TOWARDS A BIOPOLITICS OF THE VICTIMIZED BODY

This article discusses the creation of assault as a crime against health and life as this discursive process is expressed through Swedish laws, legislative discussions, and legal practice from 1945 to 1965. Inspired by Michel Foucault’s theoretical reflections on biopolitics and sociologist Thomas Lemke’s outline to a analytics of biopolitics, the article argues that a most central component in the genealogy of assault as a crime against health and life was a shift in the first post-war decades, from a predominant legal idealistic paradigm within Swedish jurisprudence, by which assault was defined as a crime against bodily integrity, to a legal realistic epistemology, imbued with the scientific knowledge and empirical ‘truth’-producing practices of modern medicine. As an effect, new discourses around the victimized body emerged, through which prevailing knowledges and ‘truths’ around violent crime and its effects were challenged and marginalized. In this discursive process, the 19th-century legal-moral category of violent crimes finally collapsed into the overarching legal category prescribed by Brottsbalken (1965) as ‘crimes against health and life’. Consequently, the victimized body was deprived of all meaning but ‘life’ and thus created as a biopolitical space, available to series of life-governing interventions and regulatory practices.     

人口、治理与政治地理学：生命政治研究综述与展望

在西方,福柯提出的生命政治内涵得到不断发展,近年来对人文地理特别是政治地理的研究起重要推动作用。生命政治为政治地理学者提供了一个全新的视角--通过探讨地理实践中以生命为对象的权力的运行机制,能够更好的解释在地理实践中权力与人的互动关系。本文首先概述了生命政治一词的来源及涵义,并梳理出由真理的权力、治理技术与主体化构成的权力运行框架;进而从生命与权力的不同关系出发,归纳出生命政治的三个分析视角：对生命的照料、对人口生产力的提升以及对赤裸生命的排除;并基于此提出了生命政治在人文地理学中的三个应用主题,分别是人口安全与可计算空间、人口规训与生产空间以及人口排斥与例外空间;最后,从全球和跨国、全国和次国家三个尺度,分别提出生命政治理论在我国政治地理领域的应用展望。     

Taking back taste: feminism,food and visceral politics

Despite much thoughtful agro-food scholarship, the politics of food lacks adequate appreciation because scholars have not developed a means to specify the links between the materialities of food and ideologies of food and eating. This article uses feminist theory to enliven a discussion of what the authors call visceral politics, and thus initiates a project of illustrating the mechanisms through which people's beliefs about food connect with their everyday experiences of food. Recent work on governed eating and material geographies is brought together with poststructural feminism in order to move towards a non-dualistic, visceral understanding of (everyday) socio-political life. In showing how the mind–body whole can be conceived as a singular, albeit ambiguously-unified agent, the article prefigures a more complete disclosure of the play of power in food systems. Food is shown as a means to trace power through the body in order to understand the making of the political (eating) subject. Specifically, reconceptualizing taste and the ‘Slow Food’ (SF) movement of taste education helps to concretize what a visceral politics of food might look like. The authors conclude that appreciating how food beliefs and representations exist materially in the body is crucial to the ability of food-based movements to inspire action across difference and achieve their progressive goals.     

The camp

Walter Benjamin has famously pointed out that we are living in a society in which the exception has become a norm. Giorgio Agamben adds to this claim another one, that the spatial ordering principle for this new order is the camp. This article focuses on this diagnosis. We do not, however, discuss its validity but rather unpack what is meant when the concept of camp is used. The camp is, we argue, given by three structuring principles that might contradict and overlap in various ways: a disciplinary disposit if according to which a distinction between inside and outside is established; a logic of transgression according to which the inside‐outside distinction is deliberately blurred; and finally a biopolitical rationale according to which the distinction between inside and outside is re‐established on each side so that the included are included as excluded (as bodies to be governed) and the excluded are excluded as included (within the realm of power). Finally, we claim that it is the combination of these three principles — discipline, transgression and biopolitics — that leads to a society in which the exception has become the norm. Such ‘society’ is, we show, given by a strange and paradoxical overlapping of bonding and un‐bonding, of distinction and indistinction.     

Giorgio Agamben and the new biopolitical nomos

In this paper I reflect on the progressive normalization of a series of geographies of exception within Western democracies and, in particular, the relation of these to the new biopolitical power that is progressively affirming itself in our everyday lives — and that appears to be imposing itself as the new, secret, ontology of the political. I do so by engaging with the work of Giorgio Agamben and, specifically, interrogating the spatial architecture that underpins his theory of sovereign power. Starting from Agamben's spatial conceptualizations, I explore his attempt to trace the contours and the secret coordinates of the contemporary biopolitical nomos, a nomos rooted firmly in the crisis and progressive demolition of that which Carl Schmitt described as the ius publicum Europaeum. I note, moreover, how the definitive dissolution of the geographical nomos that had dominated the two centuries preceding the First World War, and the lack of a new, alternative, geographical nomos in the century which followed, can also be grasped by critically rereading some key episodes in the history of European geography; in particular, the contested legacy of the work of Friedrich Ratzel's grand geographical project and the Geopolitik experiment. What I suggest is that to understand the deep nature of the geographies of exception that arm the global war on terror, it is vital that we think in terms of a theory of space in order to try to unveil the Arcanum, the secret enigma of the empty centre around which turn the wheels of a new, macabre, geo‐biopolitical machine.     

BIOPOLITICS AMONG THE DISCIPLINES

A new wave of publications attempts to bring together theory and history in order to reconsider the past, present, and future in light of a looming catastrophe. Whether in political theory, sociology, anthropology, or intellectual history, scholars are attempting to reflect about the present beyond the old boundaries that separate left and right, inner and outer, civilian and solider, friend and enemy. Three recent publications, by Catherine Mills, Didier Fassin, and an anthology edited by Devin Pendas, Mark Roseman, and Richard Wetzel, do so by considering the growth of biopolitical critique in their respective disciplines.