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Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben

Online ISBN:
9781452946696
Print ISBN:
9780816674640
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press
Book

Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben

Timothy C. Campbell
Timothy C. Campbell
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Published:
24 November 2011
Online ISBN:
9781452946696
Print ISBN:
9780816674640
Publisher:
University of Minnesota Press

Abstract

Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossible to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive this intervention. This book argues that a “crypto-thanatopolitics” can be teased out of Heidegger’s critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics—including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk—have been substantively influenced by Heidegger’s thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, the book shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in Improper Life he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault (especially his late work regarding the care and technologies of the self), Freud (notably his writings on the drives and negation), and Gilles Deleuze (particularly in the relation of attention to aesthetics).

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