Tag Archive

Eugene Thacker - The Global Genome

Eugene Thacker. The Global Genome: Biotechnology, Politics, and Culture. The MIT Press, 2005.
Although the main object of Thacker’s The Global Genome is biology (and body itself), the context in which he deals with the object throughout the book is more complex than simple investigation on scientific discipline (genomics) or biological matter (genome). Rather his context… »

Dona J. Haraway - Simians, Cyborgs, and Women

Dona J. Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, Routledge, 1991.

This book might be one of the most original, thought-provoking, and influential books in the history of social studies of science and technology since the 1980s, transversing from feminist theories and SF literatures to primate studies and military communication technology. Haraway tries to… »

João Biehl - Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment

João Biehl, Vita: Life in a Zone of Social Abandonment, U of California Press, 2005.
What makes a human being an ex-human? How can a life of a human being expelled from the family, related institutions, and society, as if there were secrete conspiracy between them? Where can this story about a woman begin and end?… »

Nikolas Rose - The Politics of Life Itself

Nikolas Rose, The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-first Century, Princeton University Press, 2006.
While reading Rose’s The Politics of Life Itself, I thought that it was complementing Kaushik Sunder Rajan’s Biocapital, where I had felt something was missing. If Biocapital focuses on the global-scale capitalist economy under the effect of… »

Agamben - Homo Sacer

Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Stanford UP, 1998.
Agamben finds the essence of modern politics – in accordance with modernity and capitalism – at the “inclusion of zoē in the polis” or, in other words, the “politicization of bare life as such.” By referring to Foucault’s concept of “biopolitics”[1] as well as Schmitt’s… »