From General History to Philosophy
Black Lives Matter, Late Neoliberal Molecular Biopolitics, and Rhetoric
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8067473 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Barbara A Biesecker (University of Georgia, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2017 |
| Volume | 50 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 409-430 |
| Publication date | 2017-11-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Philosophy and Rhetoric (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-8213 • E-ISSN: 1527-2079 |
| Publisher | The Pennsylvania State University Press (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.5325/philrhet.50.4.0409 |
| OpenAlex | W2769449897 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 11 |
| References cited | 10 |
This article aspires to explain how it is possible that “white lives matter,” “blue lives matter,” and, ultimately, “all lives matter,” can sound, feel like and act as responses to the claim that “black lives matter” for so many Americans by approaching the political sequence as both a historical (situated, epistemological, and ideological) problem and a philosophical (metaphysical and ontological) question. By way of general history, the first part of the article specifies how a statement (vital but otherwise unqualified human life), a political rationality (molecularization), and a rhetoric of democratic indifference (whose master trope is the metonym) lend to our political present its common sense. The second part pushes against it, first by advocating on behalf of the usefulness of spectralization in antiracist struggle and, second, by recommending a dramatic transformation of the common sense—from molecularization to singularization or bios as “singularly plural coexistence,” founded on a rhetoric of democratic copossibility whose master trope is the exemplar
Biopower · Common sense · Democracy · Dialectic · Epistemology · Ideology · Linguistics · Metaphysics · Plural · Political science · Politics · Rationality · Rhetoric · Sociology · Trope (literature · Cybernetics and Technology in Society · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Rhetoric and Communication Studies · Law · Philosophy
Focus versus Denial
In the Wake of Black Lives Matter
Deflective Whiteness
The Body as a Site of Material-Symbolic Struggle
Polysyndeton, Social Media, and the Contested Meanings of January 6, 2021
The Making of a Mantra
Student Perceptions of Employer Use of Social Media in Selection Decisions
Dynamics of an American countermovement
Teaching and learning guide
Black “Matter” Lives
Regarder le regard
| Citations per year | 1.38 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2018 - 2026 (9) |
| Highly cited | No |