Progressive Geographies

Miguel Vatter, The Republic of the Living: Biopolitics and the Critique of Civil Society, Fordham University Press,June 2014

ISBN: 9780823256020

Further info

Details of workshop on book below description.

This book takes up Foucault’s hypothesis that liberal “civil society,” far from being a sphere of natural freedoms, designates the social spaces where our biological lives come under new forms of control and are invested with new forms of biopower. In order to test this hypothesis, its chapters examine the critical theory of civil society — from Hegel and Marx through Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin, and Arendt—from the new horizon opened up by Foucault’s turn to biopolitics and its reception in recent Italian theory.

Negri, Agamben, and Esposito have argued that biopolitics not only denotes new forms of domination over life but harbors within it an affirmative relation between biological life and politics that carries an emancipatory potential. The chapters of…

Ole Koksvik (Bergen), along with the help of friends, has put together a very useful set of tips for giving a philosophy talk.  I appreciated the “rationale” section, in which he notes, among other things, that “giving a bad presentation is impolite.”  There is some good advice throughout, much of which is consistent with the general rule that guides how I put together my presentations: “remember, philosophers are people, too.”

And while we’re on the subject of talks, let me (again?) draw your attention to this now classic post on how to ask a question at a talk.

Feel free to add your thoughts on the topic.