While the governance of human existence is organised ever-increasingly around life and its potential to proliferate beyond all limits, much critical reflection on the phenomenon is underpinned by considerations about the very negation of life, death. The challenge is to construct an alternative understanding of human existence that is truer to the complexity of the present, biopolitical moment.
Palladino responds to the challenge by drawing upon philosophical, historical and sociological modes of inquiry to examine key developments in the history of biomedical understanding of ageing and death. He combines this genealogy with close reflection upon its implications for a critical and effective reading of Foucault's and Deleuze's foundational work on the relationship between life, death and embodied existence.
Biopolitics and the Philosophy of Deathproposes that the central task of contemporary critical thought is to find ways of coordinating different ways of thinking about molecules, populations and the mortality of the human organism without transforming the notion of life itself into the new transcendent truth that would take the place once occupied by God and Man.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Chapter 1: Evental figures and questions of method
Chapter 2: Ageing and the molecular way of life
Chapter 3: The evolutionary biology of ageing and death
Chapter 4: Molecularizing the biology of ageing and death
Chapter 5: Forging the future
Chapter 6: Life, death and philosophy
Chapter 7: The arts of living and dying
Conclusion
Notes
Works cited
Index
Paolo Palladinois Professor of History and Theory in the Department of History at Lancaster University, UK. He is the author of
Ecology, Entomology and Agriculture(1996),
Plants, Patients and the Historian(2002), and numerous essays on the history, philosophy and sociology of science, technology and mediclCƒ
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