Alter(ed) Bodies : Beyond Biopolitics

The fundamental assumption behind the volume is that the current civilizational crisis, manifested in such phenomena as climate change, environmental catastrophes, pandemics and wars, puts into question the biopolitical means of optimizing the life of populations and individuals. To narrow down the thematic concerns of the volume, the chapters are centered around the notion of body, fundamental for the majority of theoretical takes on biopolitics. The volume shows that in the current age of catastrophes bodies are not only shaped and individualized through procedures of institutionalized discipline, but by an entanglement of environmental and planetary factors, typically omitted in extant accounts of biopolitics. The chapters go beyond biopolitics, because they show bodies as sites of operation of non-human or more-than-human agencies that work on scales inaccessible to human sensorium.