In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Intermezzo THE FIRST THREE CHAPTERS OF THIS BOOK WERE CONCERNED WITH THE disciplines of molecular biology, microbiology, and infectious disease research. There I was primarily interested in biotechnologies that mobilize the productive capacities of microbial life—recombinant DNA, bioremediation , and germ warfare. The chapters moved from a consideration of the most promissory, utopian impulses animating the biotech revolution, to an analysis of the structural violences inherent in contemporary forms of pharmaceutical imperialism, and finally to the literal convergence of life production and warfare in the global war on terror. However, I do not wish to suggest any finality to this sequence of ideas—the chapters could just as easily be arranged in the opposite direction. In the second half of the book I turn from the biotechnical arts of recombination to the emerging sciences of regenerative medicine. This is an area that draws on a very different genealogy of life science disciplines—from embryology and developmental biology to oncology and reproductive medicine. I begin with a consideration of the technical novelty of tissue engineering and its difference from both organ transplantation technologies and Fordist modes of mass production. What is at issue here, I suggest, is a thorough rethinking of the possibilities of bodily transformation, one that needs to be read in parallel with the space-time imperatives of post-Fordist production techniques. I then move on to a consideration of the interfaces between stem cell science and reproductive medicine, and attempt to delineate the new forms of labor and accumulation that are crystallizing around the production of embryonic life. Finally, I turn to the most insistent and pernicious of life politics today—the rightto -life movement—with its manic desire to reestablish the fundamentals of life and (re)production, even in the face of the most speculative of life science technologies. Here I come full circle, since the right-to-life philosophy is not entirely alien 101 to the neoliberal utopias of perpetual growth and earthly regeneration that I examined in chapter 1. Or rather, the right-to-life movement embodies the contrarian impulses of capitalism, bringing together the promissory futures of neoliberalism with a violent reimposition of limits, fundamentals, and values. What it gives voice to is perhaps nothing more than the contemporary form of capitalist contradiction. But if this is true, what needs to be investigated is why the tensions of contemporary capitalism are concerned, above all, with the production and generation of new life. What might this mean for a politics that seeks to counter both the neoliberal and the neofundamentalist tendencies of contemporary power relations? 102 Intermezzo ❒ ...

Share