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About This Book
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.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1. The Cost of Living: On Pandemic Politics and Protests
- 2. Speech Begins After Death: On Claiming the Human Right to Die
- 3. Necessaries of Life: On Law, Medicine, and the Time of a Life
- 4. Racismâs Digital Dominion: On Hate Speech and Remediating Racist Tropes
- Refrain: And Who by His Own Hand?
- Notes
- Index