The Living from the Dead Disaffirming Biopolitics

• Main Author: Murray, Stuart J
• Format: eBook
• Language: English
• Published: University Park Penn State University Press 2022; Pennsylvania State University Press
• Edition: 1
• Series: RSA Series in Transdisciplinary Rhetoric
• Subjects: anti-vaxxer; Biopolitics; biopower; Communication studies; COVID-19; Critical Theory; digital media; discourse analysis; ethics; euthanasia; Ezekiel Stephan; History & Theory; Interdisciplinary studies; James Dunn; Language & Literature; LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES; Makayla Sault; Modern philosophy: since c 1800; Movements; necropolitics; pandemic resistance; PHILOSOPHY; POLITICAL SCIENCE; Political science and theory; Politics and government; racism; racist policy; Reference, Information and Interdisciplinary subjects; Rhetoric; rhetorical theory; Semantics; SOCIAL SCIENCE / Sociology / Social Theory; Social theory; Society and Social Sciences; Sociology; stylistics; suicide; suicide bombers; thanatopolitics; thanatopolitics; Makayla Sault; racism; suicide; racist policy; euthanasia; Biopolitics; ethics; suicide bombers; COVID-19; James Dunn; digital media; Ezekiel Stephan; anti-vaxxer; biopower; pandemic resistance; rhetorical theory; necropolitics
• ISBN: 9780271093611; 9780271093413; 0271093617; 0271093412
• DOI: 10.1515/9780271093611

In a society that aims above all to safeguard life, how might we reckon with ethical responsibility when we are complicit in sacrificial economies that produce and tolerate death as a necessity of life? Arguing that biopower can be fully exposed only through an analysis of those whom society has “let die,” Stuart J. Murray employs a series of transdisciplinary case studies to uncover the structural and rhetorical conditions through which biopower works. These case studies include the concept of “sacrifice” in the “war” against COVID-19, where emergent cultures of pandemic “resistance” are explored alongside suicide bombings and military suicides; the California mass hunger strikes of 2013; legal cases involving “preventable” and “untimely” childhood deaths, exposing the irreconcilable claims of anti-vaxxers and Indigenous peoples; and the videorecording of the death of a disabled Black man. Murray demonstrates that active resistance to biopower inevitably reproduces tropes of “making live” and “letting die.” His counter to this fact is a critical stance of disaffirmation, one in which death disrupts the politics of life itself. A philosophically nuanced critique of biopower, The Living from the Dead is a meditation on life, death, power, language, and control in the twenty-first century. It will appeal to students and scholars of rhetoric, philosophy, and critical theory.