Insuring life : value, security and risk / Luis Lobo-Guerrero.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Lobo-Guerrero, Luis, author.

Series:

Interventions (Routledge (Firm))

Interventions

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Life insurance.

Risk (Insurance).

Value.

Physical Description:

xix, 156 pages ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2016.

Summary:

This book is a contribution to the scholarly engagement with the wider problem of governing through risk and the politics of uncertainty. It takes life insurance as an empirical site from which to ask: what is the kind of governance created through insurance an instance of, and how does it contribute to the transcendence of liberalism? By making a distinction between capable life as object of insurance, and potential life as that which escapes its control, the book conducts a historical epistemological analysis of the problems of valuation, truth production, securitisation, classification, and gendering that constitute life insurance products and practices. Insuring Life offers a critical engagement with the epistemology of life insurance to demonstrate the unnecessary and precarious character of the conditions that make this instrument of liberal governance possible. It concludes that the transcendence of liberalism relies on the technological agency of these instruments and that its challenge begins by redefining the terms under which the potential of life, if invaluable, is to be thought as event. The book follows Insuring War as the third of a trilogy that analyses how concepts and practices of power, risk and security materialise in the form of insurance as a central instrument of governance in the liberal world. It will be of great use to scholars, researchers, and postgraduate students of political economy, critical security studies and political theory, the biopolitics of security and post-structural politics. Book jacket.

Contents:

1 Introduction: Life insurance and the politics of vital uncertainty 2

2 The problem: The technological transcendence of liberalism 21

3 Insuring the life excess 35

4 Capital securitisation: an emerging order in the valuation of life 54

5 Uberrima fides, trust and contracted life 72

6 Sex, insurance and the valuation of lives 88

7 Life beyond insurance, life as the potential of becoming 108

8 An epistemology of life insurance 121.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780415716079

0415716071

OCLC:

886492390