Microbial Empires: Active Transmission Strategies and Postcolonial Critique

In this chapter Taylor-Pirie illuminates how the microbiological imagination made its mark on anxious imperial fictions by close reading H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898) and John Masefield’s Multitude and Solitude (1909) alongside parasitologists’ characterisations of parasite-vector-host relationships. The anthropocentric semantics of war, violence, and criminality characterised tropical illness as another form of colonial insurrection, bolstering the biopolitical power of medicine as an extension of the disciplinary law-and-order state. She interrogates the collision of the ‘medicine as war’ metaphor with a medicalised concept of ‘the Other’ to think through biomedical and national identity—as well as the discomforting agency of non-human vectors—in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), H. P. Lovecraft and Hazel Heald’s ‘Wingéd Death’ (1934), and the poetry and correspondence of parasitologists. Taylor-Pirie examines how vengeful insects, alien invasions, microbial villains, and the supernatural gave shape to the anxiety that Britain’s geopolitical relationships were immersing the imperial capital in a global marketplace of pathogens. By excavating the medical and political contexts of popular cultural forms like the vampire, she historicises lexes of contagion and parasitism that persist in contemporary political discourse surrounding immigration.

Kaum Muda dalam The Social Dilemma: Sebuah Refleksi Kritis tentang Narasi Kerja, Waktu Luang dan Subjektivitas di Era Post-Fordist

This article presents a reflection on the constitutive relation of youth, work, and leisure in post-Fordist society using a documentary film The Social Dilemma as an entry point. The film has been praised as successful in delivering critics toward digital capitalism. Its content builds upon the idea that the political economy of giant platforms have caused serious problems on the vulnerability of young people’s wellbeing and their precarity of work. Different from previous comments, this article argues that The Social Dilemma does not only convey critique of digital capitalism and youth’s wellbeing, but also represents a relational narrative of work-leisure among young people in post-Fordist society, which is exploitative in its character. Building upon previous studies on youth, work, leisure, and subjectivity this article tries to offer a critical reflection—based on the respective film—that digital arena in the post-Fordist context has created a transformation of leisure into labour. This transformation has further produced a binary subjectivity cultivated by the biopolitical power of immaterial labour through massive digital infrastructure that serve as the main characteristic of post-Fordist society.

Foucault’s Keystone: Confessions of the Flesh

The fourth and final volume of The History of Sexuality offers the keystone to Michel Foucault’s critique of Western neoliberal societies. Confessions of the Flesh provides the heretofore missing link that ties Foucault’s late writings on subjectivity to his earlier critique of power. Foucault identifies in Augustine’s treatment of marital sexual relations the moment of birth of the modern legal actor and of the legalization of social relations. With the appearance of the modern legal subject, Foucault’s critique of modern Western societies is complete: it is now possible to see how the later emergence of an all-knowing homo œconomicus strips the State of knowledge and thus deals a fatal blow to its legitimacy. The appearance of both the modern legal actor and homo œconomicus makes it possible to fold the entire four-volume History of Sexuality back into Foucault’s earlier critique of punitive and biopolitical power. And it now challenges us to interrogate how we, contemporary subjects, are shaped in such a way as to implicate ourselves—both willingly and unwittingly—in the social order within which we find ourselves and that, through the interaction of knowledge-power-subjectivity, we reproduce.

Political Theology and COVID-19: Agamben’s Critique of Science as a New “Pandemic Religion”

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has reacted to the coronavirus crisis in a way that markedly contrasts with most other positions in contemporary political philosophy. His position has been described as irrational, politically incorrect, and unfair toward the victims of COVID-19. In this article, we delve into the foundations of this peculiar, pessimistic, and controversial reaction. From Agamben’s conceptual framework, we will explain how state responses to the COVID-19 crisis have turned science into a new religion from the dogmas of which various strategies have been developed in order for states to exercise biopolitical power under theological guises.

Policing Cyberspace: Understanding Online Repression in Thailand and the Philippines

Social networking sites have become increasingly relevant in the study of democracy and culture in recent years. This study explores the interconnectedness of social networks, the imposition of state control, and management of social behavior by comparing various literature on the operation of repression in Thai and Philippine cyberspaces. It examines the overt and covert policing of daily interactions in digital environments and unpacks governmental technologies’ disciplinary mechanisms following Michel Foucault’s notion of government and biopolitical power. Subjugation in the context of social networks merits analysis for it sheds light on the practice of active and passive self-censorship—the former driven by the pursuit of a moral self-image and the latter by state-sponsored fear. In tracing various points of convergence and divergence in the practice of cyber control in Thailand and the Philippines, the study found newer domains of regulation of social behavior applicable to today’s democracies.

Bordering the world as a response to emerging infectious disease. The case of SARS CoV-2

Facing emerging zoonose SARS-CoV-2, states decided unilaterally to close borders to individuals and revealed deep processes at work ‘bordering of the world’. Smart borders promoted by international organizations have allowed the filtering of indispensables (merchandise, data, capital and key workers) from dispensables (human beings) and, above all, the redefinition of the balance of biopolitical power between state and society. The observation of the unprecedented phenomenon of the activation and generalization of the global border machinery captures a common global dynamic. After a round-the-world tour of border closures between 21 January and 7 July 2020, we concentrate on a few emblematic cases: the Schengen zone, the USA–Canada and USA–Mexico borders, Brazil–Uruguay, Malaysia–Singapore and Morocco–Spain. We interrogate the justification and the strategies of border closure in a context of the global spread of an emerging epidemic, going beyond the simple medical argument. Choices appear to be dependent on ideological orientations henceforth dominant on the function and role of borders. We will discuss the acceleration of the bordering of the world, the forms of its outcome and its difficult reversibility

Otsukaresamadeshita!: A Critical Analysis of Japan's Toxic Work Culture

Japan is known for its excessive work culture and dedication to work, which led the world to view the country as a ‘workaholic’. The ‘white collar heroes’ or locally known as the ‘salary man’ have been credited with boosting the Japanese economy, at the expense of their own lives. Approximately 1,949 work-related deaths and suicide attempts were recorded in 2019, all due to overwork. This paper analyses the Japanese work culture from the biopolitical power relations and discourse theory using an ethnography approach and participant observation methodology.

Biopolitical power and paradoxes in evaluation research with transnational migrant youth

In this article, the authors theorize the practice of evaluation as linked to truth-telling and organizing future societies. Drawing on Foucauldian notions of biopolitical governmentality, the authors examine the origins of the field of evaluation, theorize it as a truth-telling practice that aims to control populations and futures, and consider the implications of this for a current evaluation project with transnational newcomer migrant youth in the United States. The authors raise the following questions about evaluation as a social practice: Who/what knowledge is produced in the process? What mechanisms/technologies are deployed to reason, compare, and quantify migrant youth experiences, and at what cost? What are the ethical imperatives underlying this truth-telling process? The article offers a productive critique of current evaluation practices, providing theoretical and methodological implications of this analysis, arguing to expose the politics of governance embedded in evaluation.

Smiling tigers: trauma, sexuality and creaturely life in Echo’s Bones

In analysing ‘Sanies I’ and ‘Serena II’ meticulously, with special attention to the animal imagery, Conor Carville in this chapter links Otto Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth with Eric Santner’s recent idea of ‘creaturely life’ – the life that is exposed to biopolitical power at moments of trauma. Trauma is here considered as constitutive of the subject, not an exceptional phenomenon, and also as providing the raw material for biopolitical power. In the process of Carville’s analyses emerge hitherto uncharted networks concerning Beckett’s fixation on the trauma of birth and the contemporary biopolitical concerns with birth, reproduction and population in Ireland and Britain. Carville’s article not only provides original close readings of those difficult poems in the light of Rank but also illustrates how a highly personal unease about sexual identity caused by birth trauma can be connected to the biopolitical discourses by the use of Santner’s idea of ‘creaturely life’ that itself draws on the ideas of Benjamin, Foucault, Lacan, Agamben and other theorists.