Biopolitics

As a whole, the course will introduce students to the different ways our bodies have, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, become micro-managed by our systems of governance. In studying different approaches by scholars to the emergence of biopolitics, students will learn to complicate oppositions between self and other, normal and pathological, sovereignty and surveillance, community and immunity, politics and death, slavery and freedom. Set in the context of the covid pandemic, all readings and assignments in the course will aim to get students to reflect on their own mediated experience of their bodies, physical and mental health and social life during our collective lockdown and confinement.

Ability to read advanced texts in English

Countries across the globe experienced similar measures to control and manage their populations during the pandemic. Depending on the spread of Covid-19, restrictions appeared on when and where residents could circulate, blocking physical contact between nation-states, municipalities, but also families and intimates. At the same time, new habits of online and virtual self-care, being-together and self-managed communities appeared. This course introduces students to the concept of “life” (bios) as a property of a collective “species” body invented by the range of institutions that together constituted the modern state (-polis). The course starts by surveying classic statements on the emergence of biopower, such as by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, at specific sites of population control, such as prisons, hospitals, camps and borders, and then continues with the work of more recent intersectional, postcolonial and queer scholars. It will finally trace the development of biopolitics through practices and theories of media, specifically focusing on the way digital media have presented, shaped and helped reconfigure our understanding of health, sexuality, gender, ethnicity and race since the pandemic.

Knowledge and understanding:

Historical familiarity with range of institutional spaces determining society, populations, ethnic, racial and gender identity and the body
Awareness of their mediation and management by specific media devices, platforms, and their associated protocols
Willingness to reflect on their own emplacement within these systems of media production, consumption and self- and collective governance
Ability to recognize and gain distance on normative conceptions of society, populations, ethnic, racial and gender identity and the body

• Foucault, Michel. 2007. »Lecture One, Security, Territory, Population,« Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78 Catalogue
• Foucault, Michel. 2007. »Lecture Two, The Birth of Biopolitics,« Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977-78
• Foucault, Michel. 1995. »Panopticism,« Discipline and Punish. Birth of the Prison.Catalogue
• Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. »Form-of-Life,« Means without End. Notes on Politics. E-version
• Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. »Beyond Human Rights,« Means without End. Notes on Politics. E-version
• Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. »What is a People?,« Means without End. Notes on Politics. E-version
• Agamben, Giorgio. 2000. »What is a Camp?,« Means without End. Notes on Politics. E-version
• Esposito, Roberto. 2013. Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics.
• Neocleous, Mark. 2022. The Politics of Immunity: Security and the Policing of Bodies. Catalogue
• Butler, Judith. 2004. “Precarious Life,” Precarious Life, 128–52.
• Crary, Jonathan, and Sanford Kwinter, eds. 1992. Incorporations. New York: Zone. E-version
• Canguilhem, Georges. 1952. “The Normal and the Pathological.” E-version Catalogue
• Canguilhem, Georges. 1992. “Machine and Organism.” E-version
• Nikolas Rose and Carlos Novas, »Biological Citizenship,« Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems. E-version
• Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 2000. »Biopolitical Production,« Empire. E-version
• Achille Mbembe, »Necropolitics,« Public Culture 15 (1). https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-15-1-11
• Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction and the Meaning of Liberty.
• Jasbir Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Catalogue
• Queer necropolitics, 2014. Eds. Jin Haritaworn, Adi Kuntsman, and Silvia Posocco. Catalogue
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1992. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October 59 (1): 3–7. E-version
• Pandemic Media. 2020. Eds. Melamed, Laliv, and Philipp Dominik Keidl. Catalogue E-version

Type (examination, oral, coursework, project):
Attendance and active participation (25%), two presentations of readings (20%), essay (2000 words) or other creative research project related to biopolitics (40%), journal (15%).

Assoc. Prof. Peter Purg, PhD currently leads the New Media module in the Digital//Media Arts and Practices graduate//postgraduate programme at the School of Arts, University of Nova Gorica, where he acts as Associate Professor, projects coordinator as well as expert across realms of digital culture and media. Since December 2021 he is Dean of the School of Humanities. Having obtained a PhD in media art, communication science and literary studies from the University of Erfurt (Germany), his scientific inquiries now include media arts pedagogy, interdisciplinary collaboration and innovation, media art and media ecology. His artistic interests range from (lecture) performances and intermedia installations to public-space interventions as well as participatory creative processes. He is active in the field of cultural and higher education policymaking and quality assurance.