Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben (Posthumanities)
Timothy C. Campbell
Language: English
Pages: 232
ISBN: 0816674655
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Has biopolitics actually become thanatopolitics, a field of study obsessed with death? Is there something about the nature of biopolitical thought today that makes it impossible to deploy affirmatively? If this is true, what can life-minded thinkers put forward as the merits of biopolitical reflection? These questions drive Improper Life, Timothy C. Campbell’s dexterous inquiry-as-intervention.
Campbell argues that a “crypto-thanatopolitics” can be teased out of Heidegger’s critique of technology and that some of the leading scholars of biopolitics—including Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Peter Sloterdijk—have been substantively influenced by Heidegger’s thought, particularly his reading of proper and improper writing. In fact, Campbell shows how all of these philosophers have pointed toward a tragic, thanatopolitical destination as somehow an inevitable result of technology. But in Improper Life he articulates a corrective biopolitics that can begin with rereadings of Foucault (especially his late work regarding the care and technologies of the self), Freud (notably his writings on the drives and negation), and Gilles Deleuze (particularly in the relation of attention to aesthetics).
Throughout Improper Life, Campbell insists that biopolitics can become more positive and productively asserts an affirmative technē not thought through thanatos but rather practiced through bíos.
Philosophy Between the Lines: The Lost History of Esoteric Writing
Latter becomes, in Agamben’s notion of the remnant, an enormous multiplier of the danger that modern technology represents for mankind given the reciprocal inscription of being saved and being marked for death thanks to the operation of the state of exception. I’ll have much more to say in the following chapter, but in the meantime, let me suggest as a way of pivoting to another of Heidegger’s texts that figures so prominently in contemporary theorizations of the thanatopolitical that this saving.
We see that life is once again at stake. Indeed, in “The Question Concerning Technology” primarily, it is the life of the one “ordered” that is present in the “revealing that in the technological age rather conceals than shows itself,” which is to say, she who is ordered to wait for an ultimate disclosing that never fully arrives.59 The same holds true for Elucidations of Hölderlin’s Poetry, except that here Heidegger lodges the saving power, never directly named as such, within the heart of a.
The effects of the breakdown on the unity of the individual and breathing spaces. Exchanges (though perhaps we might want, following Heidegger, to speak of actions, or Handlungen) between individuals are no longer carried out between “persons” but breathing households and those who inhabit them. The implication is that the condition of persons who act is no longer available when households assume the place formerly occupied by a shared breathing space. Indeed, if we were to follow further this.
Sallis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 169. Equally, Derrida’s reading of the typewriter informs a large part of my reading of propriety in Heidegger’s thought as well as the threat of improper writing. Another passage makes this clear: “Finally, the typewriter would dissimulate the very essence of the writing gesture and of writing. … This dissimulation or this veiling is also a movement of withdrawal or subtraction. … And if in this withdrawal [retrait] the typewriter becomes.
Process in which the work is composed somewhat like a cairn. … Only a conception such as this can tear art away from the personal process of memory and the collective ideal of commemoration.” Gilles Deleuze, “What Children Say,” in Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 66. 80 Merleau-Ponty, “Attention and Judgment,” 30. 81 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia,.