Volume 16, Issue 1, 2013
Critical Refusals, Part 1
Tyson E. Lewis
Pages 237-252
A Genealogy of Life and Death
From Freud to Marcuse to Agamben
In this paper, Tyson E. Lewis theorizes an alternative genealogy of biopolitics that enables us to historicize three distinct phases of the dialectic of life and death within overall transformations of the social and material relations of production. Freud, Marcuse, and Agamben each signal decisive transformations from death to life, life to death, and now the indistinction of death and life in a state of exception. In conclusion, Lewis argues for a new politics that does not simply champion one concept over the other but rather dwells precariously in their mutual exhaustion.