Agenda

Christian Sorace
Cambridge University

Introduction
Laura De Giorgi
Università Ca' Foscari Venezia

Life Above All Else: Foucault, China, and Mutations of the Biopolitical
This talk challenges the two major framings of China’s pandemic response: the Communist Party’s legitimation in the concept of “life,” and conversely, the individual body crushed under the weight of the biopolitical regime of the Communist Party. I do this in two ways: first, by examining the biopolitical art of Siyuan Zhuji, whose pandemic performances transformed his body into a surface for the inscription of state power—he has been missing since October 2022.  Second, by offering a close reading of Foucault’s writing on biopolitics. I argue that Foucault unsettles the “biopolitical binary” (Sorace and Loubere, 2022) because he cannot easily be appropriated by the Party-state or by its critics. For Foucault (2003: 30), the “individual is not . . . power’s opposite number; the individual is one of power’s first effects”.  Instead of the biopolitical dead-end of state power and resistance, what is needed is a new mutation of the biopolitical and a new political horizon.