Catherine Mills

The concept of biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used in recent years in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In Biopolitics, Mills provides a wide-ranging and insightful introduction to the field of biopolitical studies. The first part of the book provides a much-needed philosophical introduction to key theoretical approaches to the concept in contemporary usage. This includes discussions of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri. In the second part of the book, Mills discusses various topics across the categories of politics, life and subjectivity. These include questions of sovereignty and governmentality, violence, rights, technology, reproduction, race, and sexual difference. This book will be an indispensable guide for those wishing to gain an understanding of the central theories and issues in biopolitical studies. For those already working with the concept of biopolitics, it provides challenging and provocative insights and argues for a ground-breaking reorientation of the field.

Since mitochondrial replacement techniques were developed and clinically introduced in the United Kingdom, there has been much discussion of whether these lead to children borne of three parents. In the UK, the regulation of MRT has dealt with this by stipulating that egg donors for the purposes of MRT are not genetic parents even though they contribute mitochondrial DNA to offspring. In this paper, I examine the way that the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act in the UK manages the question of parentage. I argue that the Act breaks the link typically made between genetic causation and genetic parenthood by redefining genetic causation solely in terms of nuclear genetics. Along with this, mtDNA is construed as a kind of supplement to the nuclear family. Drawing on the account of the supplement developed by Jacques Derrida, I argue that mtDNA and the women who donate it are seen as both essential to establishing the nuclear family but also exterior to and insignificant for it.

We examine pregnant women's experiences with routinised obstetric ultrasound as entailed in their antenatal care during planned pregnancies. This paper highlights the ambiguity of ultrasound technology in the constitution of maternal–foetal connections. Our analysis focusses on Australian women's experiences of the ontological, aesthetic and epistemological ambiguities afforded by ultrasound. We argue that these ambiguities offer possibilities for connecting to the foetus in ways that maintain a kind of unknowability; they afford an openness and ethical responsiveness irrespective of the future of the foetus. This suggests that elucidating women's experience has implications for theorising ethics across maternal–foetal relations and, more specifically, for the ‘moral pioneering’ (Rapp, 2000) that reproductive technologies can demand of women. Moral pioneering cannot be reduced to moments or processes of decision-making; it must allow for greater recognition of the affective commitments entailed in and incited by ultrasound. Furthermore, focussing on experiences of the ambiguity of ultrasound allows for understanding the ways in which affectivity circulates across domains commonly understood as medical or social, public or private. In doing so, it contributes to undermining a series of tensions that currently shape feminist analysis of obstetric ultrasound, often at the expense of the experience of women.

JM Coetzee has on several occasions been criticised for his failure to elaborate a political vision of transformation beyond the social and political conditions that he describes in his novels. Focusing on the novel ’Life and Times of Michael K’, I argue that this criticism fails to appreciate the conception of political futurity that is evident in Coetzee’s novels. For there emerges in Michael K a gesture of hope in which turning away from history is the condition of possibility for hope for the future. Central to elaborating this gesture is the question of the status of the subject before the law, for it is on condition of the law’s suspension - or what Giorgio Agamben has identified as a condition of abandonment - that the possibility for future transformation develops. Thus I show that Michael K can profitably be read in conjunction with Agamben’s conception of biopolitics and the condition of abandonment that he argues characterises contemporary political existence. Read within this conceptual framework, Michael K appears as a limit-figure of the human and animal, in which the caesuras that Agamben argues cross the human being in modern politics become evident. Despite this apparent conceptual congruence, though, the particular figuration of hope or political futurity that Coetzee develops differs from Agamben’s in significant ways. For the latter, pushing the condition of abandonment to its extreme limit is the necessary condition for the inauguration of a redemptive ’form-of-life’ in which the human and inhuman elements of the human being can no longer be separated. Coetzee, however, offers a portrayal of hope that rests on the realisation of spaces for living within the ban of the law - spaces in which there is nevertheless ’time enough for everything’.