Affect and biopower: towards a politics of life

作者：Anderson Ben^*

来源：Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 2012, 37(1): 28-43.

DOI：10.1111/j.1475-5661.2011.00441.x

• affect
• life
• biopower
• biopolitics
• non-representational theories
• neoliberalism

In this paper I stage an encounter between two concepts that have become popular placeholders for a broad concern with a politics of life: affect and biopower. Through engagement with Antonio Negris writings on the real subsumption of life in contemporary capitalism and Michel Foucaults lectures on neoliberalism, I show that understanding how forms of biopower work through affect requires attending to three relations: affective relations and capacities are object-targets for discipline, biopolitics, security and environmentality; affective life is the outside through which new ways of living may emerge; and specific collective affects (including state-phobia) are part of the conditions for the birth of forms of biopower. In what is simultaneously a departure from, and an affirmation of, recent work on affect, I argue that attending to the dynamics of affective life may become political as a counter to forms of biopower that work through processes of normalisation. The consequence is that understanding how biopower works on and through affect becomes a precondition for developing affirmative relations with affective life.

• 出版日期2012-1