BSPC · Biopolitics, Sovereignty and Political Conflict

Biopolitics, Sovereignty and Political Conflict

My research project is situated within the interdisciplinary field of biopolitics, with a particular emphasis on the question of technology. All the articles I have written show how the issue of technology introduces a new perspective on the aporetic intertwinement of sovereignty and biopolitics, the ideas of resistance and freedom. Pursuing my thesis, I draw upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s notion of technology as an end unto itself. In my first article, "Technological Re-Foundation of an Affirmative Biopolitics," I have reexamined the relationship between the two heterogenous modalities of power, that is to say, sovereign power and biopolitical power. On the one hand, sovereign power is something negative – it extracts resources, coerces, prohibits, represses, commands, and puts to death; biopolitical power, in contrast, is something positive – it stimulates, enhances, regulates, normalizes, and optimizes the living conditions of individuals and populations. Much of recent research plays the creative, positive potentiality of life against the negative power of sovereignty. By drawing upon Nancy’s idea of technology as an end unto itself, I reconsider affirmatively the aporetic intertwinement of sovereign power and biopolitical power. In doing so, I also follow the efforts of contemporary political thinkers to think through the ideas of resistance to power mechanism. Philosophers from Foucault to Agamben usually formulate the idea of resistance to power mechanism on the plane of immanence, on the plane of power relations. Thus, they play potentiality against power, potentia against potestas, immanence against transcendence, constituent power against constituted power. To assess critically the biopolitical figures of resistance like Bartleby and multitude, I highlight and reformulate the importance of popular sovereignty. The article, "Martin Heidegger's Ambiivalent Stance towards Technology," was initially one section of my third article. The reviewrs of my articled suggested to publish it as a separate article. In my article, I call into question the commonplace view that Heidegger wants to preserve a degree of humanity from technology’s grip by retrieving its original sense in the Greek poiesis. Instead, I argue for the view that the non-truths of mastery and dominance open the human being to the “essence” of modern technology as Gestell. In my last article, "Freedom and Servitude at the Limits of Governmental Technologies," I offer a novel angle from which to re-consider the conflict between technology and life. In my article, I argue that, in Foucault's work, the freedom of a subject emerges from the conflict between technology and life. By a way of contrast, Agamben claims that there is an essential connection between slavery and technology.

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