Biopolitics of Stalinism
Biopolitics of Stalinism

Author: Sergei Prozorov

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2016-02-15

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1474410553

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Western theories of biopolitics focus on its liberal and fascist rationalities. In opposition to this, Stalinism is oriented more towards transforming life in accordance with the communist ideal, and less towards protecting it. Sergei Prozorov reconstructs this rationality in the early Stalinist project of the Great Break (1928-32) and its subsequent modifications during High Stalinism. He then relocates the question of biopolitics down to the level of the subject, tracing the way the 'new Soviet person' was to be produced in governmental practices and the role that violence and terror would play in this construction. Throughout, he engages with the canonical theories of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, and the 'new materialist' theories of Michel Henry, Quentin Meillassoux and Catherine Malabou to critique the conventional approaches to biopolitics

The Biopolitics of Stalinism
The Biopolitics of Stalinism

Author: Sergei Prozorov

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781474410540

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The first book to investigate Soviet socialism from a biopolitical perspectiveWestern theories of biopolitics focus on its liberal and fascist rationalities. In opposition to this, Stalinism was oriented more towards transforming life in accordance with the communist ideal, and less towards protecting it.Sergei Prozorov reconstructs this rationality in the early Stalinist project of the Great Break (1928-32) and its subsequent modifications during High Stalinism. He then relocates the question of biopolitics down to the level of the subject, tracing the way the 'new Soviet person' was to be produced in governmental practices and the role that violence and terror would play in this construction.Key FeaturesExtracts Soviet socialism as a distinct strain of political theory, distinguishing it from the grab-bag of totalitarianism or a Russian deviation from 'proper' socialismCritically engages with the canonical theories of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, and the new materialist theories of Michel Henry, Quentin Meillassoux and Catherine MalabouAnalyses the origins of the postcommunist rehabilitation of Stalinism under PutinDevelops a new concept of affirmative biopolitics, advancing current debates in political theory and philosophy.

Biopolitics After Truth
Biopolitics After Truth

Author: Sergei Prozorov

Publisher: EUP

Published: 2023-05-31

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781474485791

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Sergei Prozorov contends that the post-truth ideology leads to the degradation of the public sphere that is essential to democratic governance. He argues instead for a positive role of truth-telling in the democratisation of biopolitical governance.

Beyond Totalitarianism
Beyond Totalitarianism

Author: Michael Geyer

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 553

ISBN-13: 0521897963

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These essays rethink the nature of Stalinism and Nazism and establish a new methodology for viewing their histories that goes well beyond outdated twentieth-century models of totalitarianism, ideology, and personality. They offer a new understanding of the intertwined trajectories of socialism and nationalism in European and global history.

Biopolitics in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century
Biopolitics in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century

Author: Barbara Klich-Kluczewska

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-10-21

Total Pages: 309

ISBN-13: 1000774171

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The field of biopolitics encompasses issues from health and hygiene, birth rates, fertility and sexuality, life expectancy and demography to eugenics and racial regimes. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive view on these issues for Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century. The cataclysms of imperial collapse, World War(s) and the Holocaust but also the rise of state socialism after 1945 provided extraordinary and distinct conditions for the governing of life and death. The volume collects the latest research and empirical studies from the region to showcase the diversity of biopolitical regimes in their regional and global context – from hunger relief for Hungarian children after the First World War to abortion legislation in communist Poland. It underlines the similarities as well, demonstrating how biopolitical strategies in this area often revolved around the notion of an endangered nation; and how ideological schemes and post-imperial experiences in Eastern Europe further complicate a 'western' understanding of democratic participatory and authoritarian repressive biopolitics. The new geographical focus invites scholars and students of social and human sciences to reconsider established perspectives on the history of population management and the history of Europe.

Biopolitics for beginners
Biopolitics for beginners

Author: Ottavio Marzocca

Publisher: Mimesis

Published: 2021-02-25T00:00:00+01:00

Total Pages: 338

ISBN-13: 886977337X

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The term biopolitics can be fully understood only within the context of modern forms of governing society. From this perspective, the development of modern medical knowledge, the re-organization of the hospital as a health institution, the growing attention to issues related to population, and the rise of biological knowledge can be connected with the infl uence of economic rationality on the most important political strategies. In this book, the crucial role that the family has played throughout the history of biopolitics is also explored explaining how it is fi rstly a place of government of life as well as a means to extend various forms of biopower to the whole society. By analysing the works of key fi gures in the debate on biopolitics – such as Agamben, Negri, Esposito, Rose, Cooper, among others – this volume offers a systematic examination of this notion also in relation to the current ecological crisis and the pandemic of Covid-19, addressing fundamental problems of political thought and referring to great thinkers such as Foucault and Arendt, Plato and Aristotle. Mimesis International

Jean Bodin and Biopolitics Before the Biopolitical Era
Jean Bodin and Biopolitics Before the Biopolitical Era

Author: Samuel Lindholm

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2023-09-05

Total Pages: 169

ISBN-13: 100093618X

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This book offers fresh perspectives on the history of biopolitics and the connection between this and the technology of sovereign power, which disregards or eliminates life. By analyzing Jean Bodin’s political thought, which acts as a prime example of early modern biopolitics and proves that the two technologies can coexist while maintaining their conceptual distinction, the author combines Foucauldian genealogy with political theory and intellectual history to argue that Michel Foucault is mistaken in presuming that biopolitics is an explicitly modern occurrence. The book examines Bodin’s work on areas such as populationism; censors; climates, humors, and temperaments; and witch hunts. This pioneering book is the first English-language volume to focus on the biopolitical aspects of Bodin’s work, with a Foucauldian reading of his political thought. It will appeal to students and scholars of political theory, sovereignty, and governance.

The Routledge Handbook of Biopolitics
The Routledge Handbook of Biopolitics

Author: Sergei Prozorov

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-08-05

Total Pages: 364

ISBN-13: 1317044088

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The problematic of biopolitics has become increasingly important in the social sciences. Inaugurated by Michel Foucault’s genealogical research on the governance of sexuality, crime and mental illness in modern Europe, the research on biopolitics has developed into a broader interdisciplinary orientation, addressing the rationalities of power over living beings in diverse spatial and temporal contexts. The development of the research on biopolitics in recent years has been characterized by two tendencies: the increasingly sophisticated theoretical engagement with the idea of power over and the government of life that both elaborated and challenged the Foucauldian canon (e.g. the work of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Roberto Esposito and Paolo Virno) and the detailed and empirically rich investigation of the concrete aspects of the government of life in contemporary societies. Unfortunately, the two tendencies have often developed in isolation from each other, resulting in the presence of at least two debates on biopolitics: the historico-philosophical and the empirical one. This Handbook brings these two debates together, combining theoretical sophistication and empirical rigour. The volume is divided into five sections. While the first two deal with the history of the concept and contemporary theoretical debates on it, the remaining three comprise the prime sites of contemporary interdisciplinary research on biopolitics: economy, security and technology. Featuring previously unpublished articles by the leading scholars in the field, this wide-ranging and accessible companion will both serve as an introduction to the diverse research on biopolitics for undergraduate students and appeal to more advanced audiences interested in the current state of the art in biopolitics studies.

Biopolitics and Ancient Thought
Biopolitics and Ancient Thought

Author: Jussi Backman

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2022-03-31

Total Pages: 279

ISBN-13: 0192662732

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The volume studies, from different perspectives, the relationship between ancient thought and biopolitics, that is, theories, discourses, and practices in which the biological life of human populations becomes the focal point of political government. It thus continues and deepens the critical examination, in recent literature, of Michel Foucault's claim concerning the essentially modern character of biopolitics. The nine contributions comprised in the volume explore and utilize the notions of biopolitics and biopower as conceptual tools for articulating the differences and continuities between antiquity and modernity and for narrating Western intellectual and political history in general. Without committing itself to any particular thesis or approach, the volume evaluates both the relevance of ancient thought for the concept and theory of biopolitics and the relevance of biopolitical theory and ideas for the study of ancient thought. The volume is divided into three main parts: part I studies instances of biopolitics in ancient thought; part II focuses on aspects of ancient thought that elude or transcend biopolitics; and part III discusses several modern interpretations of ancient thought in the context of biopolitical theory.

Soviet Spectatorship
Soviet Spectatorship

Author: Samuel Goff

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2024-09-05

Total Pages: 265

ISBN-13: 1350411183

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What distinguished the Soviet 'look'? How did Soviet thinkers and artists reimagine the relationship between observer and observed? Soviet Spectatorship answers these questions through an in depth exploration of Soviet physical culture and its on screen representations from the end of the Civil War to the eve of the Second World War. Samuel Goff identifies the three fundamental 'structures of looking' - surveillance, aesthetics, and spectatorship - that shaped representations of the embodied Soviet subject. Close readings of understudied films such as Happy Finish (1934), The Laurels of Miss Ellen Gray (1935) and A Strict Young Man (1936), are contextualised through a theoretical analysis of the relationship between subjectivity and the body. In doing so, Goff traces the evolution of a specific Soviet 'look', examining perspectives on Soviet aesthetics and theories of body and mind, uncovering continuities within Soviet visual cultures in a period usually understood in terms of discontinuity and rupture.