Abstract
This article questions the assumptions of Darwinian “biopoetics,” as well as the premises of Foucauldian biopolitics. While poetic Darwinism still searches for poetic patterns capable of perfecting humans, according to Foucault, bios is still dependent on external constraints (such as politics, economy, and other social factors), and these external determinations form the target of his critique. In searching for an onto-epistemology that goes beyond human exceptionalism while ensuring, within the entanglement of bios and poetics, that both bios and poetics are asserted in their own right, I propose the concept of “bio-poetics.” I will discuss this concept in the context of Canguilhem’s The Normal and the Pathological, Donna Haraway’s “situated knowledge” and Roberto Esposito’s non-vitalistic and affirmative concept of “biopower.” According to recent theories of “New Materialism,” literature is a material practice that makes it possible to write life experiences that exceed life-forms. A bio-poetical reading challenges the economic politics of global capitalism, as shown in the example of Roberto Saviano’s Gomorrah (2006/2007) and Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 (2004). In addition, I also intend to argue that visual and literary aesthetics understood as “aisthesis,” i.e., sensitive experience, intensity, and affective mode of thinking, is the realm where the dynamic multiplicity of life inscribes itself. Thus, an aesthetics of the sensible, as explored by Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean-Luc Nancy, Michel Serres, and Brian Massumi has political relevance, as Jacques Rancière has also argued.
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Notes
- 1.
With reference to biopoetics, German literary scholars developed the so-called Biologische Poetik (Eibl 2004), installing a dialogue between sociobiology and evolutionary psychology that explores the relationship between body and mind as a guarantee of the integrality of being. Karl Eibl, Rüdiger Zymner, and Katja Mellmann proposed a bio-anthropology, focussing on phenomena such as games and the libido (Eibl et al. 2007: 7).
- 2.
In addition, the research-cluster at the Freie Universität “Language of emotions,” led for many years by Menninghaus, began important interdisciplinary studies on the empiric exploration of emotions.
- 3.
I understand the role of the hyphen in the sense Lyotard conceived it: as the mark of difference within a relationship—a difference rejected by political nationalisms and also a difficulty for Europe in its relationship to Jews (Lyotard and Gruber 1999).
- 4.
- 5.
See Foucault (1994a). Even though he underlines the importance of biology for epistemology as well as the role Canguilhem gives to alea in Knowledge of Life, in his text about Canguilhem, Foucault eventually comes back to mind games and interprets Canghuilhem’s claim epistemologically, not ontologically.
- 6.
“Le problème d’écrire: L’écrivain, comme dit Proust, invente dans la langue une nouvelle langue, une langue étrangère en quelque sorte.” (Deleuze 1993: 9).
- 7.
Here, I refer to the “outside of the inner” (le dehors dans le dedans), a concept by Maurice Blanchot, which was pivotal for Deleuze and Foucault, and continues to be used in relational ontologies (Foucault 1994b).
- 8.
It is a question directed to the visual arts by Georges Didi-Huberman.
- 9.
Rheinberger’s concept of the experimental system is intended to provide a link between the “play of difference” (Derrida) and the play of possibility according to the scientific method of the natural sciences. Rheinberger’s characterization of laboratory activity brings together artistic and scientific practices. Because of the resistance of materiality in scientific innovation, Rheinberger distinguishes between the epistemic object (undetermined) and the technical object (defined through the scientific discourse, for instance in publications) (Rheinberger 2001).
- 10.
- 11.
Saviano quotes Hannah Arendt’s preface to The Origins of Totalitarianism (Arendt 2004: XXVI).
- 12.
At the beginning of his reading of Nietzsche’s claim “God is dead,” Heidegger writes: “Western History is destructive because it is the result of a [t]hinking in terms of values [that] is radical killing […]. The value-thinking of the metaphysics of the will to power is murderous in a most extreme sense, because it absolutely does not let Being itself take its rise, i.e., come into the vitality of its essence.” (Heidegger 1977: 108.) This is one of the very few moments when Heidegger uses the concept of “vitality,” which he had perhaps previously avoided due to the tendency toward vitalism in Germany. This underscores the extreme sense that presents destruction as the destruction of life.
- 13.
Nietzsche denotes the “rule” of spiritual Herrschaft by the philosopher using the term tyranny. “This is an ancient, eternal story: what formerly happened with the Stoics still happens today, as soon as any philosophy begins to believe in itself. It always creates the world in its own image; it cannot do otherwise. Philosophy is this tyrannical drive itself, the most spiritual will to power, to the ‘creation of the world,’ to the causa prima” (Nietzsche 2002: 9).
- 14.
Bolaño (2004b: 354). “Cinco días después, antes de que acabara el mes de enero, fue estrangulada Luisa Celina Vázquez. Tenía dieciséis años, de complexión robusta, piel blanca y estaba em-ba-razada de cinco meses (Bolaño 2004a: 445). The next scene shows that another female body has appeared “in an alley in the center of the city” (Bolaño 2004b: 355). “She was about thirty and dressed in a black skirt and low-cut white blouse. She had been stabbed to death […] In her purse was a ticket for the nine a.m. bus to Tucson” (2004b:355). (“A mediados de febrero, en un callejón del centro de Santa Teresa, unos basureros encontraron a otra mujer muerta. Tenía alrededor de treinta años y vestía una falda negra y una blusa blanca, escotada. Había sido asesinada a cuchilladas, aunque en el rostro y el abdomen se apreciaron las contusiones de numerosos golpes. En el bolso se halló un billete de autobús para Tucson”) (2004a: 446).
- 15.
Das Leben schien […] nur lebenswert, wo die Schwelle, die zwischen Wachen und Schlaf ist, in jedem ausgetreten war […] die Sprache nur sie selbst, wo Laut und Bild und Bild und Laut mit automatischer Exaktheit derart glücklich ineinandergriffen, dass für den Groschen ‚Sinn’ kein Spalt mehr übrigblieb (Benjamin 1966: 201).
- 16.
It is also worth remembering the “pure perception” of Henri Bergson as an extreme dynamics of “molecular” experience before cognition and language structure these dynamics in a framework of discrete perceptions, cf. Lapoujade (2010).
- 17.
See Sourious’ Les Différents modes d'existence (1943), recently rediscovered by Bruno Latour. We could also mention Gilbert Simondon’s On the Mode of Existence of the Technical Object (1958), which heavily influenced Gilles Deleuze and Bruno Latour.
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Borsò, V. (2020). Bio-poetics and the Dynamic Multiplicity of Bios: How Literature Challenges the Politics, Economics and Sciences of Life. In: Kulcsár-Szabó, Z., Lénárt, T., Simon, A., Végső, R. (eds) Life After Literature. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-33738-4_2
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