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Faculty Publication: The Living and the Dead: Disaffirming Biopolitics

Published on September 19, 2022

Time to read: 2 minutes

Penn State UP, 2022

Stuart Murray

Arguing that biopower can be fully exposed only through an analysis of those whom society has “let die,� Stuart J.

The Living and the Dead: Disaffirming Biopolitics

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 politics of life itself.