Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction

Foreword

vii Foreword I N C R E AT I N G T H E “Biopolitics” book series for New York University Press, we hoped to achieve several intellectual and pragmatic goals. First, we wanted to solicit and encourage new book projects examining the potent intersection of medicine and technoscience with human bodies and lives. Second, we wanted to foster interdisciplinary scholarship in this field, realizing that contemporary “problems of the body” as they relate to technoscience and biomedicine can only be understood through diverse, overlapping, even competing analytical lenses. In this vein, the book series becomes a site for discourse about accounts of the body in relation to technologies, science, biomedicine, and clinical practices. Third, we were intent on encouraging scholarship in this field by established experts and emergent scholars. And finally, we were determined to offer fresh theoretical considerations of biopolitics alongside empirical and ethnographic work. It is with regard to the goal of theoretical innovation that we are delighted to offer here the English translation of Thomas Lemke’s Biopolitics, published originally in Germany. It is, of course, by now obvious that biopolitics, governmentality, and “life itself” have become concepts widely used in fields ranging from science and technology studies (STS) to biomedicalization studies, from cultural studies to security studies, from body/embodiment studies to health and illness studies. However, it is not the case that there has been substantial, or even adequate, theoretical conversation and debate about these terms and their usage. All too often, scholars take at face viii Foreword value the ideas of Foucault, for example, or Agamben as if it is quite clear to everyone what each has said and how their work might be applied to contemporary concerns. With the likely continued ascendance of scholarship on biopolitical processes and institutions, alongside investigation of their embodied consequences, we believe it is a timely task to engage in theoretical innovations regarding 21stcentury biopolitics. Thomas Lemke is an able guide through this biopolitical landscape . His research interests include social and political theory, organizational sociology, and social studies of genetics and reproductive technologies. He received his Ph.D. in political science in 1996 at the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, in Germany. He currently is Heisenberg Professor of Sociology with focus on Biotechnologies, Nature, and Society at the Faculty of Social Sciences of the Goethe University. From 1997 to 2006, he was an assistant professor of sociology at Wuppertal University. He also held visiting fellowships at Goldsmiths College in London (2001) and New York University (2003). A prolific scholar, Lemke has served on the editorial board of Foucault Studies and is currently an editor of Distinktion: Scandinavian Journal of Social Theory. He has published numerous journal articles in the areas of governmentality, risk, biopolitics, social theory, genetic technologies, and health and disease. In Biopolitics, Lemke offers the first scholarly introduction to the idea of biopolitics. The book is, in his words, “a general orientation” designed to present a historical overview of the concept of biopolitics , while also exploring the term’s relevance to contemporary theoretical conversations and debates. Yet at the same time, Lemke is quite reflexive about his project, recognizing that any such “systematic overview” necessarily represents the theoretical stance of its author . He contends that his is not a neutral account of the history of biopolitics as a social concept but rather a theoretical intervention in and of itself. Rather than solely a journey through theory’s past, Foreword ix the book is a strategic intellectual intervention into the shifting and contested field of knowledge about biopolitics. As with our series of the same name, Biopolitics the book is about knowledge in the making at the same time that it is knowledge in the making. The book, then, is a volley in the ongoing conversation about what biopolitics is, how it relates to this thing called Life, and where we might go from here. Lemke’s ideas are broadly applicable. He gives us fresh ways of reading theorists such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, Agnes Heller, Ferenc Fehér, Anthony Giddens, Didier Fassin, Paul Rabinow, and Nikolas Rose. He draws on geographically specific examples to illustrate his work, such as a discussion of Germany during World War II, but his theories are not located exclusively in his homeland—just as World War II was not specific to one nation. His final chapter is an exploration of some...