Anderson, B. (2012) 'Affect and biopower : towards a politics of life.', Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers., 37 (1). pp. 28-43.
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.
Item Type: | Article |
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Keywords: | Affect, Life, Biopower, Biopolitics, Non-Representational Theories, Neo-liberalism |
Full text: | Full text not available from this repository. |
Publisher Web site: | http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00441.x |
Date accepted: | No date available |
Date deposited: | No date available |
Date of first online publication: | January 2012 |
Date first made open access: | No date available |
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