I’m just in the tidy up phase of marking. It’s a thin state, like butter scraped over too much bread. It leaves me nostalgic for the dreamt figures of childhood, Hollywood cinema and processed, probably non-vegan, food. Read the rest of this entry »
Noel Pearson, allegedly, made it legitimate for white politicians to finally take some action on the national emergency of Indigenous child abuse. His (or the Cape York Institute’s) massive proposal [pdf] for controversial, welfare “reform” experiments as a solution to problems in remote Indigenous communities came after the Little Children are Sacred report [pdf] and before the Federal Government “crackdown.” There is much excellent discussion of these from and at s0metim3s and WP including the somewhat sidelined death in custody decision. However, before sides are wedged open by what Kim from Larvatus Prodeo has called Tampa 2007, it is important to examine the ambiguities and silences of this interstitial document. Read the rest of this entry »
So I’m writing about the politics of contagion and 28 Weeks Later, which I saw after having encountered foucaultisdead’s viral reading of the film. The sensibility is, then, of a reading already gathered by FID’s.
28 Weeks Later illustrates a logic of viral containment that targets the host. It secures territory against people. This logic of containment can only understand people as clean or infected or Schrödingerly both. It is a security logic of war or emergency, not sickness, for the western nation-state. As such it is a logic wedded to clear relations of enmity. Viscerality of transmission aside, this makes the film hard to read as literal virus and plays strongly into its overtones of the war-on-Iraq-terror.
The set up of 28 weeks later is London, the infected zombie plague of the first film has died of starvation, the RAGE virus seems to have gone and NATO/US troops have begun, what is termed, reconstruction. British refugees have been brought from extraterritorial camps to a greenzone in central London. The greenzone is tightly circumscribed by military presence and the moat of the Thames. As each refugee is brought into the area they are scanned for disease. The camera dwells on the eyes as they are scanned, showing the absence of blood, the filmic and metafilmic visible mark of disease. But also the differently coloured irises of a boy child (Andy) – one blue, one hazel-brown – a genetic trait, we are told, that can be passed from parent to child. [Spoilers for 28 Weeks Later below.] Read the rest of this entry »
Last time on Preoccupied Biopoliticals: Kant distinguishes medicine, from the other higher faculties of law and theology, as the most autonomous from sovereignty because its concern is nature. Still, Kant describes a threefold relation between the study of medicine and the state, in each case the medium of relation is the people or public. Firstly, Kant describes a relationship of the people’s convenience where a government provisions doctors for public use. Secondly, Kant describes a relationship of safety, where the government protects the people from illegitimate, irresponsible or zealous doctors. Lastly, Kant describes a relation of exploitation where worthless bodies, corpori vili (see vile), are provided to medicine for the extraction of medical knowledge.
A while back Angela Mitropoulos in her contribution to the edu-factory discussion used a portion of Kant I hadn’t come across before. The Conflict of the Faculties [pdf] is an account of the university, as composed of 3 higher faculties – in descending order theology, law and medicine – and 1 lower, being philosophy. As Kant sees it the hierarchy of the faculties, their respective vertical positions, is related to their proximity to oversight. The more autonomous a discipline the lower it is. Read the rest of this entry »
Is it possible to think a politics of health, that includes the child yet to be born, that is not biopolitical? Nancy in his note on biopolitics suggests that Foucault’s historical thesis on the birth of biopolitics from the 18th century requires:
a more precise examination of what the biopolitical preoccupations were before the modern era (there was a politics of wheat in Rome and a politics of birth in Athens, for example).
This use of ‘biopolitical’ seems (to me) different from the others in Nancy’s text. Firstly, it addresses an expressly historical account of biopolitics rather than the more metaphysical interpretation belonging to Agamben. Secondly, in making this address Nancy uses biopolitics to refer to a form of coexistence, rather than to designate a form of auto-management. Nancy opens the question of collective subsistence and reproduction before population or populousness. Read the rest of this entry »
ancy in his recently translated (into English) work, La création du monde ou la mondialisation, has a note on the term biopolitics. The note is reproduced in full below. This note in 3 pages, with its own set of notes, at first occasions a few points of clarity, a direction of further research and then some reconfigurative maneuvers that enframe biopolitics in Nancy’s work on ecotechnology. This reframing then turns on the final page to a dense argument for the poverty of biopolitics. The biopolitical diagnosis of the limits of democratic management entangle us, life and politics in the symptoms of democracy.
pparently torture gets politicised ‘because of very real stories and events.’
The moral issues of representation come down to quantity and quality.
The executive producer of 24 decides to tone it down because:
anguilhem continuing from precisely where the last left off:
rom Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological:
meant to write about Babel this evening as it haunts me and s0metim3s’ post brought it back. But Alice Dreger writes about the ashley treatment which is all the outrage at the moment. And she holds back any invective to draw out the way parental decision making is continually recoded along an axis of selfish/less-ness.
I’ve been thinking about formula and daycare and pull-ups, and how I am a selfish mother. I’ve been thinking about that because I don’t believe Ashley’s parents’ protestations that “the Ashley Treatment” (as they themselves dubbed it) is all about their daughter’s well-being and comfort and not about their own. I know that’s what they are supposed to say – that they are doing it only for her. When I became a mother, I learned this was the line I was supposed to toe: I do everything for my child, and never, never anything that might put myself before my child. Heck, I learned this while I was still pregnant. Try having a glass of wine with dinner in public when you are eight months pregnant, and you discover that people will go to pretty extreme measures to make sure you understand Motherhood Means Selflessness.
o this is a tour of (some of) Jean-Luc Nancy’s writing on bodies. My aim in this tour is to find ways of writing about bodies and pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). I’m hoping that the tangibilities Nancy describes – his own disintegrating body; the impenetrability of bodies, the intercorporeality of touch and his projected eight billion human bodies – might provide a way of thinking together the techniques of reproduction and the techniques of normal incarnation.
The first guide on this tour is Diane Perpich, the relevant essay is sitting locally on shelf.
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Corpus Meum: Disintegrating Bodies and the Ideal of Integrity [PDF] Diane Perpich Hypatia 20(3) 2005 |
t the heart of much bioethics discussion around reproductive technologies is a binary conceived between chance and choice. Between an idea that what is valuable in the child is its unexpectedness, the gift of its arrival. And an idea that we should be free to choose as much as possible about our lives including when, where and how to have children.
Via AutismVox we get Vardit Ravitsky giving an succinct summary of the way pre-implantation genetic diagnosis is aligned by the ethics of chance and choice:
Some people argue that a new ethical principle is emerging: procreative beneficence, the responsibility to benefit future children as much as we can. If you can bring a child into this world with better genetic equipment, it is our ethical obligation to do so, just like providing medical care.
On the other end of the spectrum, people argue that this kind of testing will modify our relationship with our children. Until now we saw them as gifts. What we got was what we got. Once we try to control their identities, we’ll see them as commodities, a product that should meet a certain standard. If you bought genetic equipment to have an athlete, will you be upset if you get a musician?
Ravitsky’s elaboration of both positions is a little too succinct and glib. I’m not sure a duty to benefit children to come spins immediately into a duty to improve germ line genetics. As I am equally unsure that the problem with commodification is merely the introduction of standards and consumer expectations.
What strikes me though is the way these two ethics, an ethics of beneficent choice and an ethics of the gift of chance, are concerned about different kinds of children. WHen a child is a gift, an unexpected arrival, its significance occurs when it arrives and in the preparations for its arrival. The child that is of concern is always a specific child that will have a body of its own with its own ways of being, tolerances and circumstances. However, the child that is the concern of procreative beneficence is a child without a body, without specificity. Under the rubrics of beneficent choice we are concerned precisely with homing this nonspecific child in the best place and body.
influxus_deli