The republic of the living : biopolitics and the critique of civil society / Miguel Vatter.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Vatter, Miguel E., author.

Series:

Commonalities

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Civil society.

Biopolitics.

Physical Description:

viii, 403 pages ; 23 cm.

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2014.

Summary:

This book takes up Foucault's hypothesis that liberal "civil society," far from being a sphere of natural freedoms, designates the social spaces where our biological lives come under new forms of control and are invested with new forms of biopower. In order to test this hypothesis, its chapters examine the critical theory of civil society-from Hegel and Marx through Lukács, Adorno, Benjamin, and Arendt-from the new horizon opened up by Foucault's turn Lo biopolitics and its reception in recent Italian theory. Negri, Agamben, and Esposito have argued that biopolitics not only denotes new forms of domination over life but harbors within it an affirmative relation between biological life and politics that carries an emancipatory potential. Tire chapters of this book take up this suggestion by locating this emancipatory potential in the biopolitical feature of the human condition that Arendt called "natality." The book proceeds to illustrate how-natality is the basis for a republican articulation of an affirmative biopolitics. It aims to renew the critical theory of civil society by pursuing the traces of natality as a "surplus of life" that resists the oppressive government of life found in the capitalist political economy, in the liberal system of rights, and in the bourgeois family. By contrast, natality offers the normative foundation for a new "republic of the living." Finally, natality permits us to establish a relation between biological life and contemplative life that reverses the long-held belief in a privileged relationship of thinking to the possibility of our deaths. The result is a materialist, atheological conception of contemplative life as eternal life. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Biopolitics of the Economy

1 The Tragedy of Civil Society and Republican Politics in Hegel 17

2 Living Labor and Self-Generative Value in Marx 60

Part II Biopolitics of the Family

3 Reification and Redemption of Bare Life in Adorno and Agamben 99

4 Natality, Fertility, and Mimesis in Arendt's Theory of Freedom 129

5 The Heroism of Sexuality in Benjamin and Foucault 156

Part III Biopolitics of Rights

6 Free Markets and Republican Constitutions in Hayek and Foucault 195

7 Biopolitical Cosmopolitanism: The Right to Have Rights in Arendt and Agamben 221

Part IV Biopolitics of Eternal Life

8 Bare Life and Philosophical Life in Aristotle, Spinoza, and Heidegger 263

9 Eternal Recurrence and the Now of Revolution: Nietzsche and Messianic Marxism 290.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780823256013

0823256014

9780823256020

0823256022

OCLC:

861678547