April 6, 2007
Biopower Lecture April 16
BIO-POWER AND VITAL POLITICS
Townsend Center, 4.00, April 16th
co-sponsored by the Critical Theory Initiative, Department of
Rhetoric, and the Maxine Elliot Funds
Several strands of political and ethical discussions around the
notion of bio-power have emerged since Foucault’s classical
definition of the term. This lecture will provide a critical
assessment of some of the leading critical theories about life
itself. By stressing, with Deleuze, the bodily materialism and the
vital elements of contemporary politics, the lecture also explores
its necro-political aspects, that is to say the shifting boundaries
between bio-power and the management of new ways of dying.
Rosi Braidotti is Professor of Women’s Studies in the Arts Faculty of
Utrecht University and scientific director of the Netherlands
Research School of Women’s Studies and of the Expertise Centre Gender
and Multiculturalism (GEM). She founded the inter-European university
exchange programme, NOISE, linking 10 universities in different
European countries, which offers a yearly European Summer School. She
has published extensively in feminist philosophy, epistemology,
poststructuralism and psychoanalysis. Her books include Patterns of
Dissonance (Routledge, 1991, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual
Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory (Columbia University,
1994), Metamorphoses, Toward a Materialist Theory of Becoming (Polity
Press, 2002), and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Polity Press,
2006).