Synopses & Reviews
This book is a volume of essays on the Biopolitics of Security in the 21st Century, by Professor Mick Dillon. It is at first of its kind in that no other study currently available covers the same field of research with the same degree of innovation. There is clearly growing attention to biopolitics in general, and the biopolitics of security in particular, beyond international relations and into the social sciences more generally (Geography, Sociology, Criminology, Law, and the Management Sciences). This volume will provide a genealogy of the biopolitics of security beginning with Michel Foucault 's original account of the rise of biopolitics at the beginning of the 18th century, and will clarify and further develop Foucault 's original analytic of the biopolitics of security.
This work is an original introduction to the emerging field of the biopolitics of security, tracking its development into the 21st century, which will serve as an intellectual provocation to researchers as much as it will a pedagogical guide to graduate and undergraduate teachers.
This book will be of great interest to students of critical security studies, IR theory, political theory, philosophy and ancillary social science disciplines, such as criminology and sociology.
Synopsis
Taking its inspiration from Michel Foucault, this volume of essays integrates the analysis of security into the study of modern political and cultural theory.
Explaining how both politics and security are differently problematised by changing accounts of time, the work shows how, during the course of the 17th century, the problematisation of government and rule became newly enframed by a novel account of time and human finitude, which it calls 'factical finitude'. The correlate of factical finitude is the infinite, and the book explains how the problematisation of politics and security became that of securing the infinite government of finite things. It then explains how concrete political form was given to factical finitude by a combination of geopolitics and biopolitics. Modern sovereignty required the services of biopolitics from the very beginning. The essays explain how these politics of security arose at the same time, changed together, and have remained closely allied ever since. In particular, the book explains how biopolitics of security changed in response to the molecularisation and digitalisation of Life, and demonstrates how this has given rise to the dangers and contradictions of 21st century security politics.
This book will be of much interest to students of political and cultural theory, critical security studies and International Relations.