Biopolitics as a System of Thought

Our contemporary mode of life is characterised by what Serene Richards in Biopolitics as a System of Thought calls: Smart Being.Smart Being believes in the solutions of techno-capital where living is always at stake and directed to survival.Armed with this concept, this book examines how we arrived at this mode of being and asks how it could be that, while the material conditions of our lives have increasingly worsened, our capacities for effective political action, understood as the capacity for transforming our existing social relations, appear to be diminishing. Drawing from jurists and philosophers such as Pierre Legendre, Yan Thomas, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Richards argues that biopolitics intervenes at the most minute level of our everyday lives.She argues that there are conceptual truths presupposed in the mode of biopolitics’ functioning, for instance that life can be assigned a value for the purpose of intervention, abandonment, or death, which hav