Bioviolence: How the powers that be make us do what they want
Aylan, Isis, Begum, Grenfell, Trump.
Harambe, Guantanamo, Syria, Brexit, Johnson.
COVID, migrants, trolling, George Floyd, Trump!
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Gazing over the fractured, contested territories of the current global situation, Watkin finds that all these diverse happenings have one element in common. They occur when our biopolitical states, in trying to manage and protect the life rights of their citizens, habitually end up committing acts of coercion or disregard against the very people they have promised to protect.
When states tasked with making us live find themselves letting us die, something has gone seriously wrong in the body politic and the name of this malaise is bioviolence.
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Agamben and Indifference
Since the publication of Homo Sacer in 1995, Giorgio Agamben has become one of the world’s most revered and controversial thinkers. His ideas on our current political situation have found supporters and enemies in almost equal measure. His wider thoughts on topics such as language, potentiality, life, law, messianism and aesthetics have had significant impact on such diverse fields as philosophy, law, theology, history, sociology, cultural studies and literary studies.
Yet although Agamben is much read, his work has also often been misunderstood. This book is the first to fully take into account Agamben’s important recent publications, which clarify his method, complete his ideas on power, and finally reveal the role of language in his overall system. William Watkin presents a critical overview of Agamben’s work that, through the lens of indifference, aims to give a portrait of exactly why this thinker of indifferent and suspensive legal, political, ontological and living states can rightfully be considered one of the most important philosophers in the world today.
Badiou and Indifferent Being
The first critical work to attempt the mammoth undertaking of reading Badiou's Being and Event as part of a sequence has often surprising, occasionally controversial results.
Looking back on its publication Badiou declared: “I had inscribed my name in the history of philosophy”. Later he was brave enough to admit that this inscription needed correction. The central elements of Badiou's philosophy only make sense when Being and Event is read through the corrective prism of its sequel, Logics of Worlds, published nearly twenty years later.
At the same time as presenting the only complete overview of Badiou's philosophical project, this book is also the first to draw out the central component of Badiou's ontology: indifference. Concentrating on its use across the core elements Being and Event-the void, the multiple, the set and the event-Watkin demonstrates that no account of Badiou's ontology is complete unless it accepts that Badiou's philosophy is primarily a presentation of indifferent being.
Badiou and Indifferent Being provides a detailed and lively section by section reading of Badiou's foundational work. It is a seminal source text for all Badiou readers.