Biopolitics as a System of Thought with Serene Richards

Purchase 'Biopolitics as a System of Thought' from Bloomsbury:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/biopolitics-as-a-system-of-thought-9781350412095/


Our contemporary mode of life is characterised by what Serene
Richards in Biopolitics as a System of Thought calls: Smart
Being. Smart Being believes in the solutions of techno-capital
where living is always at stake and directed to survival. Armed
with this concept, this book examines how we arrived at this mode
of being and asks how it could be that, while the material
conditions of our lives have increasingly worsened, our
capacities for effective political action, understood as the
capacity for transforming our existing social relations, appear
to be diminishing.

Drawing from jurists and philosophers such as Pierre Legendre,
Yan Thomas, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze,
Richards argues that biopolitics intervenes at the most minute
level of our everyday lives. She argues that there are conceptual
truths presupposed in the mode of biopolitics' functioning, for
instance that life can be assigned a value for the purpose of
intervention, abandonment, or death, which have implications for
our politics. In exciting engagements with political movements
such as the post-May 1968 Mouvement des travailleurs Arabes
(MTA), Richards shows how demands to transform our system of
social relations are undermined by institutional models that
proffer to offer rights protection while simultaneously
annihilating the living altogether. Through a reappraisal of law,
governance and capital, Richards seeks to reconceptualise our
collectivity of thought, arguing for a politics of destitution
that could form the basis of a communism to come.


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