Aihwa Ong, Stephen J. Collier (eds.): Global assemblages: technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems (2005)

Provides an exciting approach to some of the most contentious issues in discussions around globalization—bioscientific research, neoliberalism, governance—from the perspective of the “anthropological” problems they pose; in other words, in terms of their implications for how individual and collective life is subject to technological, political, and ethical reflection and intervention.

* Offers a ground-breaking approach to central debates about globalization with chapters written by leading scholars from across the social sciences.
* Examines a range of phenomena that articulate broad structural transformations: technoscience, circuits of exchange, systems of governance, and regimes of ethics or values.
* Investigates these phenomena from the perspective of the “anthropological” problems they pose.
* Covers a broad range of geographical areas: Africa, the Middle East, East and South Asia, North America, South America, and Europe.
* Grapples with a number of empirical problems of popular and academic interest — from the organ trade, to accountancy, to pharmaceutical research, to neoliberal reform.

Published by Wiley-Blackwell, 2005
ISBN 1405123583, 9781405123587
494 pages

Key terms:
biopolitics, neoliberal, Singapore, Belaya Kalitva, anthropology, Heterarchies, Michel Foucault, Paul Rabinow, Icelandic, Marilyn Strathern, Islamic banking, ethnography, Cameroon, David Stark, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, deCode Genetics, bioavailability, bioethics

More info

PDF

Joanna Zylinska: Bioethics in the Age of New Media (2009)

Bioethical dilemmas—including those over genetic screening, compulsory vaccination, and abortion—have been the subject of ongoing debates in the media, among the public, and in professional and academic communities. But the paramount bioethical issue in an age of digital technology and new media, Joanna Zylinska argues, is the transformation of the very notion of life. In this provocative book, Zylinska examines many of the ethical challenges that technology poses to the allegedly sacrosanct idea of the human. In doing so, she goes beyond the traditional understanding of bioethics as a matter for moral philosophy and medicine to propose a new “ethics of life” rooted in the relationship between the human and the nonhuman (both animals and machines) that new technology prompts us to develop.

After a detailed discussion of the classical theoretical perspectives on bioethics, Zylinska describes three cases of “bioethics in action,” through which the concepts of “the human,” “animal,” and “life” are being redefined: the reconfiguration of bodily identity by plastic surgery in a TV makeover show; the reduction of the body to two-dimensional genetic code; and the use of biological material in such examples of “bioart” as Eduardo Kac’s infamous fluorescent green bunny.

Zylinska addresses ethics from the interdisciplinary perspective of media and cultural studies, drawing on the writings of thinkers from Agamben and Foucault to Haraway and Hayles. Taking theoretical inspiration in particular from the philosophy of alterity as developed by Jacques Derrida, Emmanuel Levinas, and Bernard Stiegler, Zylinska makes the case for a new nonsystemic, nonhierarchical bioethics that encompasses the kinship of humans, animals, and machines.

Published by MIT Press, 2009
ISBN 0262240564, 9780262240567
240 pages

Key terms: bioethics, biopolitical, Stelarc, Homo Sacer, bioart, Jacques Derrida, Bernard Stiegler, Giorgio Agamben, Emmanuel Levinas, cybernetics, Peter Singer, ethics, Michel Foucault, Eugene Thacker, Cyborgs, moral panics, biopower, biotechnology, Cultural Studies

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)

Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri: Empire (2001–) [EN, DE, CR]

“Imperialism as we knew it may be no more, but Empire is alive and well. It is, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri demonstrate in this bold work, the new political order of globalization. It is easy to recognize the contemporary economic, cultural, and legal transformations taking place across the globe but difficult to understand them. Hardt and Negri contend that they should be seen in line with our historical understanding of Empire as a universal order that accepts no boundaries or limits. Their book shows how this emerging Empire is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today’s Empire draws on elements of U.S. constitutionalism, with its tradition of hybrid identities and expanding frontiers.

Empire identifies a radical shift in concepts that form the philosophical basis of modern politics, concepts such as sovereignty, nation, and people. Hardt and Negri link this philosophical transformation to cultural and economic changes in postmodern society–to new forms of racism, new conceptions of identity and difference, new networks of communication and control, and new paths of migration. They also show how the power of transnational corporations and the increasing predominance of postindustrial forms of labor and production help to define the new imperial global order.

More than analysis, Empire is also an unabashedly utopian work of political philosophy, a new Communist Manifesto. Looking beyond the regimes of exploitation and control that characterize today’s world order, it seeks an alternative political paradigm–the basis for a truly democratic global society.”

Key words and phrases: biopolitical, labor power, Antonio Negri, postmodern, Michael Hardt, proletariat, postmodernist, Gilles Deleuze, capitalist, deterritorialized, plane of immanence, nation-states, biopower, U.S. Constitution, Fordist, Felix Guattari, Fredric Jameson, ontological, surplus value, cold war

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2001
ISBN 0674006712, 9780674006713
478 pages

Reviews: Ernesto Laclau (Diacritics, 2001), more.

Wikipedia
Publisher

Empire (English, 2001, updated on 2012-7-27)
Empire. Die neue Weltordnung (German, trans. Thomas Atzert and Andreas Wirthensohn, 2002, added on 2012-7-27)
Imperij (Croatian, trans. Živan Filippi, 2003, updated on 2017-7-27)