ABSTRACT
John Milbank argues, instead the secular as a domain had to be instituted or imagined, both in theory and in practice. For Milbank, rather than constituting a fundamental break with a previous sacral age, the emergence of contemporary secular culture sustained by a series of decisive shifts within Western theology. Both scholarly and popular accounts of the social, ethical and moral significance of novel technologies have tended to represent processes of technological change as a largely a social affair. Exploring recent political debates concerning proposals for the deliberate and large-scale modification of climatic systems as a response to anthropogenic climate change, collectively referred to as geoengineering. Originally drawn from Michel Foucault's analyses of biopower the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, the contemporary biopolitical analyses have tended to focus on the intersections between techno-economic innovation and the vitalisation of biological life.
