Biopolitics, Biosociality and the Body: Introduction

Abstract

The terms ‘biopolitics’ and ‘biosociality’ seem at first glance to be hybrids derived from categorically different concepts, one of them — biology — belonging squarely to the so-called ‘hard’ natural sciences, the other two — politics and society — belonging just as squarely to the scholarly realm of the ‘soft’ humanities and social sciences. These terms were conceived, however, against the background of a fundamental shift in the perception of the human body that affects the ‘hard’ as well as the ’soft’ sciences. Today, the human body can no longer lay claim to the radical otherness of nature as distinct from the embedding framework of culture. Rather, instead of representing a stronghold of essential subjectivity, it has come to be seen also as a malleable object, its natural elements inextricably bound up in its cultural contexts, both shaping them and being shaped by them or — in the terminology of LCS scholarship — both reading and readable, writing and rewritable.