Polygraph 18: Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality This issue of Polygraph takes up the recent theories of Foucault, Deleuze, Agamben, and Hardt & Negri about the contemporary reformation of political forces around the issue of life. While these thinkers all present different pictures of what biopolitics might mean for the present, they are united in identifying life as a locus of political power and site of political struggle. Polygraph 18: Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality features work exploring the politics of life today by examining the constructions of temporality within narrative articulations of lived experience (everyday or otherwise), causality, and political action. Featuring articles on topics ranging from suicide bombers or the discourse of the biological clock to cultural objects by Goya, Matisse, and DeLillo, the issue is held together by the articulation of forms of life that exceed, overflow, or render impossible the reduction of life to what Giorgio Agamben calls bare or naked life (life divested of qualitative difference). The work contained in this volume shifts the focus of biopolitics and biopolitical analysis from the mere fact of life (or death) to different ways in which life can be lived and/or conceived as a temporal experience, and so reasserts the importance of cultural analysis to political theory.
Polygraph 18: Biopolitics, Narrative, Temporality” (special Edition, 2007)
