Re-turns of Biopolitics. Connections from and to Latin America

Abstract

During the last decades, few notions have combined debates as heterogeneous as the notion of “biopolitics.” Thanks to its enormous capacity for appropriation and adaptation to diverse contexts, the biopolitical perspective quickly proved to be very productive for thinking about archives and struggles in Latin America. However, the concept also faced the limits of a notoriously Eurocentric formulation that left aside other configurations of the idea of life that come, for example, from non-Western cultures and that, sooner rather than later, reappear not only in forms of cultural and subjective experience but also in forms of politicization and in the very configuration of disputes. In this sense, thinking about the production of biopolitical criticism from Latin America implies mapping a field of frictions and reinscriptions, of sedimentations and drifts with respect to the European matrix of biopolitical thought. This chapter develops some lines of biopolitical reflection that are drawn from and onto Latin America, with the aim of mapping some uses of a concept that crosses disciplinary borders between humanities, social sciences, and biological and natural knowledges, stimulating not only diverse but often disparate connections. Mobilized from Latin America, the biopolitical discussion manifests before the advent of the COVID pandemic, and the field of responses generated by that event; it reappears in the debates on cosmopolitics and the so-called “geological turn” as a horizon to think about rearticulations of the bios, in light of the environmental crisis and the so-called anthropocene or capitalocene; and, finally, it returns to the ways in which biopolitical thought thinks about the emergence of the “new right” or contemporary neo-fascisms, the blind spots and the possibilities that this emergence opens for the biopolitical tradition.