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Though the focus of this book has been on Romantic-era experiments in art and science, both my introduction and my various references to the work of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Michel Foucault, and other contemporary theorists emphasize that it is also an attempt to address, and intervene in, our own contemporary vital turn. I have sought to intervene in part by introducing the concept of “experimental vitalism,” for my hope is that such a concept allows us to historicize , to reveal the Romantic-era origins of, our own contemporary interest in phenomena such as suspended animation, bare life, and non-organic life. Yet the point of historicizing in this way is not to shunt contemporary experimental vitalism back into the past; my goal is not to suggest that a purportedly vitalist contemporary author such as Deleuze should be understood as an atavism who belongs more properly to the eighteenth than to the twenty-first century. Rather, I hope to amplify resonances between Romantic-era and contemporary experimental vitalisms in ways that make Romanticism—or, at any rate, a certain strain of Romanticism—itself contemporary, rather than a part of our distant past. The relationship that I establish between Romantic and contemporary experimental vitalism has the form of chiasmus: on the one hand, I draw on contemporary theory in order to reveal alongside or beneath the Romanticism of organic form an experimental Romanticism focused on the vertiginous, the non-organic, and suspensions of animation; on the other hand, my theorization of Romantic literary experimentation is intended to allow us to grasp more clearly than in the case of much contemporary theory the extent to which experimental vitalism depends on practices that confuse distinctions between “art” and “science.” Linking Romantic and contemporary experimental vitalisms through the form Conclusion Biopolitics and Experimental Vitalism biopolitics and experimental vitalism 219 of the chiasmus also means, however, that I cannot adopt the historian’s stance of distance from my subject matter and thereby inoculate Romantic-era experimental vitalism from our own debates about vitalist language and logic. To put this another way, if the theoretical work of Deleuze, Guattari, and Foucault helps us to understand Romantic-era experimental vitalism, then it is also true that criticisms of contemporary neo-vitalism are likely to apply to Romantic-era experimental vitalism (in both its strictly historical dimension and in that dimension of contemporary resonance that I hope to give it). There are at least two quite distinct kinds of criticisms leveled at contemporary neo-vitalisms. On the one hand are criticisms of the purportedly homogenizing tendencies of contemporary concepts of life, claims that concepts of life are necessarily univocal, and as a consequence obscure important differences among living beings. On the other hand are criticisms of the ideological function of concepts of life in our current political economic situation, claims that because our ever-expanding “bioeconomy” depends upon tight feedback loops between speculative concepts of life and speculative debt and finance structures, any discussion of theories of life that avoids political economic critique risks serving as a vector for expansion of the bioeconomy. In what follows, I consider each of these criticisms in more detail, in the hopes of using these as means for further clarifying precisely what is at stake in the concept of experimental vitalism. The Univocity of Life The potentially homogenizing tendency of concepts of life comes to the fore in criticisms of Roberto Esposito’s influential Bíos: Politics and Philosophy. Esposito ’s book is part of a wide-ranging debate on the forms and nature of biopolitics , a debate grounded in Foucault’s discussions of populations but which takes his approach in new directions. Esposito’s book explicitly engages—and draws its title from—the link that Giorgio Agamben established between the Foucaultian problematic of biopolitics and the Greek political distinction between zoe (the “simple fact of living common to all living beings”) and bios (“the form of life proper to a given kind of living being”—in the case of humans, a political life).1 Agamben argues that biopolitics operates on populations by establishing institutions—the concept and institutions of the “citizen” and the “refugee,” the discourse of human rights, legal distinctions between “coma” and “vegetative state,” and so on—that paradoxically function in part by depriving some individuals of bios (their “right” to political existence), which in turn allows these individuals to be killed (or prevented from dying) without such actions constituting either murder or an abridgement of rights...

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