Professor Ben Anderson ben.anderson@durham.ac.uk
Professor
Affect and Biopower: Towards a Politics of Life
Anderson, B.
Authors
Abstract
In this paper I stage an encounter between two concepts that have become popular placeholders for a broad concern with a politics of life: affect and biopower. Through engagement with Antonio Negri’s writings on the ‘real subsumption of life’ in contemporary capitalism and Michel Foucault’s lectures on neo-liberalism, I show that understanding how forms of biopower work through affect requires attending to three relations: affective relations and capacities are object-targets for discipline, biopolitics, security, and environmentality; affective life is the outside through which new ways of living may emerge; and specific collective affects (including ‘state-phobia’) are part of the conditions for the birth of forms of biopower. In what is simultaneously a departure from, and an affirmation of, recent work on affect, I argue that attending to the dynamics of affective life may become political as a counter to forms of biopower that work through processes of normalisation. The consequence is that understanding how biopower works on and through affect becomes a precondition for developing affirmative relations with affective life.
Citation
Anderson, B. (2012). Affect and Biopower: Towards a Politics of Life. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 37(1), 28-43. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00441.x
Journal Article Type | Article |
---|---|
Publication Date | Jan 1, 2012 |
Deposit Date | Jan 12, 2011 |
Journal | Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers |
Print ISSN | 0020-2754 |
Electronic ISSN | 1475-5661 |
Publisher | Wiley |
Peer Reviewed | Peer Reviewed |
Volume | 37 |
Issue | 1 |
Pages | 28-43 |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00441.x |
Keywords | Affect, Life, Biopower, Biopolitics, Non-Representational Theories, Neo-liberalism |
Publisher URL | http://www.wiley.com/bw/journal.asp?ref=0020-2754&site=1 |
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