In the mid-1990s, the political philosopher Giorgio Agamben began a 20-year project exploring the origin of what Michel Foucault called biopolitics – the governance of populations through technocratic management of aspects of their biological lives and the conditions intended to make live, or let die. Performing an archaeology of politics tracing back to the Greeks, Agamben identified a number of governmental apparatuses through which our world is both split, and bound, in two, between the included and the excluded; the inside and the outside; the human and the not-quite-yet.

In this episode, we talk to Serene Richards, a Lecturer in Law at New York University London, and author of the book Biopolitics as a System of Thought. During our conversation, we discuss the origins of two of Agamben’s most famous political concepts: Homo Sacer, the sacred man or ‘bare life’; and the State of Exception, the mechanism by which Law establishes its own ‘inside’ through the creation of an ‘outside’ that lies beyond it, and yet which must be included. Later we discuss Serene’s book, her concept of Smart Being, and how our techno-capitalist moment has seen biopolitical logics extend beyond the political realm, penetrating even how we think, perceive and understand our own lives.

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/biopolitics-as-a-system-of-thought-9781350412095/

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The Use of Bodies

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