The eroticization of biopower
Masochistic relationality and resistance in Deleuze and Agamben
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 2398227 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Hannah Richter (0000-0001-5680-6888, University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 22 |
| Issue | 3 |
| Pages | 382-398 |
| Publication date | 2019-08-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | European Journal of Social Theory (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1368-4310 • E-ISSN: 1461-7137 |
| Publisher | SAGE Publishing (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1177/1368431018805379 |
| OpenAlex | W2961084164 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 23 |
This article examines Gilles Deleuze's and Giorgio Agamben's thoughts on the immanent creativity emergent from formal, impersonal life as a pathway for resistance to biopolitics. In Coldness and Cruelty, Deleuze explores masochism as the inversion of the sadistic, biopolitical use of the body which can bring forth genuinely new expressions. Agamben dismisses masochistic creativity because it leaves the dialectical ontology of biopower intact to conceptualize his form-of-life as a space of indiscernibility between ontological essence and legal-political actualization. For Agamben, the form-of-life escapes biopolitical capture because it is absolutely detached from its relations. This article argues that the radicalness of this detachment calls into question the political capacity offered by the form-of-life to actively change the relations of biopower. Against this background, Deleuze's masochistic eroticization of power offers an alternative conceptualization of relationality as external to its terms and productive of expressions which are both thoroughly immanent and genuinely creative
Aesthetics · Biopower · Conceptualization · Dialectic · Epistemology · Politics · Power (physics · Psychoanalysis · Resistance (ecology · Sociology · State of exception · Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy · Law · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Psychoanalysis, Philosophy, and Politics · Psychology
Containing Community
Discipline and Punish
Notes Towards an Analytics of Resistance
Agamben and Politics
The Use of Bodies
Libidinal Symptomatology in Deleuze's Masochism – Coldness and Cruelty
Gilles Deleuze on Sacher-Masoch and Sade
The Kingdom and the Glory
Homo Sacer
“I am sure that you are more pessimistic than I am…”
The Abandonment of Sex
Refusing to be a victim, refusing to be an enemy”. Form-of-life as resistance in the Palestinian struggle against settler colonialism
Living à la mode
A thousand plateaus
Human Rights, Self-Formation and Resistance in Struggles against Disposability
The Revolutionary Unconscious
Deleuze's "Masochism" and the Heartbreak of Waiting
From Sacher-Masoch to Masochism
The Highest Poverty
The Fire and the Tale
The Romance of Resistance
| Highly cited | No |
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