The Care of Life Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics [Hardcover]

This collection of essays is based on the hypothesis that the question of life has become an all-encompassing problem in current debates in the social science and humanities. The Care of Life is a valuable contribution to a great variety of fields reaching from bioethics and biopolitics to political economy and psychoanalysis as well as from 19th century philosophy of biology to 21st century philosophy of science. It is a must read for anyone interested in going beyond reductivist accounts of life.The notion of life is today as complex and puzzling as ever, notwithstanding the advances in and proliferation of the life-sciences over the past century. ?In this important collection of essays, a group of leading thinkers take stock of a philosophical tradition which approaches the puzzles of life not just in scientific terms, but with the resources of ontology, politics, history and critical theory. ?This is a collection that can be expected to produce fertile offspring.The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics is a striking collection of interdisciplinary essays exploring key debates in, and the relationship between, bioethics and biopolitics.This interdisciplinary collection of essays demonstrates how the ethical and political problems we are confronted with today have come to focus largely on life. The contributors to this volume define and assess the specific meaning of life itself. It is only by doing so that we can understand why life has become an all-encompassing problem, why all questions, especially ethical and political, have become vital questions. We have reached a moment in history where every distinction and opposition is no longer in relation to life, but within it, and where life is at once a theoretical and practical problem.This book throws light on this nexus of problems at the heart of contemporary debates in bioethics and biopolitics. It helps us understand why and how life is understood, valued, cared for and frlCt