CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2007
| Author | Selmeczi, Anna |
|---|---|
| Title | BIOPOLITICS OF HUNGER UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY WORLD HUNGER THROUGH THE CONCEPTS OF MICHEL FOUCAULT AND GIORGIO AGAMBEN |
| Summary | In this thesis I compare and contrast the biopolitics-concepts of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben with particular emphasis on the aspect whether they can be employed for analyzing contemporary world hunger. I argue that current theoretical approaches which aim to integrate the two concepts tend to overlook the different role they attribute to sovereign power; a difference, which in my view renders them incompatible. I argue that it is wrong to apply Agamben’s thesis about the state of exception becoming normal in our age in the context of contemporary humanitarianism, because these operations do not rely on the sovereign right to take life, but on the biopolitical power to make live. Therefore, I argue that instead of Agamben’s concept of “sovereign biopower”, world hunger should be assessed as being regulated by global biopolitical governance, that is, by applying the Foucauldian notion of governmentality on the global level. I claim that by tracing the gaps in the rationalities of such global governmental technologies as the structural adjustment programs of the early 1980s, one can also locate the points where the negative pole of biopower—almost unexplored in governmentality literature—takes its effect. |
| Supervisor | Merlingen, Michael |
| Department | Political Science MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2007/selmeczi_anna.pdf |
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