Biopolitics ─ A Reader

In his famous 1976 essay, "Right of Death and Power over Life," Michel Foucault gave a new and unprecedented meaning to the term "biopolitics." In this anthology, that touchstone piece is followed by essays in which biopolitics is implicitly anticipated as a problem by Hannah Arendt and later altered, critiqued, deconstructed, and refined by major political and social theorists who explicitly engaged with Foucault's ideas. By focusing on the concept of biopolitics, rather than applying it to specific events and phenomena, this reader provides an enduring framework for assessing the central problematics of modern political thought.

Contributors. Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Timothy Campbell, Gilles Deleuze, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt, Achille Mbembe, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, Jacques Ranciere, Adam Sitze, Peter Sloterdijk, Paolo Virno, Slavoj ?i?ek

Timothy Campbell is Professor of Italian Studies and Chair of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi and the translator of Roberto Esposito's books Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community.

Adam Sitze is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. He is the author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (forthcoming) and the editor of Carlo Galli's Political Spaces and Global War.