ABSTRACT
Since Michel Foucault’s crucial articulation in the 1970s, and the subsequent publication of Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer (1998) in English, biopolitics has become indispensable as a theoretical point of reference in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. Now, it seems that few fields are immune to the biopolitical. Further, derivations of the term, such as biolegalities, biocultures, biosociality and biocapital, are instigating and defining new fields of scholarship. This analytic fecundity no doubt arises at least partly from the fact that the concept seems to capture crucial aspects of the workings of the modern – and, perhaps, pre-modern – world. It is also enhanced by the fact that there are multiple theoretical accounts of biopolitics: the term itself may entail different theoretical commitments, different interpretive emphases and different problems to be resolved or overcome at the levels of philosophy and political activism. This allows for a certain analytic flexibility while also encouraging scholarship that attempts to resolve conflicts in favour of one view or another, or that attempts to redress and rectify the blind spots and shortcomings of the various and competing dominant theoretical approaches.
