<p>This thesis examines how the late work of Jacques Derrida challenges the efficacy of the concept of biopolitics to describe the relationship between life and politics. The central question that occupies this thesis is how life becomes part of the political, how it exits the putative spontaneity of nature and enters the calculation of sovereignty. In order to posit this question, my work is organized according to two horizons. The first horizon centers on the ways in which Derrida configures the relationship between life and politics. The second horizon is that the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center or what is now known as September 11 or 9/11 became an event around which Derrida bends this critique of life in politics.</p> <p>My first chapter looks to Derrida’s concept of autoimmunity as a way to articulate the problematic conflation of life and politics by the term “biopolitics.” While Derrida does not explicitly state his complication of this term, I argue that “autoimmunity” positions life as an impossibly unstable concept, one that cannot and should not be confined to a single understanding. My second chapter turns to the first volume of Derrida’s final seminars The Beast and The Sovereign. This chapter continues many of the themes pursued in the first chapter, but changes the focus from an autoimmune critique of democracy toward a more generalized critique of human life as political and non-human life as apolitical. Ultimately I pursue the idea that Derrida sought to rethink a configuration of the political that apprehends life in excess of politics. Derrida imagines a politics that escapes being pulled into the political and contoured into so many configurations of death and subjugation.</p> / Master of English

This thesis explores the theory and practice of sovereignty. I begin with a conceptual analysis of sovereignty, examining its theological roots in contrast with its later influence in contestations over political authority. Theological debates surrounding God’s sovereignty dealt not with the question of legitimacy, which would become important for political sovereignty, but instead with the limits of his ability. Read as an ontological capacity, sovereignty is coterminous with an existent’s activity in the world. As lived, this capacity is regularly limited by the ways in which space is produced via its representations, its symbols, and its practices. All collective appropriations of space have a nomos that characterizes their practice. Foucault’s account of “biopolitics” provides an account of how contemporary materiality is distributed, an account that can be supplemented by sociological typologies of how city space is typically produced. The collective biopolitical distribution of space expands the range of practices that representationally legibilize activity in the world, thereby expanding the conceptual limits of existents and what it means for them to act up to the borders of their capacity, i.e., to practice sovereignty. The desire for total authorial capacity expresses itself in relations of domination and subordination that never erase the fundamental precarity of subjects, even as these expressions seek to disguise it. I conclude with a close reading of narratives recounting the lives of residents in Chicago’s Englewood, reading their activity as practices of sovereignty which manifest variously as they master and produce space. / Master of Arts / Political philosophy has long been concerned with what makes political rule legitimate. Why should we be governed by others? In what ways should we be governed? Why is it that humankind is “everywhere in chains” despite being born free, as Rousseau asks? This thesis explores these questions through the concept of sovereignty. Political sovereignty expresses the idea of rule by the “highest” authority. This concept was initially rooted in a theological worldview that is no longer as dominant as it was in early modernity. Political philosophers from Hobbes to Kant turned instead to reason, which was supposed to determine who could rightfully rule. However, the question of what “rightfully” means in a political era where the state governs who is able to live a good life and who instead will live a life of poverty is increasingly tenuous. What allegiance do those who live in situations of dire need have to a distributional system that has only perpetuated their immiseration? John Locke argued that those who are oppressed have a right to “appeal to heaven,” i.e., to the highest power: the true sovereign. In a world where God’s sovereignty no longer undergirds political thought and practice as its final guarantor, the state as a form of rule seems to be groundless. Consequently, subjects regularly take matters into their own hands. This thesis explores how they enact their sovereignty in the world, using a This American Life podcast as an example through which to explore the theory and practice of sovereignty.

My thesis concerns how architecture can actively participate in processes of community-formation without reducing its creative processes to the oppositional tensions, prejudices and instrumentality of conventional left/right or bottom-up/top-down politics, “two poles of the same governmental machine.” By elaborating the architect as craftsman-author, my thesis explores Community and processes of political and poetic Representation. It is critical towards the biopolitics of governance. Theorisation is drawn principally from the political philosophy of critical theory, phenomenology and hermeneutics. My thesis promotes the architecture of “unavowable community.” Rather than forming communities by grouping likenesses together, and architecture forming their limits to either secure self-sufficiency or protect against insufficiency, architecture is tasked with finding methodologies for delimiting community-formation based on affirmative views of incompleteness and insufficiency. It is arranged in three Sections: Section I sets out the political and representational ground from which the investigation into community begins – it is a brief investigation into historical processes of forming community; Section II sets out possibilities for rethinking community – it is an investigation that shifts questions of craftsmanship, authorship, politics and representation from the search for appropriate community form to processes for becoming community; Section III is an investigation into the processes of craftsmanship and authorship directed towards the unpredictable but nonetheless “coming community” – it sets out a methodology for how an architect might go about proposing community.

This thesis explores the political and ethical response to the development of new medical technology in the 1980s through the governmental commission Utredningen om det ofödda barnet [the commission regarding the unborn child] and its final report Den gravida kvinnan och fostret – två individer: om fosterdiagnostik, om sena aborter: slutbetänkande av Utredningen om det ofödda barnet [The Pregnant Woman and the Foetus – two individuals. On prenatal diagnosis. On late abortions: final report on the commission on the unborn child]. This governmental commission, alongside the late 1980s more broadly, have been described as a conservative backlash and reaction to the feminist movement and the fight for women’s right to their bodies. However, a close reading of the report shows that though it draws controversial connections between abortion, prenatal diagnosis and ability variations, the governmental commission advocated an extension of the law, not a limitation of rights. Through a biopolitical perspective this thesis shows how power was distributed between the state, the society and the individual. Unlike previous research’s polarisation, this thesis’s take on medicalisation shows that medicalisation is not something that necessarily opposes moralisation, but that they can be used to legitimate each other. Finally it discusses what this means for our understanding of the political climate in Sweden during the 1980s and how this changes our perception of what makes a human being.

This PhD seeks to explore the development of a bio-molecular (i.e., genomic) map as a sovereign resource in Mexico. The basic analytical thread of the dissertation is related to the circulation of genomic variability through the policy/legal and scientific social worlds that compose the Mexican medical-population genomics arena. It follows the construction of the Mexican Institute of Genomic Medicine (INMEGEN), the notion of genomic sovereignty, and the Mexican Genome Diversity Project (MGDP).The key argument for the construction of the INMEGEN relied in a nationalist policy framing, which considered the Mexican genome as a sovereign resource, coupling Mexican “uniqueness” to the very nature of genomic science. Nevertheless, the notion of genomic sovereignty was nothing similar to a paradigm, and was not based on shared visions of causality, since the very “nature” of the policy object —Mexican Genome— was, and still is, a disputed reality. It was through the rhetoric upon independence, emancipation and biopiracy: i.e. experiences of dispossession “in archaeology, botany or zoology” (IFS 2001: 25) that the novelty of population genomics became amenable to be understood as a sovereign matter. Therefore, the strategic reification of Mexicanhood fuelled the whole policy and the legal agenda of the INMEGEN as well, which permitted cooperation without consensus and opened the process of policy innovation. Conversely, scientists considered genomic sovereignty an unfounded exaggeration, but anyhow they cooperated and even created a new policy and scientific enterprise. Genomic sovereignty exemplifies the process of cooperation without consensus on its most extreme version .So, as the notion circulated and gradually became a law to protect Mexican genomic patrimony, the initial coalition of scientists, lawyers and policy makers disaggregated. Many of the original members of the coalition now think of genomic sovereignty as a strategy of the INMEGEN to monopolise genomic research in the country. This dissertation additionally explores the way in which the MGDP is constructed in mass media, in INMEGEN´s communication and in the laboratory practices. These different dimensions of the MGDP depict the difficulties that emerge between the probabilistic, relative and multiple constructions of population genomics and the rhetorical strategies to continually assert the existence of the unique “Mexican Genome”. I argue that the Mexican case study provides an entry point to what I and others (Benjamin 2009; Schwartz-Marin 2011) have identified as a postcolonial biopolitics in which the nation state is reasserted rather than diluted. However the relation between sovereignty, race and nation is not mediated by the biological purification of the nation (Agamben 1998; Foucault 2007), or the active participation of citizens looking to increase their vitality (Rose 2008, Rose & Rabinow 2006), but on an awareness of subalternity in the genomic arena and a collective desire to compete in the biomedical global economy.

<p>This dissertation explores how the contemporary Anglophone novel asks its readers to imagine and respond to disposable life as it emerges in our present-day biopolitical landscape. As the project frames it, disposable life is not just life that is disposed of; it is life whose disposal is routine and unremarkable, even socially and legally sanctioned for such purposes as human consumption, scientific knowledge-production, and economic and political gain. In the novels considered, disposability is tied to excess--to the "too many" who cannot be counted, much less individuated on a case-by-case basis. </p><p>This project argues that the contemporary novel forces a global readership to confront the mechanisms of devaluing life that are part of everyday existence. And while the factory-farmed animal serves as the example of disposable life par excellence, this project frames disposability as a form of normalized violence that has the power to operate across species lines to affect the human as well. Accordingly, each chapter examines the contemporary condition of disposability via a different figure of disposable life: the nonhuman (the animal in J. M. Coetzee's The Lives of Animals and Disgrace), the replicated human (the clone in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go), the woman (in Margaret Atwood's MaddAddam trilogy), and the postcolonial subject (the victim of industrial disaster in Indra Sinha's Animal's People and political violence in Michael Ondaatje's Anil's Ghost). Chapter by chapter, the dissertation demonstrates how the contemporary novel both exposes the logic and operations of disposability, and, by mobilizing literary techniques like intertextual play and uncanny narration, offers up a set of distinctively literary solutions to it. </p><p>The dissertation argues that the contemporary novel disrupts the workings of disposability by teaching its audience to read differently--whether, for instance, by destabilizing the reader's sense of mastery over the text or by effecting paradigm shifts in the ethical frameworks the reader brings to bear on the encounter with the literary work. Taken together, the novels discussed in this dissertation move their readership away from a sympathetic imagination based on the potential substitutability of the self for the other and toward a form of readerly engagement that insists on preserving the other's irreducible difference. Ultimately, this project argues, these modes of reading bring those so-called disposable lives, which are abjected by dominant social, economic, and political frameworks, squarely back into the realm of ethical consideration.</p> / Dissertation

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

When the body is observed through a certain combination of technologies, there can be subversive politics to doing anything at all. The nature of media and biopolitics has permitted for a set of systems aimed at total control of the human body; a power which can permeate all facets of life. This thesis is a collection of essays which argues that speculative fiction contains multitudes of approaches to biopolitical discourse, permitting the reader of the text to approach politics from their own set of experiences, but not allowing the political to be ignored. These chapters contain three separate but interrelated arguments regarding the nature of power: “Law, Technology, and the Body,” “Weaponized Media,” and “The Subversive Politics of Doing Anything at All.” This thesis creates working definitions of critical or political concepts which the chapters engage, defining terms such as speculative fiction, formalism, and biopolitics. The texts which these chapters primarily rely upon to convey examples of the visibility of these concepts—the work of Margaret Atwood and David Foster Wallace—will also be explored in these pages, prescribing specific interpretations of their plots and suggesting possible readings of the way the narratives describe technologies. The first chapter, “Law, Technology, and the Body,” posits that computational metaphors for humans are used to enforce power, particularly through the construction of law, which is prominent in works of speculative fiction. This chapter will use biopolitical theory as well as formalist readings to approach the texts: it begins by explaining the biopolitical approach to the texts which permits for such readings, then elaborates upon law, power structures, and technology which affect the body within Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy. It ultimately concludes by suggesting that these structures will be visible within all narratives, but particularly prominent in speculative fiction due to the way speculative fiction engages with and responds to the technologies of the real world. The second chapter, “Weaponized Media,” shows that the trope of weaponized media is a compelling lens through which to approach text and an apt metaphor for the relationship between art and power, elucidating its prominence within speculative fiction. This argument relies primarily upon structuralism, linguistic theory, Russian formalism, and conflict theory to explain the highly-politicized use of weapons in these texts. Beginning with a survey of examples of this trope in speculative fiction, particularly within David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, the chapter concludes by reflecting upon the biopolitical structures which contribute to and are reflected by this trope. The final chapter, “The Subversive Politics of Doing Anything at All,” is a cumulation of the prior arguments. Supporting the chapter’s titular thesis, Russian formalism, media theory, and the surveillance and race theory of Simone Browne are used as central tenets to support this argument’s progression. This chapter argues that media propagates norms, that all things are now media. The consequences that follow from the nature of media entail that due to a hyper-connected world and the conflation of fear and terrorism, almost all things can be considered outside the norm—that doing almost anything at all is viewed as subversive by some, particularly by normative structures and governments. Speculative fiction questions these structures, specifically asking the reader to consider the political structures inherent in every action that they might commit to.

This study examines how the discourse of wenming (civilisation/civility) has been visualised throughout twentieth century Chinese art, with a particular emphasis on contemporary practice. Originally linked to concepts of modernity and change in the early twentieth century I argue that wenming continues to be of crucial importance in understanding how contemporary China wishes to be seen by the rest of the world. Through a series of close visual readings and case studies I explore how wenming attained considerable saliency as it was invoked to address a range of artistic and political reforms which resulted from China's socioeconomic transformations. Individual chapters focus on the work of Sun Yuan and Peng Yu, Liu Gang, Wang Jin and Ai Weiwei amongst others. Taken together they provide an emic account of artistic praxis that seeks to understand contemporary art from China on its own terms. The study begins by examining how wenming was visualised in the early twentieth century. It then charts what happened to the term after the founding of the PRC in 1949 and how its appearance in locations such as Taiwan and Hong Kong provide sites of contention and alterity to mainland wenming discourse. It analyses how the bifurcation between material civilisation and spiritual civilisation that gained prominence following the economic reforms of the 1980s reconfigured the visual art of this period. Then, turning to a single art work, it theorises the relationship of wenming to an emerging corporeal politics. Finally, it explores how the discourse of wenming is being visually articulated in contemporary China as a result of these developments and traces its interaction with consumer culture, urbanisation and the politics of the internet.

Loin de disparaître dans le cadre de la mondialisation des échanges, les frontières de l’Union indienne s’effacent devant certains flux pour se manifester vivement devant les flux jugés indésirables. Parallèlement au renforcement des contrôles des passages transfrontaliers, trois des six dyades de l’Union indienne font l’objet d’une teichopolitique, c’est-à-dire de la construction d’une barrière frontalière. Ces trois barrières ont pour objectif de réorienter tous les flux vers des points de passage où un tri est effectué entre les flux qui peuvent entrer sur le territoire et ceux qu’il convient de refouler. Les flux sont ainsi hiérarchisés en fonction de leur degré de désirabilité. Ils sont alors traités de manière différentielle en fonction des risques qu’ils représentent pour la sécurité de la société indienne. Les principaux flux indésirables sont les migrations clandestines, les trafics illicites et illégaux et les mouvements d’activistes dont les projets vont à l’encontre des intérêts indiens. L’hypothèse principale de cette thèse est que les trois barrières frontalières érigées par le gouvernement indien depuis le début des années 2000 sont des dispositifs biopolitiques dans la mesure où leur objectif est de filtrer les flux pour empêcher les entrées indésirables sur le territoire indien. Bien plus, ces barrières sont les manifestations de la radicalisation contemporaine du biopouvoir indien. L’objectif de cette thèse est d’appliquer une réflexion biopolitique à l’analyse des barrières frontalières indiennes et de poser les bases d’un système explicatif de ces phénomènes. Cette recherche a été initiée afin de mieux appréhender la théorisation de ces objets géographiques et géopolitiques. / Far from disappearing in the era of globalization, Indian Union borders are no longer policed against some immigration flows; conversely, they have been tightened against other unwelcome flows. In parallel with the reinforcement of cross-border flow controls, three of the six Indian land borders have been subjected to teichopolitics, that is to say the erection of border barriers. The aim of these border barriers is to redirect all the cross-border flows towards checkpoints, where they are sorted into different groups, namely those that are allowed in and those that are to be rejected. Thus prioritized in terms of social desirability, they are dealt with according to the risks they represent for Indian society. The main unwelcome flows are induced by clandestine migrants, traffickers and activists, whose plans can run counter to Indian interests. The main hypothesis of this research is that the three border barriers created by the Indian government since the beginning of the millenium are biopolitical devices. Indeed, their objective is to filter cross-border flows to prevent the unwelcome from entering the Indian territory. Moreover, these barriers manifest the contemporary radicalisation of Indian biopower. The aim of this thesis is to apply a biopolitical approach to the analysis of Indian border barriers and to propose an explanatory system for the understanding of this geopolitical phenomenon. This research was initiated in order to evolve a theory concerning these geographical and geopolitical factors.