Heather Lynch

In the context of environmental crisis and ascendant advanced technologies, the question of how to live in more-than-human worlds is imperative. To develop a practical theorisation of what this might mean, this article brings Spinoza’s Ethics into conversation with the traditional ways of living practised by Scotland’s Gaelic peoples. Together, they offer the means of contemplating a relational, more-than-human ethics. This has relevance to social work scholarship, critical of abstract codes that prioritise human objectives. Spinoza’s ethics and Gaelic ways of living originated pre-Enlightenment, before Descartes placed mind above body and before Kant’s transcendent codes. Both offer a view within the messy interdependence of lives that cannot be extracted from more-than-human interdependence with land, sea, plants, weather and creatures. The resistance of Gaelic modes of living that is conveyed as much through material environment as culture indicates the sustainability of their relational approach to living. This relational approach is not a God's eye view from above but is a view of infinity found only in the immersive tangle of material relations. This article does not offer a blueprint or model for social work but is a provocation to rethink the social.

Drawing on Roberto Esposito’s conceptualization of ‘affirmative biopolitics’, this article examines the relationship between bedbugs and humans in the Glasgow neighbourhood of Govanhill. Through an analysis of ethnographic field notes and interviews with people who live in the area, this article traces their experiences from first encounters. The trajectory of this experience shows a shift from a desire to immunize their homes through total annihilation of the creatures to the more pragmatic position of learning how to live with them through an orientation toward ‘shared vulnerability’. This case study raises interesting questions for biopolitical theory: how can we conceive of affirmative biopolitics when the limitations of species being are evident, and is it possible to conceive of a multi or even interspecies munus or obligation?

This introduction to the special issue focuses on the messiness of biopolitics. The biopolitical is a composite mixture of heterogeneous, and sometimes conflicting, forces, discourses, institutions, laws, and practices that are embedded in and animated by material social relations. In the now extensive literature on biopolitics, our biopolitical era is characterized by the blending and mixing of what were previously thought of as separate realms: life is biologized, politics is biologized and biology is politicized, life and politics have been economized, and making life is intertwined with making death. This article provides a general overview of two strains of these biopolitical entanglements. It begins by examining the largely French and Italian focus on how politics and life have become economized in contemporary neoliberalism. We then turn to the mainly Anglo-American focus on the biologization of life. It concludes by taking up the central problem that arises from the messiness of biopolitics: whither the political of the biopolitical economy of life? Is there such a thing as the political proper in our era? If not, then what type of politics must be deployed to address the issues of our biopolis?