Schwarz, Elke
(2013)
The biopolitical condition: re-thinking the ethics of political violence in life-politics.
PhD thesis, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Abstract
This project interrogates how the biopolitical rationale conditions our contemporary
subjectivities, politics and ethics, in order to critique the ethical justifications of
technology driven practices of political violence put forth in present counter-terrorism
struggles. Employing the work of Hannah Arendt, and her insights into life-politics
and technology to construct a biopolitical lens that adds to traditional Foucaultian
analyses of biopolitics, my original contribution to knowledge is thus twofold in a)
elaborating core aspects of an Arendtian theory of biopolitics, with which then to b)
identify the theoretical underpinnings of biopolitically informed forms of ethics in
emerging practices of technology-driven political violence. While a number of
scholars have drawn on Arendt for the analysis of the biopolitical dimensions of
contemporary violence, a systematic independent account of her work on biopolitical
trajectories and technologies remains under-developed in current scholarship.
In this work, I suggest that the Arendtian life-politics account allows us to recognise a
duality at work in the biopolitical shaping of subjectivities: the politicisation and
technologisation of zoe, on one hand, and the ‘zoeficiation’ of politics on the other. It
is this duality that conditions the human, politics, and the role and justifcations of
violence in modernity. Within these two umbrella categories, the project addresses
the equally under-examined but pressing question of the ethics of technology-driven
modalities of political violence in a contemporary context and argues that a
biopolitically informed rationale of ethics occludes the possibility to engage with
ethics as a perpetual and ever-anew arising and political demand that must be taken
responsibility for. The analysis in this work unfolds in two parts to draw out and
critically address the biopolitically informed ethical rationales of political violence.
The first part engages closely with Arendt’s work to establish the theoretical
framework of biopolitics for the project’s central analysis. The second part then
departs from an exposition of Arendt’s work and draws on this framework to
highlight and critique the implications of biopolitically infused subjectivities, politics,
violence and ethics.
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