Lecture by Ghassan Hage: From Biopolitics to the Politics of Well-Being
The Centre for Global Criminology is happy to present the following talk by Professor Ghassan Hage from the University of Melbourne:
"From biopolitics to the politics of well-being: viability inside and outside the law"
Abstract:
Introducing what became his highly influential concept of biopolitics, Foucault argues that ‘life’ only comes to exist when biology came to exist at the end of the eighteenth century. In this presentation I will argue that rather than witnessing the emergence of ‘life’ the late eighteenth century sees its reduction to biology. From an anthropological perspective, we can say that ‘life’ before being about biology was what Marcel Mauss would call a ‘total social fact.’ This reduction of life to biology part and parcel of the modern Western compartmentalisation of the social world into ‘politics’, ‘religion’, ‘economy’, ‘kinship’ etc… Nonetheless, from the practice of holistic medicine to governmental interest in ‘well-being’, we continuously see a re-assertion of life as a ‘total social fact’. In this paper, I will examine this fluctuation between compartementalised and holistic life in the fluctuation between modes of being inside and outside the law.
Introducing what became his highly influential concept of biopolitics, Foucault argues that ‘life’ only comes to exist when biology came to exist at the end of the eighteenth century. In this presentation I will argue that rather than witnessing the emergence of ‘life’ the late eighteenth century sees its reduction to biology. From an anthropological perspective, we can say that ‘life’ before being about biology was what Marcel Mauss would call a ‘total social fact.’ This reduction of life to biology part and parcel of the modern Western compartmentalisation of the social world into ‘politics’, ‘religion’, ‘economy’, ‘kinship’ etc… Nonetheless, from the practice of holistic medicine to governmental interest in ‘well-being’, we continuously see a re-assertion of life as a ‘total social fact’. In this paper, I will examine this fluctuation between compartementalised and holistic life in the fluctuation between modes of being inside and outside the law.
Venue:
UCPH - Center for Sundhed og Samfund, Øster Farimagsgade 5.
Room 2.1.12
Time: 14:00 to 16:00, 9th of May, 2022.
UCPH - Center for Sundhed og Samfund, Øster Farimagsgade 5.
Room 2.1.12
Time: 14:00 to 16:00, 9th of May, 2022.
Ghassan Hage is the Future Generations Professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Hage has published extensively on topics of globalization, racism, nationalism and multiculturalism. Among his published work are "White Nation: fantasies of White supremacy in a multicultural society" (2000), "Alter-Politics" (2015), and most recently "The Diasporic Condition" (2021).