Metamorphosis of Biopolitics. A Foucauldian Ecological Perspective and the Challenge of the Pandemic

A Review Essay of Ottavio Marzocca, Biopolitics for Beginners. Knowledge of Life and Government of People

Authors

  • Valentina Antoniol University of Bari Aldo Moro

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i35.7082

Keywords:

Biopolitics, Health crisis, Ecological perspective, Environmental changes, COVID-19, Capitalism, Neoliberal governmentality

Abstract

This paper is a review essay of Ottavio Marzocca, Biopolitics for Beginners. Knowledge of Life and Government of People, Milan/Udine: Mimesis International, 2020. Pp. 457. ISBN: 9788869771781 (paperback). It focuses on Marzocca's investigations into biopolitics, a topic of which the author offers an original ecological reconfiguration. The proposed reflections, which address the recent pandemic crisis of COVID-19, are developed from the work of Foucault but are not limited to this thinker. In fact, they offer an articulate examination of the issue by also taking into broad consideration the thought of authors such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Donzelot, Robert Castel, Pierre Rosanvallon, Nikolas Rose, Melinda Cooper and Gregory Bateson.

 

Author Biography

Valentina Antoniol, University of Bari Aldo Moro

Valentina Antoniol is a researcher in Political Philosophy at the University of Bari Aldo Moro. She holds a PhD in Political Theory from the University of Bologna, in joint supervision with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) of Paris, with a dissertation focused on the concept of war from the work of Michel Foucault and Carl Schmitt. Her recent work is mainly focused on the investigation of the relationship between conflict, urban spaces, and architecture, starting from a critical redefinition of the concept of stasis. She is also currently working on a project devoted to Cyber Social Security, taking a critical interest in aspects related to social control and user profiling through the use of digital technologies. She is author of various essays, including “Biopolitics Beyond Foucault. A Critique of Agamben’s Analysis of the Pandemic,” Soft Power 9:2 (2023). Her book on Foucault as a critic of Schmitt is forthcoming, in Italian and in French, in 2023 (Foucault critico di Schmitt. Genealogie e guerra, Rubbettino; Foucault et la guerre. À partir de Schmitt, contre Schmitt, Les Éditions Mimésis).

References

Agamben, Giorgio, Where Are We Now: The Epidemic as Politics. London: Eris, 2021.

Lorenzini, Daniele, “Biopolitics in the Time of Coronavirus,” Critical Inquiry 47:2 (2021), 40-45. https://doi.org/10.1086/711432

Malm, Andreas, Corona, Climate, Chronic Emergency: War Communism in the Twenty-First

Century. London: Verso Books, 2020.

Marzocca, Ottavio, “Sorveglianza globale e metropoli pandemica. Attualità e genealogia di un disastro,” Scienze del Territrorio, special issue (2020), 18-28. https://doi.org/10.13128/sdt-12288

Marzocca, Ottavio, “Pandemia, protezione della vita, ecologia: Smarrimenti del

biopotere,” Politics. Rivista di Studi Politici 15:1 (2021), 183-197. http://hdl.handle.net/11586/374158

Vatter, Miguel, “One health and one home: On the biopolitics of Covid-19,” in Coronavirus, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy, ed. Fernando Castrillon and Thomas Marchevsky, 79-82.

Abingdon: Routledge, 2021.

Downloads

Published

2023-12-29

How to Cite

Antoniol, V. (2023). Metamorphosis of Biopolitics. A Foucauldian Ecological Perspective and the Challenge of the Pandemic: A Review Essay of Ottavio Marzocca, Biopolitics for Beginners. Knowledge of Life and Government of People. Foucault Studies, (35), 232–242. https://doi.org/10.22439/fs.i35.7082

Issue

Number 35, December 2023

Section

Special Issue: Biopolitical Tensions after Pandemic Times

License

Copyright (c) 2023 The Author

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Authors retain copyright to their work, but assign the right of the first publication to Foucault Studies. The work is subject to a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license, but despite these restrictions, authors can take for granted that Foucault Studies will permit articles published in Foucault Studies to be translated or reprinted in another format such as a book providing a full reference is made to Foucault Studies as the original place of publication.