The Care of Life

Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics

The Care of Life

Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics

Paperback ~~£44.99~~ £40.49 Hardback ~~£140.00~~ £126.00 Ebook (Epub & Mobi) ~~£40.49~~ £32.39 Ebook (PDF) ~~£40.49~~ £32.39

Quantity

In stock

£32.39 RRP £40.49 Website price saving £8.10 (20%)

Add to basket

Add to wishlist

Read on any device, including Android, Apple & Kindle

Description

This interdisciplinary collection of essays demonstrates how the ethical and political problems we are confronted with today have come to focus largely on life. The contributors to this volume define and assess the specific meaning of life itself. It is only by doing so that we can understand why life has become an all-encompassing problem, why all questions, especially ethical and political, have become vital questions. We have reached a moment in history where every distinction and opposition is no longer in relation to life, but within it, and where life is at once a theoretical and practical problem.

This book throws light on this nexus of problems at the heart of contemporary debates in bioethics and biopolitics. It helps us understand why and how life is understood, valued, cared for and framed today. Taking a genuinely transdisciplinary approach, these essays demonstrate how life is a multifaceted problem and how diverse the origins, foundations and also consequences of bioethics and biopolitics therefore are.

Acknowledgements / List of Contributors / Introduction / Part I: ‘Bioethics’ and ‘Biopolitics’/ 1. A Brief History of Bioethics, Guillaume Le Blanc / 2. Between (Bio)-Politics and (Bio)-Ethics: What Life?, Luca Paltrinieri / 3. What is Vital?, Frédéric Worms / Part Two: Norms and Normality / 4. The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem, Bergson and the project of a biophilosophy, Charles T. Wolfe and Andy Wong / 5. Life and Objective Norms: Canguilhem in the Context of Contemporary Meta-ethics, Sander Werkhoven / 6. Critical and Political Stakes of a Philosophy of Norms. Part I: Towards a critical philosophy of norms, Julien Pieron / 7. Critical and Political Stakes of a Philosophy of Norms. Part II: Theory of Norms and Social Criticism, Florence Caeymaex / 8. The Racial Politics of Life itself: Goldstein, Uexküll, Canguilhem, and Fanon, Robert Bernasconi / 9. History and the Politics of ‘Life’,Claudia Stein and Roger Cooter / Part Three: Pathology and Ageing / 10. Life of Pain. Remarks about Negativity and Effort in Georges Canguilhem, Giuseppe Bianco / 11. Human Life and Subjectivity. Learning from Foucault, Piergiorgio Donatelli / 12. Ethics of Care and Face Transplant. After Levinas, Deleuze and Guattari, Marjorie Gracieuse / 13. Ageing and Longevity, Paul-Antoine Miquel / 14. Generational Change as a Vehicle for Radical Conceptual Change: the Case of Periodic Rejuvenation, Steve Fuller / Part Four: Desire and Pleasure / 15. Sexuality and liberalism,
Patrick Singy / 16. Desire Within and Beyond Biopolitics, Miguel de Beistegui / 17. The Pragmatics of Desire and Pleasure: Rethinking Somatic Powers with Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Marjorie Gracieuse and Nicolae Morar / 18. Revenge of the Tender Pervert: On A Troubling Concept that Refuses to Go Away, Hector Kollias / 19. Jouissance in Lacan’s seminar XX: Proglomena to a New Reading of Strange Enjoyement and Being an Angel, Lorenzo Chiesa

Product details

Published	22 Dec 2014
Format	Ebook (Epub & Mobi)
Edition	1st
Pages	332
ISBN	9781783480395
Imprint	Rowman & Littlefield
Illustrations	1 BW Illustration
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing

This collection of essays is based on the hypothesis that the question of life has become an all-encompassing problem in current debates in the social science and humanities. The Care of Life is a valuable contribution to a great variety of fields reaching from bioethics and biopolitics to political economy and psychoanalysis as well as from 19th century philosophy of biology to 21st century philosophy of science. It is a must read for anyone interested in going beyond reductivist accounts of life.

Vanessa Lemm, is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Australia.
The notion of life is today as complex and puzzling as ever, notwithstanding the advances in and proliferation of the life-sciences over the past century. In this important collection of essays, a group of leading thinkers take stock of a philosophical tradition which approaches the puzzles of life not just in scientific terms, but with the resources of ontology, politics, history and critical theory. This is a collection that can be expected to produce fertile offspring.

Wayne Martin, University of Essex