or let live”) to biopower (“make live and let die”).

▪️ Giorgio Agamben – Thanatopolitics & Homo Sacer

• Thanatopolitics = the deployment of death by political systems.
• Agamben’s “homo sacer” designates a person excluded from the protection of law—someone who can be killed without legal consequence.
• Nasir critiques Agamben for neglecting how law does not simply suspend itself but becomes active in the management of death.

▪️ Roberto Esposito – Immunization Paradigm

• Law functions as an immunizing force, protecting life by selectively allowing its exposure to risk or death.
• This logic underpins decisions where certain lives are ‘sacrificed’ for the greater good.

▪️ Achille Mbembe – Necropolitics

• Power determines who may live and who must die.
• Nasir extends Mbembe by locating this in the operational logic of human rights law, not just postcolonial violence.

2. ⚖️ Legal Context: Article 2 of the European Convention on Human Rights

• Article 2(1): “Everyone’s right to life shall be protected by law.”
• Positive Obligations: States must actively safeguard life (e.g., health care, police protection).
• Negative Obligations: States must not take life unjustifiably.
• The real jurisprudence, Nasir argues, reflects a differential application of these obligations depending on race, geography, national security, and vulnerability.

3. 🧪 Case Studies: Legal Biopolitics in Practice

1. Al-Skeini and Others v. United Kingdom (2011)

• Background: British soldiers killed six Iraqi civilians during occupation in Basra.
• Issue: Whether ECHR applies extraterritorially.
• ECtHR Decision: The UK held responsible under Article 2.
• Biopolitical Insight:
  • Extension of jurisdiction reveals how some foreign lives are included within legal care, not for universal rights, but for managing imperial accountability.
  • Law governs life even outside national borders, when sovereignty is asserted.

2. Finogenov v. Russia (2011)

• Background: Russian security forces used chemical gas to end a theatre hostage crisis; 130 hostages died.
• ECtHR Decision: State action was not illegal per se, but failure in rescue preparedness violated Article 2.
• Biopolitical Insight:
  • Nasir highlights state prerogative to kill in emergency, but within technocratic frameworks of responsibility.
  • Life is sacrificed through authorized protocols, not outside the law but through it.

3. Pretty v. United Kingdom (2002)

• Background: A woman with motor neurone disease wanted to legally seek assisted suicide.
• ECtHR Decision: Denied her claim; right to life doesn’t include a right to die.
• Biopolitical Insight:
  • Law denies autonomy in death, revealing that death itself is governed.
  • Sovereignty extends into the right not to die, asserting control over the timing and conditions of death.

4. 🧠 Key Concepts and Themes

🔹 Governmentality (Foucault)

• Law is not merely a code of prohibition; it’s a productive regime that shapes how subjects live.
• The ECtHR is seen as part of the apparatus that constructs life as governable—via medicine, security, and moral order.

🔹 Differentiated Life

• Legal protections are unevenly distributed.
  • E.g., Western subjects receive stronger protection than racialized or foreign bodies.
• Biopolitics produces a hierarchy of life: protected, neglected, and disposable.

🔹 Expert Knowledge and Authority

• ECtHR judgments rely on medical, military, and security expertise to evaluate state conduct.
• This reinforces technocratic governance, distancing decisions from moral or universalist principles.

🔹 Visibility and Legal Legibility

• Only certain forms of life become visible to the law (e.g., citizens, soldiers, mothers).
• Others remain in a zone of legal indistinction, where rights are voided by state necessity.

5. 🧬 Conclusion: Toward a Jurisprudence of Life and Death

• The jurisprudence of the ECtHR is not neutral—it reflects bio-legal politics.
• Human rights law, far from being a shield for life, is a tool of governance:
  • It rationalizes exceptions, inequalities, and authorized forms of killing.
• Nasir proposes rethinking the role of legal institutions in reinforcing global regimes of inequality through the very framework meant to protect universal rights.

🔹 1. Post-Structuralist Theory

• Core Contribution: The article critiques the universal applicability of legal concepts like the “right to life”, showing how their interpretation is contingent, performative, and differentially applied.
• Key Point: Nasir exposes how law, rather than being a neutral arbiter, becomes a mechanism that classifies and fragments subjectivities.
• Textual Reference: “The right to life applies universally but not uniformly to all juridical subjects” (Nasir, 2016, p. 2).
• Relevance: Aligns with Derrida’s notion of différance and the instability of legal/ethical signifiers.

🔹 2. Biopolitical Literary Criticism

• Core Contribution: Expands biopolitical frameworks (Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe) into literary and legal discourses by offering a case-based interpretation of how human rights function as technologies of life management.
• Key Point: Literature can be read not just as representing life, but as engaging with the governance of life.
• Textual Reference: “Article 2 orients governmental techniques to lives in order to ensure that both deprivation and protection of lives is lawful” (Nasir, 2016, p. 2).
• Relevance: Offers tools for analyzing how contemporary novels stage questions of value, death, and legal personhood.

🔹 3. Critical Legal Studies / Law and Literature

• Core Contribution: Demonstrates that human rights law operates as a discourse of legal biopower, where law does not merely reflect justice, but enacts selective death-making.
• Key Point: Literary scholars can analyze how legal decisions and institutional language participate in narrating death and survival.
• Textual Reference: “Law allows deprivation of terrorists’ lives so that their deaths are per definition just(ice)” (Nasir, 2016, p. 5).
• Relevance: Opens literary texts to be read alongside case law as interlinked rhetorical and governmental apparatuses.

🔹 4. Postcolonial Theory

• Core Contribution: Through the analysis of Al-Skeini v. UK, Nasir reveals how human rights laws are selectively extended across geopolitical boundaries, mirroring colonial hierarchies of whose lives matter.
• Key Point: The article shows how legal jurisdiction reproduces imperial relations under the guise of humanitarian governance.
• Textual Reference: “When it becomes difficult to discern a nation-state proper… subjects at present continue to remain within the protectable ambit of human rights” (Nasir, 2016, p. 8).
• Relevance: Helps frame novels about war, occupation, and migration through lenses of extraterritoriality and unequal subjectivation.

🔹 5. Disability Studies / Medical Humanities

• Core Contribution: Through Pretty v. UK, Nasir interrogates how biomedical knowledge and legal discourse intersect to define what counts as a life worth living.
• Key Point: Legal recognition of suffering and dignity in terminal illness is dependent on the circulation of medical discourse.
• Textual Reference: “Conditions of ‘degeneracy and incurability’ allow knowledge to circulate… establishing life expectancy and suffering” (Nasir, 2016, p. 10).
• Relevance: Informs literary analysis of disabled characters or end-of-life narratives shaped by legal-medical institutions.

🔹 6. Sovereignty and Political Theology (Agambenian Theory)

• Core Contribution: Nasir refines Agamben’s theory of thanatopolitics by showing that life remains tenuously tethered to legality, even in death zones like counter-terror operations.
• Key Point: Rather than abandoning legality, law intensifies its role in regulating life’s termination.
• Textual Reference: “This (terrorizing) life maintains a tenuous but nevertheless palpable link with its right to life” (Nasir, 2016, p. 6).
• Relevance: Useful for analyzing state-sanctioned violence or characters in literary works caught in exceptions, camps, prisons, or wars.

🔹 7. Governmentality and Surveillance Studies

• Core Contribution: Provides a Foucauldian analysis of how human rights law functions as a technology of conduct regulation, requiring institutional coordination across military, medical, and legal fields.
• Key Point: Surveillance is implicit in the biopolitical governance of life and its optimization.
• Textual Reference: “Legal regulation of lives remains connected with specific processes of knowledge and governmental techniques” (Nasir, 2016, p. 6).
• Relevance: Applies to novels that stage bureaucratic control, institutional surveillance, and moral regulation.

🔹 8. Trauma and Memory Studies

• Core Contribution: In Finogenov, the state’s obligation to explain and justify deaths shows how legal discourse functions as a memory device, encoding trauma through procedural narratives.
• Key Point: Law itself becomes a repository and regulator of national trauma.
• Textual Reference: “The relatives of victims should be provided with satisfactory explanations of deaths” (Nasir, 2016, p. 5).
• Relevance: Connects with trauma theory in literature where legal or bureaucratic institutions serve as narrative agents of memory and forgetting.

🔹 9. Narratology / Genre Studies

• Core Contribution: Nasir’s article is structured like a case-based narrative—inviting literary analysis of the form and structure of legal storytelling.
• Key Point: The jurisprudence of the right to life functions not only legally but narratively, deploying characters (e.g. terrorists, civilians), plot arcs (e.g. emergencies), and resolutions (e.g. verdicts).
• Textual Reference: “Law grants permission to execute counterterror moves based on the effectiveness of measures taken… later judged via feasible precautions” (Nasir, 2016, p. 4).
• Relevance: Aligns with literary approaches analyzing law as a storytelling practice.

🔹 1. Overreliance on Legal Case Law as Theoretical Foundation

• The argument depends heavily on ECtHR jurisprudence (especially Finogenov and Al-Skeini), potentially limiting its broader theoretical generalizability.
• Critics may argue that this juridical formalism risks reducing complex biopolitical dynamics to institutional legal reasoning, thereby marginalizing other socio-political determinants.

🔹 2. Limited Engagement with Literary or Cultural Narratives

• Although published in Theory, Culture & Society, the article does not engage with literary texts or cultural representations, which limits its relevance to cultural and literary theory in practice.
• This lack of intertextuality may be seen as a missed opportunity to situate law within broader cultural narratives of life and death.

🔹 3. Ambiguity in Differentiating Biopolitics and Thanatopolitics

• While Nasir critiques Agamben and Mbembe for emphasizing death, he does not provide a stable alternative to clarify how biopolitical governmentality differs structurally from thanatopolitical power.
• The article oscillates between showing that law protects life and enables death without always clarifying the boundary between optimization and exclusion.

🔹 4. Lack of Marginal/Intersectional Perspective

• Nasir’s legal analysis is largely gender-, race-, and class-neutral, which obscures the way biopolitical management intersects with identity categories (e.g., racial profiling, reproductive governance, or refugee bodies).
• Critics may find the absence of intersectionality a major shortcoming in mapping how differentiated life operates in practice.

🔹 5. Technocratic Emphasis on Legal Precision

• The article sometimes reads like a technical commentary on legal efficiency, such as the Court’s standards of investigation or procedural duties.
• This may lead to the normalization of legal violence, as its procedural regulation is treated as sufficient for justice, rather than being critically interrogated for structural biases.

🔹 6. Reproduction of State-Centric Sovereignty

• Nasir critiques sovereignty in theory but reifies the nation-state as the sole guarantor of human rights in practice.
• His framework does not consider non-state actors, insurgent justice, or community-based forms of life protection, potentially reinforcing statist biopower.

🔹 7. Lack of Empirical Context or Voices of the Affected

• The victims in Finogenov and Al-Skeini are analyzed abstractly, without attention to testimonial, personal, or affective dimensions of life lost or lived under legal violence.
• This omission weakens the article’s engagement with embodied life and may appear overly analytic or emotionally disengaged.

🔹 8. Uncritical Use of Medical and Military Discourses

• Nasir relies heavily on medical and military epistemes (e.g., efficiency, feasibility, necessity), which are treated as neutral expert systems.
• Critics from STS (Science and Technology Studies) or Critical Medical Humanities might argue that this reproduces the authority of biopower, rather than critically dissecting it.

🔍 1. Linking Biopolitics and Critical Theory

• Meyer-Emerick explores the intersection of biopolitical theory and critical theory, suggesting that domination and false consciousness may stem not only from social constructs but also from evolutionary traits.
• ⬩ “Critical theorists were accurate in their analysis of the domination and control that fosters false consciousness and one-dimensional life” (Meyer-Emerick, 2004, p. 1).
• ⬩ She aims to show that “bureaucratic pathology… may be deeply rooted in human nature” (p. 1).

🧬 2. Evolutionary Roots of Obedience and Hierarchy

• Humans may have inherited tendencies toward hierarchy, submission, and obedience.
• ⬩ “We may have ‘a genetic bias towards hierarchy, dominance, and submission’” (Somit & Peterson, 1997, as cited in Meyer-Emerick, 2004, p. 1).
• ⬩ “Disobedience is a rarely encountered political phenomenon” (Somit & Peterson, 1997, p. 70).

📺 3. Spiral of Silence and Media Control (Noelle-Neumann)

• The media contributes to social conformity by silencing dissenting voices through fear of isolation.
• ⬩ “People suffer so much when they sense others avoiding them that they can be ‘manipulated as easily by their own sensitivity as by a bridle’” (Noelle-Neumann, 1993, as cited in Meyer-Emerick, 2004, p. 2).
• ⬩ The spiral of silence “preserved…by the individual’s fear of isolation and…demand…that we conform” (p. 7).

📚 4. Critical Theory’s Emphasis on False Consciousness

• Based in Frankfurt School thought, critical theory asserts that capitalism manufactures false consciousness through media, administration, and bureaucracy.
• ⬩ “One-dimensionality…prevents people from freely pursuing their own interests” (Marcuse, 1964, as cited in Meyer-Emerick, 2004, p. 3).
• ⬩ “Administration…reflects some form of domination” (p. 3).

🏛️ 5. Biopolitics from Political Science vs. Foucault

• Political science-based biopolitics emphasizes genetic predispositions and biological evolution.
• Foucault’s concept focuses on how power regulates life via governmentality and knowledge production.
• ⬩ “Power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race” (Foucault, 1978, as cited in Meyer-Emerick, 2004, p. 4).
• ⬩ “Government gained more knowledge about individuals and therefore had greater power over them” (p. 3–4).

🧠 6. Bureaucracy and Domination

• Bureaucracy is viewed as a self-reinforcing mechanism of control, aligning with both critical theory and biopolitical insights.
• ⬩ “The more there is, the more we need it…administrative agencies fill the gap that they themselves create” (p. 4).
• ⬩ Bureaucrats are less likely to critique their own role due to benefits they gain from the system (p. 4).

🧬 7. Challenges of Applying Biopolitics

• Biopolitics remains marginal in public administration due to resistance from ideological, religious, and methodological camps.
• ⬩ “Many…do not believe in or have serious doubts about evolution” (Somit & Peterson, 1997, p. 102).
• ⬩ “Public administration…difficult to identify a mainstream at all” (Losco, 1994, as cited on p. 9).

🚫 8. Legacy and Misuse of Social Darwinism

• Misuse of evolutionary theory (e.g., Social Darwinism, racism, sexism) contributed to skepticism toward biological explanations in social sciences.
• ⬩ “Gross misappropriation…discredited Social Darwinism” (Meyer-Emerick, 2004, p. 10).
• ⬩ “Prejudiced generations of non-biological scholars against Darwin’s work” (Wahlke, 2001, as cited on p. 10).

💡 9. Potential for Emancipation and Practice

• Though somber, the paper ends with possibilities for change, referencing reciprocal altruism, cultural indoctrinability, and critical pedagogy.
• ⬩ “Reciprocal altruism…beneficial to them” (p. 11).
• ⬩ “Helper role…enlighten citizens and give them access to the policy dialogue” (Box, 1998, as cited on p. 12).
• ⬩ “Plurality of resistances…each of them a special case” (Foucault, 1978, p. 96).

1. Contribution to Critical Theory (Frankfurt School)

• 📌 Integrates evolutionary explanations into Frankfurt School analysis of false consciousness, bureaucracy, and ideological control.
• 📖 “Critical theorists were accurate in their analysis of the domination and control that fosters false consciousness and one-dimensional life.” (Meyer-Emerick, 2004, p. 1)
• ⬩ Offers a naturalized basis for Marcuse’s idea of one-dimensionality by linking it to biological tendencies toward conformity and hierarchy.
• 📖 “This domination fosters a one-dimensionality…that prevents people from freely pursuing their own interests.” (p. 3)
• ⬩ Supports Adorno’s concept of the authoritarian personality by situating it within evolutionary behavior.
• 📖 “Inclined to submit blindly to power and authority.” (Adorno et al., 1982, as cited in Meyer-Emerick, 2004, p. 3)

📚 2. Contribution to Ideology and Subject Formation

• 📌 Extends Althusserian ideas of interpellation by explaining how obedience and conformity may stem not just from ideology but also from biological predispositions.
• 📖 “Our species’ evolutionary history has left Homo sapiens genetically endowed with certain social and political behavioral tendencies.” (p. 4)
• ⬩ Proposes that subjects may be biologically conditioned to accept their roles in dominant systems, reinforcing the illusory freedom often critiqued in literary texts.

📺 3. Contribution to Media Theory (Spiral of Silence and Cultural Reproduction)

• 📌 Noelle-Neumann’s spiral of silence complements media studies and poststructural literary theory by showing how media shapes social norms and discursive silence.
• 📖 “People suffer so much when they sense others avoiding them that they can be ‘manipulated as easily by their own sensitivity as by a bridle.’” (p. 2)
• ⬩ Contributes to theories of hegemony (e.g., Gramsci) and media control in literature by explaining why dissent is often muted in characters and real-world readers.

🧬 4. Contribution to Posthumanism and Biopolitics in Literature

• 📌 Incorporates Foucault’s biopolitics, linking it with natural sciences, encouraging literary scholars to read texts through biological regimes of power.
• 📖 “Power is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race.” (Foucault, 1978, as cited in Meyer-Emerick, 2004, p. 4)
• ⬩ Emphasizes biopower and population control as key interpretive frameworks in literature exploring health, governance, and surveillance.

🧠 5. Contribution to Evolutionary Literary Theory

• 📌 Offers a nuanced challenge to purely culturalist interpretations by introducing evolutionary political behavior as relevant to literary character development and plot.
• 📖 “Social primates display dominance behavior; in every instance so far observed, they also live in hierarchical social…structures.” (p. 6)
• ⬩ Suggests that human characters’ tendencies toward hierarchy, submission, or rebellion in literature may mirror evolved survival strategies.

🕊️ 6. Implications for Resistance and Literary Emancipation

• 📌 Reinvigorates the notion of emancipatory potential in literature by locating it within human idiosyncrasy and capacity for cultural override.
• 📖 “It is the idiosyncrasies of individuals within the species population where the greatest potential for ‘immanent critique’ and emancipation may persist.” (p. 11)
• ⬩ Encourages critical literary theory to look for moments where characters override biological or social programming, echoing Marcuse’s Great Refusal.

🔍 Conclusion: Literary Theory’s Expanded Terrain

Meyer-Emerick’s article pushes literary theory toward a cross-disciplinary expansion—inviting scholars to engage evolution, biology, psychology, and public administration theory in their analyses of power, ideology, and subjectivity. Her work provides a new biopolitical foundation to long-standing literary debates on freedom, conformity, and resistance.

⚠️ 1. Biological Determinism and Reductionism

• ⛔ Critics argue the paper leans toward biological essentialism, suggesting human behaviors like obedience or hierarchy are genetically hardwired.
• 🧬 This may risk reducing complex political, cultural, and literary phenomena to biological instincts.
• 📌 “Humans have an ‘innate inclination to obey.’” (Eibl-Eibesfeldt, as cited, p. 6) – such claims risk ignoring social variability and context.

📉 2. Undermines Agency and Emancipation

• ⚠️ By attributing false consciousness and social conformity to evolutionary history, the paper could weaken the critical theory tradition’s belief in human agency.
• 🙅‍♂️ This challenges the Frankfurt School’s goal of emancipation through awareness, implying that resistance may be unnatural or rare.
• 📌 “Disobedience is a rarely encountered political phenomenon.” (Somit & Peterson, 1997, as cited, p. 6)

💬 3. Limited Engagement with Literary or Cultural Theory

• ❓ The paper’s theoretical framework is not explicitly applied to literary or cultural texts, limiting its direct contribution to literary theory.
• 📚 Although it references critical theory and Foucault, it misses an opportunity to connect with literary discourse such as narrative theory, genre, or representation.

🧪 4. Scientific Controversies in Biopolitics

• ❗ The reliability of biopolitical claims about human nature is contested in evolutionary science and social science alike.
• 🧠 Scholars like Corning (2000) and Wilson (1998) warn that behavioral genetics is still in its infancy and not ready to support strong social claims.
• 📌 “Our behaviors are greatly affected by social pressures… not solely biology.” (Corning, 2000, p. 104)

🧨 5. Historical Baggage of Social Darwinism

• ⚠️ Any linkage between evolutionary biology and human social behavior risks echoing Social Darwinism, a historically discredited ideology.
• 🧑‍🔬 Despite her disclaimers, Meyer-Emerick’s paper revives dangerous framings of hierarchy as ‘natural’, even if unintentionally.
• 📌 “This gross misappropriation eventually, and fortunately, discredited Social Darwinism.” (p. 10)

🧩 6. Conceptual Incoherence Between Theories

• 🔀 Merging Foucault’s historical, post-structuralist analysis with biopolitical evolutionary science creates tensions, as these frameworks are epistemologically distinct.
• 🌀 Foucault analyzes power as relational and discursive, not innate or biologically determined.
• 📌 “Foucault’s theory is different in that he restricts his analysis…to historical analysis versus specific behavioral examination.” (p. 4)

📝 Introduction: Context and Problematic

• Biopolitics as a Contested Concept:
  • The term “biopolitics” has become widely and sometimes uncritically invoked in diverse contexts.
  • Authors warn against its automatic use, asking “how and why life breaks through the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it” (Virno, 2004, p. 81).
• Sovereignty in Political Theory:
  • Sovereignty, though often treated as settled, contains underlying diversity and contestation (Walker, 1993, p. 165).
  • Biopolitics emerges in literature as a supposed “nonsovereign” or “postsovereign” form of power but this is questioned.

⚡ Key Debates: Biopolitics and Its Differing Definitions

• Multiplicity of Definitions:
  • “Our goal… is to draw attention to multiple competing definitions of biopolitics, and in so doing problematize the term as a catchall category to describe either the ‘nonsovereign’ or the ‘postsovereign’ operation of power.” (p. 490)
• Competing Theoretical Accounts:
  • Contrasts Foucault’s historical and geographical specificity with Agamben’s metaphysical thanatopolitics and Hardt & Negri’s universalist biopotenza.

🧬 Foucault: Genealogy, Governmentality, and Biopolitics

• Inductive and Contextual Approach:
  • Foucault’s “inductive, genealogical, and time-specific and place-specific use of the concept” (p. 490).
  • “The state is neither a ‘cold monster’ nor a ‘puppet show policeman’, but a time-specific and place-specific way of governing” (Foucault, 2008, p. 4, 6).
• Power/Knowledge Assemblages:
  • “Government is… about the relative durability of regimes of truth in relation to institutionalized practices—systems of power/knowledge” (p. 491).
• Biopolitics as a Modern Technology of Power:
  • Not a dissolution of the state, but a “reconfiguration of ‘state’ power” as an assemblage of diverse practices (p. 491).
  • “Biopolitics itself warrants explanation—a modern technology of government whose contingency on earlier experiments in political and economic governance is the problem to be examined” (p. 501).

☠️ Agamben: Thanatopolitics and Sovereign Ban

• Critique of Foucault:
  • Argues Foucault neglects death and periodizes power too rigidly (Agamben, 2002).
  • For Agamben, “sovereign power is the ability to hold life hostage within what he calls a ‘sovereign ban’” (p. 496).
• Bare Life and Homo Sacer:
  • “Homo sacer is a life doubly excluded—such that it can be killed without the charge of murder, and yet not sacrificed” (p. 496).
  • Death camps illustrate “the limit form of a racist biopolitical technology” (p. 496).
• Totalizing Vision:
  • Agamben’s threshold “renders all places subject to the biopolitics of the sovereign ban, without differentiation” (p. 497).

💥 Hardt & Negri: Biopotenza and the Multitude

• Critique of Foucault:
  • Argue Foucault “fetishizes power as a faceless function, and… ignores ‘the ontological substance of cultural and social production’” (Hardt & Negri, 2000, p. 28).
• Biopotenza (Constituent Power):
  • “Biopotenza, ‘the potentiality of constituent power’, as ‘the bios that creates power’” (Casarino & Negri, 2004, p. 167).
  • “The multitude is at its core deterritorializing… a force that undercuts and dissolves any sort of spatiality predicated on boundaries or on territorialized accounts of identity and its differences” (p. 500).
• Universalizing Critique:
  • Hardt & Negri’s biopolitics is “a bold explanation of the social world—it is, categorically, what animates all social life, everywhere” (p. 501).

🌍 Spatiality and Metaphysics: Geographies of Biopolitics

• Metaphysics of Geopresence:
  • Both Agamben and Hardt & Negri “deploy biopolitics in both metaphysical and metageographical ways” (p. 490).
  • Critique: This risks “finalization and totalization… which conceal ‘the complex geographical palimpsest'” (Sparke, 2005, p. xvi).
• Contrast with Foucault:
  • Foucault “seeks to identify the multifarious logics, strategies, and forces at play that give contextual meat to the bare-bone elements of social life” (p. 501).

🚩 Conclusion: The Return of Sovereignty and Critical Implications

• No Stable Concept:
  • “Biopolitics should be approached as a site of fervent definitional struggle and disagreement” (p. 505).
• Two ‘Returns’ of Sovereignty:
  • Agamben: Sovereignty returns as a “black hole”—an all-encompassing, formless power.
  • Hardt & Negri: Sovereignty “cannot be thought outside or beyond life”; power is parasitic on the productive potential of the multitude.
• Caution for Theory:
  • The concept’s use in literary and cultural theory should “avoid reduction of complex theoretical traditions to catch-all terms.”
  • Authors argue for “the plurality, contestation, and situatedness of ‘biopolitics'” (p. 506).

Key Quotations

1. “Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it.” (Virno, 2004, p. 81)
2. “Biopolitics… is anything but a stable concept and cannot be deployed but in reference to specific thinkers and texts.” (p. 505)
3. “For Foucault… biopolitics itself warrants explanation—a modern technology of government whose contingency on earlier experiments in political and economic governance is the problem to be examined.” (p. 501)
4. “The multitude is a force that undercuts and dissolves any sort of spatiality predicated on boundaries or on territorialized accounts of identity and its differences.” (p. 500)
5. “Agamben’s threshold… renders all places subject to the biopolitics of the sovereign ban, without differentiation.” (p. 497)

🧬 Biopolitics and Literary Theory: Destabilizing the Concept

• Challenges the Automatic Use of Biopolitics:
  • The article warns against the “automatic and unreflective use of the term” biopolitics in literary and cultural criticism (p. 489).
  • Quotation: “We should avoid this automatic and unreflective use of the term. Let us ask ourselves, then, how and why life breaks through the center of the public scene, how and why the State regulates and governs it.” (p. 489, quoting Virno)
• Promotes Contextual, Critical Use:
  • Advocates for careful, context-driven applications in theoretical analysis, not as a catch-all for ‘nonsovereign’ or ‘postsovereign’ power.
  • Quotation: “We think the term is anything but a stable concept and cannot be deployed but in reference to specific thinkers and texts.” (p. 505)

👑 Sovereignty: Reconceptualizing Power in Textual Analysis

• Re-examines the Role of Sovereignty:
  • Offers a nuanced genealogy of sovereignty as a category, impacting readings of authority, legitimacy, and subjectivity in literature.
  • Quotation: “A number of different presuppositions circulated under sovereignty’s sign… beneath the too often taken-for-granted categorical presentation of sovereignty was a rich and overdetermined diversity of texts and thinkers.” (p. 489)
• Highlights the Return and Complexity of Sovereignty:
  • Engages with how sovereignty re-emerges in both theory and textual politics, rather than being obsolete.
  • Quotation: “If Agamben and Hardt and Negri alike employ biopolitics in order to emphasize the ‘return’ of sovereign power… what results are two very different ‘homecomings’.” (p. 505)

⚡ Critical Theory: Problematizing Universal Categories

• Against Universalism in Theory:
  • Critiques the tendency to treat biopolitics or sovereignty as universal, ahistorical categories in theoretical and literary analysis.
  • Quotation: “We submit that Agamben as well as Hardt and Negri deploy biopolitics in both metaphysical and metageographical ways.” (p. 490)
• Stresses the Plurality of Theoretical Traditions:
  • Reminds scholars to respect the multiplicity and contestation in theory, rather than collapsing differences.
  • Quotation: “Biopolitics should be approached as a site of fervent definitional struggle and disagreement.” (p. 505)

🏛️ Spatial Theory and Geographies of Power in Literature

• Spatiality as Crucial to Literary Analysis:
  • Encourages attention to spatial and geographical differences, avoiding abstractions in analyzing literary power dynamics.
  • Quotation: “Their [Agamben and Hardt & Negri’s] shared metaphysical deployment of biopolitics is at quite some remove from Foucault’s geographically and historically grounded investigation of state power.” (p. 491)
• Challenges Flattened Global Space in Literary Texts:
  • Critiques “the drive to finalization and totalization that accompanies various mappings, visualizations, landscapings, and metaphorizations of space in postfoundational theory.” (p. 490, citing Sparke)

🔬 Theory of Subjectivity: Life, Death, and the Politics of the Body

• Enriches Theorization of Subjectivity and Bare Life:
  • Provides resources for literary theory to think about bodies, death, and subjectivity—especially in readings of Agamben (bare life) and Foucault (discipline and biopolitics).
  • Quotation: “Homo sacer is a life doubly excluded—such that it can be killed without the charge of murder, and yet not sacrificed.” (p. 496)

🌍 Genealogy and Critique: Methodological Guidance for Theory

• Promotes Genealogical, Context-Sensitive Critique:
  • Recommends Foucault’s “inductive, genealogical, and time-specific and place-specific use of the concept” as a model for literary theory (p. 490).
• Encourages Resistance to Metaphysical Totalizations:
  • Advocates for methodological caution in adopting metaphysical or universalizing frameworks in theory and criticism.
  • Quotation: “For Foucault… biopolitics itself warrants explanation—a modern technology of government whose contingency on earlier experiments in political and economic governance is the problem to be examined.” (p. 501)

🧐 Overemphasis on Theoretical Multiplicity

• The article’s insistence on the plurality and contestation of “biopolitics” can risk a kind of critical relativism, making it difficult for scholars to apply the concept productively in specific contexts.
• Critics might argue that “problematizing” every use of biopolitics leads to endless debate rather than clarifying theoretical stakes.

📚 Limited Engagement with Literary Examples

• While highly relevant for literary and cultural theory, the article remains abstract and seldom provides close readings or applications to actual literary works.
• Some may critique that the lack of engagement with narrative or textual material makes its relevance to literary criticism less immediately practical.

🧭 Potential Neglect of Political Urgency

• By focusing so much on conceptual nuance and genealogical differentiation, the authors may downplay the urgent political realities that drive the widespread use of biopolitics, such as health crises, migration, or state violence.
• Critics may contend that the article risks academicism at the expense of political commitment.

🗺️ Underplaying Local and Material Differences

• Although the article cautions against universalizing biopolitics, some critics might argue it still works mostly at the level of theory, insufficiently foregrounding local, material, or intersectional differences (e.g., race, gender, colonial histories) that shape biopolitical realities.

🔄 Heavy Reliance on Other Theorists

• The critique of Agamben and Hardt & Negri, while valuable, is heavily mediated through Foucault’s framework.
• Some critics might see this as a Foucauldian bias, possibly limiting the exploration of genuinely alternative approaches to biopolitics or sovereignty.

🤔 Risk of Conceptual Paralysis

• By problematizing the use of “biopolitics” so thoroughly, the article may leave readers unsure how to move forward analytically or politically with the concept.
• This could inadvertently undermine the value of biopolitics as a tool for critique.

📈 Lack of Empirical Case Studies

• The article is deeply theoretical and does not supplement its analysis with empirical or case-based illustrations of biopolitical governance, which could limit its broader applicability and resonance beyond theory.