• About
    • Login
    View Item 
    •   Institutional Repository Home
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    •   Institutional Repository Home
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of Institutional RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    My Account

    LoginRegister

    Zoe, Bios and the Language of Biopower

    Hansen, Sarah K.
    : https://etd.library.vanderbilt.edu/etd-07232010-134550
    http://hdl.handle.net/1803/13492
    : 2010-08-03

    Abstract

    My dissertation explores the significance of “biopower” to forms of life and language in the contemporary West. Generally defined, biopower is a type of regulatory power that directs and fosters the biological life of populations. Focusing on its differential operation, this project investigates how populations are afforded or denied the attentions of biopower. I argue that the question ‘How does life have language?’ is an important mechanism of exclusion in biopolitical contexts. By deciding what counts as language and, accordingly, which living-beings are speaking-beings, biopower gives voice to and fosters the lives of some while silencing and abandoning the lives of others. This project develops fresh interpretations of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and an under-recognized theorist of biopower, Julia Kristeva. In their varied and resourceful writings on contemporary power, these thinkers challenge the distinction between zoe (the life of biology) and bios (the life of language and politics). To map the languages of biopower, this project brings Foucault, Agamben and Kristeva into uncommon conversation. In the spirit of Foucault’s “history of the present,” I examine the mechanisms that separate animal voice from human speech and that divide, in Kristeva’s words, “’those who give life’ (women) and ‘those who give meaning’ (men).” Ultimately, I argue for a connected transformation— a biopower beyond the logic of exclusion and a language beyond the logic of sacrifice—that opens ways of living and speaking otherwise.
    Show full item record

    Files in this item

    Icon
    Name:
    Hansen_DissertationFinal.pdf
    Size:
    849.5Kb
    Format:
    PDF
    View/Open

    This item appears in the following collection(s):

    • Electronic Theses and Dissertations

    Connect with Vanderbilt Libraries

    Your Vanderbilt

    • Alumni
    • Current Students
    • Faculty & Staff
    • International Students
    • Media
    • Parents & Family
    • Prospective Students
    • Researchers
    • Sports Fans
    • Visitors & Neighbors

    Support the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries

    Support the Library...Give Now

    Gifts to the Libraries support the learning and research needs of the entire Vanderbilt community. Learn more about giving to the Libraries.

    Become a Friend of the Libraries

    Quick Links

    • Hours
    • About
    • Employment
    • Staff Directory
    • Accessibility Services
    • Contact
    • Vanderbilt Home
    • Privacy Policy