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.
Author(s): Michael Dillon
Series: PRIO New Security Studies
Edition: 1
Publisher: Routledge | Taylor & Francis Group
Year: 2015
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 239
Tags: Political Science, Political Freedom & Security; Biopolitics; Security, International Philosophy; Sovereignty Philosophy
Cover
Half title
Series title
Review
Title
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 | A political analytic of finitude: the infinity of finite government and rule
Introduction
Finitude
The infinite government of finite things
Sovereignty and government
Pascal without the wager
Notes
Bibliography
2 | Biopolitics of security in the twenty-first century
Introduction
The biopolitics of population: From ‘Le Genre Humain’ to ‘Être Biologique'
Dispositifs de Sécurité
The aleatory biopolitical economy of population
Population: the compression of morbidity
Recombinant biopolitics: securing ‘pluripotent life’
Molecularisation: the recombinant biopolitical economy of life and death
Conclusion: the biopolitical freedom of security
Notes
Bibliography
3 | Government, economy and biopolitics
Introduction: government and economy
Government, economy, freedom
Bibliography
4 | Underwriting security
Enframing risk biopolitically
Biopolitical life: transaction, contingency, risk
Risk: the contingent is no accident
Underwriting security
Risk rules
The abstraction of risk as universal unit of account
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
5 | Politics of truth and pious economies
Introduction
The religio-political nexus of the modern age
The pious developmental economy of the seventeenth century
Civic decorum
Evangelical discipline
The pious economy of the twenty-first century: faith-based organisations
FBOs in the UK
FBOs in the US
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
6 | Biopolitics of security, race and war
Introduction
The biopolitical genealogy of modern power and politics
Race war (La guerre des races)
Species life
War as the logos of politics
Biopolitics of security as necropolitics
Early biopolitics: population, political arithmetic and race
Population
Race: from political arithmetic to demographics
Demographics to biometrics: facial recognition and race
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
7 | Governing terror: the state of emergency of biopolitical emergence
Introduction
Governing terror
Dispositifs of security
The biopolitical emergency of emergence: a new ‘real’
The changing reality of life
The changing reality of chance
The emergency of biopolitical emergence
The terror of contingency and the contingency of terror
The terror of Kantian reason
The erasure of ‘man’ and the targeting of life
Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Conclusion | Acceleration of the baroque katechon
The living dead
The baroque
The katechon
Acceleration
Notes
Bibliography
Index
