BIOS-TECHNÉ. THE BIOTECHNOLOGICAL POLITICS OF THE BODY AND THE POLITICS OF LIFE
Keywords:
bio-power, biopolitics, regenerative medicine, tissue engineering, anatomo-politics, regenerative-politicsAbstract
Not so long ago Timothy Campbell noticed an actual and very important question that has not been discussed yet: "What does the opening to bíos as a political category that humanity shares tells us about the other development that so decidedly marks the current biopolitical moment, namely, biotechnology?" and continued with a remark, "indeed, missing is precisely a reflection on the role biotechnology plays for contemporary biopolitics." The aim of this paper is to call attention to the growing importance of biotechnology for power over life and body and analyze it as a contemporary biopolitical strategy. Thus biotechnology will be comprehended as a political technology investing in the body, improving its qualities, prolonging youth, taking care of health and reproduction. In such sense it preserves or protects life by helping to improve health, enriching the quality of life and enabling active aging. It intensifies techniques of biopolitics and anatomo-politics (detected by Foucault) and implicates specially derived politics, engineering-politics and regenerative-politics, which demonstrate that there is power over life and body in contemporaneity that is far exceeding the extensions and the technological possibilities of power from the biological modernity. In the growing interest in the biopolitical issues related to the development of life sciences, the field of genetics has attracted quite an attention, up to this moment, while even younger discipline of regenerative medicine has not been comprehensively discussed yet. The paper is focused especially on regenerative medicine as the knowledge-power opening a new horizon for bio-power.
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