Biopolitics, Sovereignty and Political Conflict (BSPC)
Main funder
Funder's project number: 101065769
Funds granted by main funder (€)
- 276 864,48
Funding program
Project timetable
Project start date: 01/09/2022
Project end date: 31/08/2025
Summary
This project is a philosophical attempt to address the question of political conflict. At this time what seems to matter most in the escalation of conflicts around issues like gender, minorities and the COVID-19 pandemic is the biological life of individuals and populations. This is problematic for the reason that politics is structurally ambivalent about natural life: it is productive and affirmative, on the one hand, and, on the other, it is lethal and negative. There is a wide agreement that this ambivalent relation of politics to life stems from how biopolitical power intersects with sovereign power, the power over life with the sovereign right of death. While studies in biopolitics often take this enigmatic nexus as the point of reference for further considerations and subsequently emphasise the imminence of the problems with violence and pacification, this project aims to go further than that by drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s idea of technology as the condition of biopolitics to deconstruct and recast affirmatively the knot of biopolitical power and sovereign power. This re-articulation I argue provides a novel angle from which to review the conceptions of resistance and to consider the grounds of political conflict. To show the affirmative value of political conflicts, I apply my developed concepts to examine populist polarization and neoliberal pacification that beset biopolitical liberal democracies today.
