I’ve taken plenty of obnoxious-sounding, esoterically-oriented
graduate courses before, but this takes the cake. Official
description of an NYU course offered next spring:
“Mediating the Biopolitical Body”:
This seminar will engage the material histories, philosophy and
political culture of embodiment/disembodiment. The body is
situated as the interface of our era’s most contentious political
terrains including human rights violations, epidermal stigma,
gendered gazes, targeting gazes, and confinement in refugee,
detention, torture and concentration camps. For Foucault the
formation of the political subject is isomorphic to the formation
of the body as a mediating and mediated site. The body has become
the screen, the archive and the stylus for political inscription
and encryption. For Foucault, Agamben and Esposito the political
is concerned with producing forms of life as biopower— the
governing of life and death through subject forming and deforming
body-media from surveillance to violence. Previously Hegel,
Kojeve, Lacan and Fanon theorized political domination as the
spectral occupation and inhabitation of one body by another.
Derrida described the current war on terror as the shift from
communitas to immunitas, to auto-co-immunity in which the
body-politic sacrifices its actuality to protect itself as
virtuality. In the above theories the body unfolds as the place
where our current historical actuality originates and culminates
in a politics of somatic virtuality centered on rogue bodies,
illicitly circulating bodies, bodies of animality, disabled, and
disabling bodies, and bodies of ideological and bio-medical
contagion.
We will examine the body as a political semiotechnique, as
material support for political ideology and spectacle and as
enabled/disabled by techno-political prosthetics and as the means
of political virtualization. We will track several orienting
genealogies of the body that roughly run from Hegel and Kojeve to
Lacan and Fanon; from Spinoza, Nietzsche and Heidegger, to
Deleuze, Foucault, Agamben, Esposito and Derrida; from
Merleau-Ponty to Lefort and Ranciere. Among the themes to be
explored are: exposability and disposability of the body;
torture, embodied witnessing and truth; postcolonial typographies
of the body; second bodies, subversive mimesis and political
virtuality; political animality and monstrosity; communicable and
excommunicated bodies; political violence as auto-immunization.
Only someone with a severe inferiority complex would feel
compelled to use such preposterous words to describe what can
very concisely be explained as a course on the political
relevance of the body. There is no such thing as “biopolitical.”
I bet the professor of this course goes up to grad students at
Peculiar Pub and says stuff like, “I want to map my epidermal
stigma on your biopolitical body.”
