Poetic Biopolitics

Peg Rawes is Senior Lecturer and Programme Director for the MA in Architectural History at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London.

'Despite the importance of space, distance and the emergence of relations in Foucault's original theory of biopolitics and in Agamben's later theory of the entire Western tradition as marked by biopolitical thresholds, there has been far too little sustained work on the poetic dimensions of biopolitics, with even less attention paid to the original sense of poiesis as a bringing into being of an object distinct from praxis. In this wonderfully edited collection of essays from a wide range of scholars, the concept of biopolitics is enriched and intensified by exploring the ways in which various arts reconfigure life, the polity and its intimate but complex relations. This book will be valuable for scholars in architecture, cultural theory, contemporary aesthetics, and anyone with an interest in one of the most difficult but intriguing concepts of twenty-first century thought.' - Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Penn State University, 'This is a profoundly optimistic and energizing book - a collection or collective of fascinatingly diverse, attentive chapters working together to examine the many "expressions of positively differentiated life" and singing out for the vital part aesthetic practices play in producing relations between bodies and spaces, opening out newly affirmative ways of thinking, conversing, making, writing and living.' - Kate Briggs, Assistant Professor in Comparative Literature and English, The American University of Paris, 'Despite the importance of space, distance and the emergence of relations in Foucault's original theory of biopolitics and in Agamben's later theory of the entire Western tradition as marked by biopolitical thresholds, there has been far too little sustained work on the poetic dimensions of biopolitics, with even less attention paid to the original sense of poiesis as a bringing into being of an object distinct from praxis. In this wonderfully edited collection of essays from a wide range of scholars, the concept of biopolitics is enriched and intensified by exploring the ways in which various arts reconfigure life, the polity and its intimate but complex relations. This book will be valuable for scholars in architecture, cultural theory, contemporary aesthetics, and anyone with an interest in one of the most difficult but intriguing concepts of twenty-first-century thought.' - Claire Colebrook, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English, Penn State University

• Introduction PEG RAWES, STEPHEN LOO AND TIMOTHY MATHEWS 1 PART I The biopolitical body and the imaginary 1 Biopolitical ecological poetics PEG RAWES 11 2 Biopolitics, bioethics and the capitalisation of female bodies MARY C. RAWLINSON 24 3 How close do you want to be? Kate Craig's Delicate Issue CADENCE KINSEY 46 4 Other loving in Helene Cixous's 'The Love of the Wolf' JUDITH STILL 63 5 Mistress O & the Bees: Biopolitics and the performance of a makeshift poetics STEPHEN LOO AND UNDINE SELLBACH 81 PART II Poetic transitions: Voices and bodies 6 Towards a loving embrace TIMOTHY MATHEWS 107 7 Lina and Pina ANA ARAUJO 118 8 Approaching interspecies space through Association for Imaginary Architecture JOANNE BRISTOL 134 9 utter matter condensed JULIEANNA PRESTON 148 10 Songs of the Aveyron and the Ariege: After The Song of Songs SHARON MORRIS 170 11 A postscript from Bartlebess: How to perform creative resistance in the workplace HELENE FRICHOT 193 PART III Whirlwinds: Social and environmental performativity 12 Facts are no more solid, coherent, round and real than pearls are SANDRA SCHAFER 209 13 Mapping turbulent gestures and liquid ground DORITA HANNAH AND CAROL BROWN 221 14 Theatre-of-Self, Nested Selves and Three Point Nomad ELAINE ANGELOPOULOS 245 15 A methodology of locks ELLA FINER, EMILY ORLEY AND P. A. SKANTZE 255 16 Cafe Carbon THE GLUTS 271 17 Fuggles writes (An autumn draught) JANE RENDELL 283 INDEX 300