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The production of living death is particularly common in warfare. In Weil’s discussion of war there emerges another aspect of what it might mean to exist in a living death. On the one hand, war turns all its participants into “things.” Both conqueror and conquered are caught up in a momentum that robs them of their freedom, making them subject to pure necessity and thus depriving them of some aspect of being alive. In Weil’s imagining, those subject to force become inert, frozen in place like Hector before Achilles, while those who ply it are driven by an equally mechanical momentum of violence and destruction. She concludes that battles are fought not by human beings but by things, by “men who have undergone a transformation, who have dropped either to the level of inert matter, which is pure passivity, or to the level of blind force, which is pure momentum.”239 War, that is, makes “things” of all those it touches.

In addition to becoming a “thing” caught up in the momentum of war, soldiers undergo a psychic shift that alters their relationship to “life.” At first, conquering soldiers shield themselves from the horrors of war through emotional and conceptual distancing. They view warfare as a kind of game, and the lives they destroy “are like toys broken by a child, and quite as incapable of feeling.”240 Eventually, though, their own vulnerability to pain or loss becomes unavoidable, perhaps due to a serious injury or the death of a beloved comrade. In such a moment, the reality of war makes itself painfully present. Awareness of this reality transforms the soldier’s relationship to living and dying. As Weil describes it, “for those whose spirits have bent under the yoke of war, the relation between death and the future is different than for other men. For other men death appears as a limit set in advance on the future; for the solider death is the future, the future his profession assigns him.”241 Life enfolds death. Death becomes the only imaginable future – the death of one’s enemy, of one’s comrades, of oneself. This relationship to futurity, in which death appears as the sole future, alters not only the relation to the future but also to the present. It is “much too hard to be borne,” “abhorrent,” “unendurable.”242 Weil continues, “Once the experience of war makes visible the possibility of death that lies locked up in each moment, our thoughts cannot travel from one day to the next without meeting death’s face. The mind is then strung up to a pitch it can stand for only a short time; but each new dawn reintroduces the same necessity; and days piled on days make years.”243 War reveals a reality that is intolerable to the mind, yet the mind cannot turn away. The possibility of death becomes ever-present, inescapable. It is as though the solider must each day experience the acute agony of facing a sword that could strike at any moment. The solider is like Hector, but for far more than a single moment. Every day, “the soul suffers violence. Regularly, every morning, the soul castrates itself of aspiration, for thought cannot journey through time without meeting death on the way.”244 When the future appears (only) as death, aspiration becomes impossible. Contemplating the future entails contemplating death; death becomes life’s only possibility, its sole horizon. Thus, Weil claims, “the mind has lost all capacity to so much as look outward. The mind is completely absorbed in doing itself violence.”245 War imprisons the mind, making it impossible (or at least incredibly painful and therefore exceedingly rare) to imagine anything beyond the present, which is suffused with death. The future holds only death; the present is lived in thrall to this deathly future. To pass through one’s days in such a way cannot really be called “living.” One who exists in this way “belongs to a different race from the race of the living,” Weil insists.246 Like Hector, all soldiers who have perceived the reality of war become no longer quite alive.

Returning to copyright law, we have no delusions about the existing possibilities for restructuring its conceptual focus and terminological layout, and even more the reasoning which it implements down in its very foundations. However, critical understandings and tools, like the idea of an online commons as providing a biopolitical translation of the network society and its internal workings, could be employed for realising alternatives to current regulatory shortcomings.

For example, where copyright laws demand authorisations from content owners, these could be managed through centralised and more relaxed automated systems. Or if not centralised, considering the disliking of neoliberal markets towards centralisations, such operations could be carried out by limited in numbers, recognisable and accessible outlets. For each use they could demand a substantially small fee.

Following a course of legal education means becoming with power. To be a student of the law is to be—to grow, change, develop, unfold—within the structures of the law school and the legal tradition in which it provides training. These structures govern the learning subject and condition the forms of life that such education produces or enables, both with respect to individual students and the wider social contexts they go on to populate. But law, and its study, is an area of human and intellectual endeavour oriented around the legitimate exercise of authority—querying not only the structure of legal regulation but the manner in which it can be deployed and administered to produce justice in the governance of community. In many renditions, law is not merely about the promulgation of power (although that is something law can enable) and thus its education is not merely the memorisation of rules as the expression of static forms of authority. More fundamentally, law is—or, perhaps, should be—about questioning and seeking to ensure the legitimacy of the way power is exercised, and its education about developing the tools required for such conduct.

Law governs through structure, delineating the multifarious ways in which life takes shape, facilitating the formation, maintenance, and variation of lawful relations. Law is thus often a question of the relationship between the structures of power and the conduct of individuals—as either subjects or agents of power, or both. To learn the law is doubly concerned with power: if we accept—in line with critical pedagogies such as those of Paulo Freire or Jacques Derrida—that pedagogy is always an exercise of power in itself, then to teach is to control or direct, or at least influence, the intellectual exposure and journey of learners (including teachers). It is to manage the backgrounding and foregrounding of knowledge and experience, and the concomitant patterning of the learning subject into certain habits of mind and ways of working with legal and other materials, as well as into different institutional structures and modes of (lawyerly) life.

Biopolitical analyses of higher education include examinations of various applications of political rationality aimed at investing in the life of multiple groups of people: students, faculty, staff, citizens, etc. In the application of biopolitical logic to the “knowledge economy,” the emphasis on publications and grants produces overstressed and overworked bodies of academics (Allen & Rasmussen, 2015) and contributes to what D’Hoest and Lewis (2015) call the “fatigue university.” The tiredness and exhaustion are not only a byproduct of the publication regime but also a constitutive part of academic life, a necessary illness that describes what it means to be a faculty member (D’Hoest & Lewis, 2015). In the biopolitics of managing student populations, standardized college admissions tests serve as a tool for categorizing students into hierarchies of achievement based on their racial, ethnic, and gender identities and parental education. Far from being an objective instrument external to the conditions that produce and maintain racialized, gendered, and classed achievement gaps, college admissions testing is part of a larger apparatus of measurement that is enmeshed in sociopolitical, economic, and cultural environments, policy contexts, and the testing preparation industry, all of which act upon and enact that hierarchized difference under the guise of educational equity (Dixon-Román, 2017).

Permeating U.S. college curricula, biopolitical logics aim at creating subjects of neoliberal market democracy dominated by whiteness. Pedagogical innovations in the scholarship of teaching and learning aim at transforming students and faculty into “entrepreneurial learners” who consume and utilize knowledge for competitive advantage (Servage, 2009). In science education in particular, the end goal is to create de-politicized citizens who are best prepared to function in a neoliberal market economy and to contribute to the country’s fiscal health and global competitiveness (Bazzul, 2017; Hoeg & Bencze, 2017). In teacher preparation, biopower manifests itself in defining a good teacher of color as a role model who overcame deficiencies of their race and ethnicity, thereby re-centering normative whiteness (Phillips & Nava, 2011). Through educational discourses at all levels from primary to postsecondary, biopolitical logics and governmentality shape, describe, and prescribe what it means to be a U.S. citizen, a construct that beyond nationality and democratic participation includes the normative attributes of a citizen-subject: whiteness and masculinity (Cary, 2001) as well as middle classness, heterosexuality, and ablebodiedness (Brandzel, 2016).

Our time living within and across online settings, connecting with others, creating new knowledges and communication practices or building on the existing ones, generates in proportion with the numbers of interconnected populations a vast informational surplus, which is exploited in manifold ways. Our common interactions translate instantly into social network production, which includes online content and data – both traffic and personal. Informational surplus accrues from direct forms of original and derivative alike user-generated creative and generally cultural contributions (Lessig 2004, 2008; Jenkins 2006; Boyle 2008; Bruns 2008; Hayes 2008; Tushnet 2008; Jamar 2010; Fuchs 2015); from the indirect generation of content in the shape of communities coming together and taking form in shared social, cultural, knowledge exchange and even gaming spaces (Jenkins 2006; Benkler 2006); from ‘irregular, unpaid, precarious, outsourced, crowd-sourced, and click-worked digital labour’ on platforms, such as YouTube, LinkedIn and Pinterest, and through activities that include online reviews, surveys and improving online service performance (for example, reporting spam email) (Fuchs 2017, 71). Furthermore, Cohen (2017) discusses the non-stop production of a ‘biopolitical public domain’ of personal data, being harvested, refined and then distributed across data markets. Taking all this into consideration, there is a great deal of value deriving from endlessly flowing in information surplus, for the content industries (for example, promotion, appropriation of fandom, possible royalties); for the Internet media of all kinds and sizes (infrastructures, online services, content hosts, social media and so on); for corporations, benefiting from unpaid digital labour reducing their wage-sum to therefore increase profits (Fuchs 2017); and, of course, for advertisers.

The Internet becomes a most illustrative example of what Hardt and Negri envisage when arguing that ‘labor and value have become biopolitical in the sense that living and producing tend to be indistinguishable’ (2004, 148). This we may take further, in relation to the network society, and analyse down into two different components.

Centered on the metaphor of genes as information, the initial 2009 ACLU complaint argues that Myriad’s BRCA1 and BRCA2 patents restrict the flow of information regarding breast cancer research. Women are prevented from receiving genetic information regarding their susceptibility for the disease because testing can only be done through Myriad laboratories. The complaint points out that many women, particularly women of color, cannot afford the testing. This is because patent law provides Myriad with a temporary monopoly over breast cancer testing involving BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, allowing Myriad to keep costs high and to be selective in the types of insurance they accept from patients. The legal com- plaint also argues that gene patents restrict information sharing among researchers, precluding them from developing alternative tests. Female patients at risk for breast cancer are unable to obtain more meaningful genetic testing, and female scientists are hindered from doing breast cancer research. Thus, women’s labor and participation (and health) in the bioeconomy is curtailed. The ACLU argues therefore for overturning genetic sequence patents and keeping them in the public domain. BRCA1 and BRCA2 gene sequences should not be patented and should remain freely available in the public domain for scientific research.

Similar arguments are made in the initial amicus briefs filed on behalf of the plaintiffs. A coalition of women’s health advocates assert that gene patents “prevent women at risk for breast cancer and ovarian cancer from obtaining the information they need about their own bodies to take steps to improve their health outcomes, and possibly save their own lives and the lives of their children.”68 Thus, they argue, it is critical that genetic sequence “knowledge and information are maintained in the public domain.”69 In developing a feminist analysis of patent law, one must think carefully how this case leaves neoliberal, biopolitical values unchallenged.

Critical science studies scholars articulate a more contemporary understanding of biopolitics, which help frame and illuminate patent law. Science in the twenty- first century is a technomedicine and technoscience shaped by capitalization and intellectual property rights.12 It involves the “molecularization”13 of the body where cells, tissues, and DNA are made visible, isolated, stored and can be transferred to others through new circuits of biovalue mediated by patent ownership. Technologies of the self have shifted to become “technologies of optimization” that not only govern bodies, but also “change what it means to be biological.”14 New hierarchies structured through an “informatics of domination”15 no longer stress the perfection of bodies, but rather their optimization. As individuals are obliged to optimize themselves, patent law incites innovations for them to take advantage of. Patent law therefore facilitates the optimization of nature for circuits of capital, so that individuals can optimize themselves.

Human beings thus become “nature’s author or inventor”16 as they seek to generate and utilize technoscientific inventions. New forms of subjectivity also emerge as individuals engage in self-techniques to manage their risk and susceptibility for disease. For example, individuals are compelled to take advantage of genetic counseling and screening. In so doing, they form new biosocial relations of “somatic expertise”17 with medical professionals, while also developing new modes of genetic and biological citizenship by lobbying politicians to support genetic causes. Such relations and modes of citizenship also work to contest patent law ownership and its privileging of scientific expertise, as individuals become patent owners themselves (e.g., PXE International) and/or file legal claims against patents on their human tissue (e.g., Moore18). Furthermore, such technologies of optimization are sustained by a “moral economy of hope”19 where the promise of future innovation to treat and/or cure disease is used to stimulate further innovation. Economies of hope similarly drive the approval of patent law rights. Inventors, in filing their applications, only have to demonstrate a potentiality and promise of industrial application for their creations. Approval of a patent then serves as a promise to investors that the invention is worthwhile to finance and develop. Patent law therefore enables technologies of optimization through discourses of hope and promise.

"Intellectual property is power, but what kind of power is it, and what does it do? Building on the work of Michel Foucault, this study examines different ways of understanding power in copyright, trademark and patent policy: as law, as promotion of public welfare, and as promotion of neoliberal privatization. It argues that intellectual property policy is moving toward neoliberalism, even as that move is broadly contested in everything from resistance movements to Supreme Court decisions. The struggle to conceptualize IP matters, because different regimes of power imagine different kinds of subjects, from the rights-bearing citizen to the economic agent of neoliberalism. As a central part of the regulation of contemporary economies, IP is central to all aspects of our lives. It matters for the works we create, the brands we identify and the medicines we consume. The kind of subjects it imagines are the kinds of subjects we become"

The CUP page for the book has not just the text as a whole but the chapters (the main ones are a theoretical discussion, and one each on copyright, trademark and patent), and each of the chapters has an abstract. For now, here's a little text from the introductory chapter that should give a better idea of what I'm up to. As you'll see, I want to say something about IP, of course, but also about how I think biopolitics works (in both what I call its earlier, "public," form, and current neoliberalism) and about the fundamental but neglected importance of including law and legal institutions in our genealogical work:

These processes can be seen as instances of energy or carbon colonialism, whereby countries in the global South and other peripheries are treated as carbon dumps, or targeted for grabbing land and resources necessary to reduce CO2 emissions generated primarily in the North (Bachram, 2004). Moreover, several of those projects “rely on extractive landscapes forged through various forms of physical and structural violence” (Camargo & Ojeda, 2017, p. 62). In other words, projects as diverse as wind farms, biofuel plantations, dams and lithium mining follow the same “green extractivist” logic. According to this logic, extracting as much resources, energy and profits as fast as possible from a territory, irrespective of the impacts on local socioecological relations, is framed as necessary not only for the wealth and wellbeing of populations in host locations—but also, increasingly, as an imperative for “saving” the climate and the planet.

Climate change mitigation comprises a vast array of economic and technological interventions and strategies, operating at multiple scales and across multiple sectors. The cornerstone of mainstream mitigation policy is, on principle, a shift away from fossil fuels—the highest global CO2 “emitter”—towards “renewable” or less carbon-intensive forms of energy generation. The socioenvironmental implications of expanding renewable energy frontiers are becoming central to research and debate in political ecology and critical geography (Cavanagh & Benjaminsen, 2017; McCarthy, 2015). There is increasing attention, for instance, to the extraction of minerals necessary for batteries and other “low-carbon” (Cavanagh & Himmelfarb, 2015; Marx, 1976). Contemporary extractive and agricultural frontiers, including those for renewable energy, reproduce the same logic, with different degrees of intensity.

Yet, upon critical examination, conceptions of an open public domain emerge aligned with neoliberal, biopolitical strategies. Nature is now optimized through logics of free trade and competition. It is assumed that an open public domain can bolster circuits of biocapital even further than patent ownership, ensuring the unrestricted trade of human bodily tissue for scientific experiment and commercialization. This engenders more scientific innovations for individuals to choose from in their self-governing efforts at optimizing themselves. Theorizing of an open public domain might question the privatization of scientific ideas and materials, but it does not challenge market logics entirely. In fact, it relies faithfully on market values of freedom and openness to promote innovation. Yet, only certain forms of creativity emerge and prosper in such an economic terrain, primarily an inventiveness that remains mediated by and through market mechanisms.

Privatization through patenting is also not entirely abandoned; it is just deferred. Proponents of an open public domain seem more concerned about patent ownership rights locking up creativity at the temporal stage of its initial inception. An open public domain is meant to incentivize a market-mediated creativity that will eventually lead to patentable products, thus patent law ownership remains sought at a later stage. Uncritical acceptance of values of free trade and privatization unfortunately cloud a discussion of inequality, namely who has access to patented scientific technologies and patent ownership rights.

It is not difficult to imagine ways in which Agamben‟s framework, which does not recognize the legal categories of public and private, might speak to feminist legal perspectives, which dismantled these artificial distinctions of liberal political theory years ago. 7 But it is not the collapsed binaries per se which have attracted feminist scholars to his work, but rather his particular collapse of the political category of the citizen into the biological category of “bare life”. This category has invited feminist theorists to ponder the gender implications of a political theory of law that sees politics as the reduction of all citizens to their „bare‟ biological functions (what Foucault referred to as “the bestialization of man”8 ). In a recent edited collection of essays entitled The Agamben Effect, 9 Penelope Deutscher asks the critical question: “is it possible to open a debate with Giorgio Agamben concerning the role of women‟s bodies in the politicization of life? What different inflections of life and of politicized life would result from an intermittent insertion „born of women‟s bodies‟?”10 As one might expect, Deutscher‟s engagement with Agamben is in part intended as a corrective to a male theory that is blatantly indifferent to gender difference, and indeed other bodily markers of difference. She writes: “women‟s bodies are impressively absent from Agamben‟s writing, as are reproductive bodies”.11 Elsewhere, she points out that when Agamben speaks of “life”, he means that which has been first identified as human “and then stripped of that status or subjected to a threshold state: the overcomatose person, 12 the immigrant, the refugee, the internee, the enemy combatant, the Muselmann”.13 This makes it hard to insert into the theory forms of life that have never been accorded the status of the human in the first instance: the fetus, for example, and indeed the reproductive life of woman herself as womb-owning bearer of the fetus. Life, in an Agambenesque world, according to Deutscher, is life dissociated entirely from women‟s reproductivity. Yet, it is perhaps this very dissociation of woman from the theory that strikes Deutscher as the key to its potential for feminist theory; an “intriguing potential”, she writes, “to operate as a lens to rethink the terms life, bare life, threshold, and biopolitics”.14

If we were to intervene in order to reformulate Deutscher‟s hypothesis regarding the “potential” in Agamben‟s work for feminist theory, it would be as follows: woman is absent from the theory insofar as the body of „woman‟ (by which we mean „reproductive woman‟) is already assumed as a key political referent. The theory, as it stands, sex blind as it is, is committed to an analysis of bodies in relation to the legal thresholds between “life and death, animate and inanimate, human and inhuman, nature and culture”.15 It therefore begs for an analysis of human bodies in relation to reproduction, and as mechanisms for reproduction. „Human life‟, in such an analysis, and with it „human rights‟ and the ethical foundations of citizenship in any given biopolitical state, must inevitably turn to a set of political and legislative questions around reproduction, reproductive rights (especially abortion), sexuality, and the family. In short, biopolitical theory cannot avoid making the female body central to its analysis of human life as an undefined essence both protected and unprotected by law.

Women’s bodies and minds are storehouses for potential patentable subject matter. They supply oocytes, cells, and DNA for technoscientific research and commercialization.1 Women, in particular indigenous women, provide human tissues and DNA, as well as knowledge regarding the medicinal properties of local plants and animals.2 Women therefore are performing novel forms of labor within new circuits of biocapital. In addition, women are primarily responsible for utilizing technological medical inventions to care for themselves and their families. Within contemporary neoliberal conditions, these forms of labor are variegated across social relations of race, class, ethnicity, indigeneity, nation, and citizenship. Some groups of women benefit from patented medical inventions, while others contribute to their development with no benefits in return. New forms of feminized labor conditions also increasingly shape men’s experiences. Human bodily tissue and indigenous knowledge is additionally extracted, commercialized, and patented from men as well, but in different ways, given the variable mechanisms of power structuring their lives. Thus, questions of gendered social relations should be central to a discussion of patent law within neoliberal, biopolitical conditions.

Feminist science studies scholarship demonstrates that contemporary biopolitics is itself highly gendered and racialized. Contemporary biopolitics is now aimed at the individual and enhancing the quality of life. In particular, it depends upon women’s reproductive and intellectual labor. As Rose argues, “responsibility now falls not on those who govern, but on those who are responsible for a family and its members.”20 Although he fails to elaborate, Rose explicitly notes that it is women in particular who are responsible for the medical needs of their families and children.21 In contrast, feminist science studies scholars have produced valuable and extensive insights furthering this point. For example, women are often obliged to take advantage of genetic screening to ensure a “normal” child.22 Women’s bodies also become sources of raw material called upon to “donate” or “gift” their eggs for the advancement of reproductive technologies and stem cell research.23

Bodies are also governed through demands for what might be called “epistemic donations.” For example, indigenous women are often compelled to “donate” their epistemic knowledge regarding traditional plants and healing practices for pharmaceutical research. Such forms of governance may lead to important medical advances that benefit individuals and groups of women. The problem, however, is that individuals are obliged to take advantage of medical technologies to ensure their health without being given the necessary resources in which to do so, such as adequate health insurance and education. Biopolitics is accompanied by neoliberal strategies of governing that have reduced governmental support for public health care, while shifting the burden (and guilt) to individuals.24 Thus, many women are left with fewer options to care for their families. In addition, those women who can afford a range of medical care for their families are obliged to do so, and if they fail to utilize all available options then they are left to blame for burdening the welfare state. Biopolitics is therefore variegated and relational, governing different groups of women in variable ways.

Biopower offers a theoretical framework for understanding contemporary forms of governance within a neoliberal order that includes patent law ownership. Foucault argued that, starting in the seventeenth century, mechanisms of power shifted from the sovereign authority to take a life toward the power to foster life.8 Power became directed at administering and regulating the biological existence of populations. Bodies became subject to “techniques of power”9 through diverse institutions such as schools, churches, hospitals, and the family, which were aimed at managing populations for the development of capitalist production. Power therefore, according to Foucault, transformed into a discursive power that “comes from everywhere.”10 As a consequence, Foucault claims that the juridical system of law gave way and shifted to law as norm. This does not mean that the law is no longer an important site of inquiry. Rather, the law, whose task is to govern life, begins to operate more as a norm and “the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, administrative, etc.) whose functions are for the most part regulatory.”11 This later point is important for our purposes. Law remains a crucial site of analysis to consider within biopolitics. Yet, attention must be paid to the discursive and regulatory power of the law and how it is embedded. How does patent law act as an ethico-legal norm privileging certain forms of knowledge production, bodies, and subjectivities over others? How are patent law, scientific knowledge, and the life science industries co-constituted? How is patent law employed as a technique to optimize and manage life in the service of neoliberal capitalism? These questions begin to frame a feminist analysis of patent law that opens up space to consider the multiple and contradictory implications of patent law on different women’s lives.

In its investigations the current study adopts the genealogical method based on the writings of Foucault and shows how present-day phenomena, including accounting practices and the expertise that underlies these practices, can be understood as contingent. It also attempts to create a “history of the present” by “cultivat(ing) the details and accidents that accompany every beginning” (Foucault, 1977, p. 144). Genealogies present the unfolding of a non-linear diverse series of events that shaped some present-day phenomena:

We want historians to confirm our belief that the present rests upon profound intentions and immutable necessities. But the true historical sense confirms our existence among countless lost events, without a landmark or a point of reference (Foucault, 1977, p.155).

In stark contrast, I would instead privilege the rhetorical agency of the city’s so-called waste products—the civilly dead, disappeared, decaying, delinquent—and suggest that they have the power to expose the biopolitical ruse, and to disrupt the system, by claiming their place not as waste products or by products of neo-liberal biopol- itics, but as its condition of possibility, its raw materials, its inclusive-exclusion. Theirs is neither a tactic nor a strategy in de Certeau’s sense; they do not make or do or make do with the tawdry products of the dominant cultural economy, but they force the fact that, in some sense, without them, there is no making or doing or living at all. The dead, disappeared, decaying, and delinquent forcibly remove la perruque and put it and its theological agencies out of work. My point here is not to propose an overarching—or, indeed, “strategic”—theory of death, but nei- ther is it to reduce the care for the dead, the dying, the decaying, the delinquent to mere symbolic action. Rather, it is to position them at the heart of neo-liberal biopolitics, to avow their centrality, not just as its waste products but also as fodder for our cannibalizing apparatus. For the cannibal is the appropriate figure for such a system, consumer culture turned, by its wicked army of tropes, on the flesh of its flesh. To struggle for life in this context is not to resort to a tactical politics of progressive living. It is to stand with and alongside the dead and disappeared— those our administrative system facelessly fucks over, those it indirectly kills in the passive voice by letting die.

Foucault’s analysis of biopower replaces an understanding of power that is traditionally attached to sovereignty as ‘the right to take life or let live’, with the power ‘to foster life or disallow it to the point of death’ (Foucault 1978, 138). In this respect, this power applies to humans not simply as individual beings, but as species (Foucault 2003). Note that power in the Foucauldian vocabulary is conceived as a multiplicity of relations immanent in a setting, whereas state sovereignty, the formulation of law and other established social hegemonies constitute only terminal forms in which power materialises (1978). Biopower is primarily concerned with fostering the health and wellbeing of populations so they can live and be more productive longer (Randell-Moon and Tippet 2016), and it appears in two forms: one centred on disciplining the body and optimising its capabilities towards becoming integrated into systems of efficient and economic controls; and another focussed on the regulatory controls of the population (Foucault 1978). As such, biopower moves away from notions of power dealing with ‘legal subjects over whom the ultimate dominion was death’ (Foucault 1978, 142–143). Thus biopolitics constitutes a technology of power, which, according to Foucault’s historical analysis, developed during modernity to involve sets of (social) interventionist processes and techniques, like statistics and demographics, for observing and controlling such objectives as birth and mortality rates, population fertility and so on; economically rational mechanisms, like individual and collective insurance, security and safety measures, for dealing with accidents and old age incapacities; and control over relations between human beings and their geographical, climatic, or hydro- graphic environment, including urban environments (Foucault 2003).

Foucault located biopolitics within the context of governance practices of the evolving Western liberal state. During the rise of modern capitalism (through the 18th and 19th centuries), an interest in the relationship between populations and their environments was linked with overarching goals of health and productivity: the desire to supply business and other productive enterprises with physically and mentally healthy labour force, called for closer attention to life contingencies and demanded government devised, organised and actualised towards effectively calculating and managing ‘climate, disease, industry, finance, custom, and disaster’ (Miller 2014, 191–192). As ‘biological existence was reflected in political existence’ (Foucault 1978, 142) and ‘life’ emerged as the centre of political strategies (Lemke 2011), the governmentalisation 12 of life and its mechanisms would unfold in schools, hospitals, the army, prisons and psychiatric institutions, marking a gradual key shift from power accumulated by the sovereign towards power dispersed among populations (Miller 2014). Biopolitics connotes bodies being placed within dispersed networks of material, institutional and administrative coercions and knowledge structures, through which they become subject to processes of self-surveillance and self-discipline towards optimising and securing their existence (Foucault 2003; Miller 2014).13 This also connects to Foucault’s idea of government as not limited to political structures or management by the state, but as including a broader range of practices too, that ‘structure the possible field of actions of others’ and control conduct (Foucault 1983, 221). Thus biopolitics denotes ‘a distinctive art of government that historically emerges with liberal forms of social regulation and individual self-governance’ (Lemke 2011, 34).

The first step in pedagogical efforts to unmake microfascist subjectivities is identifying the ways in which desire is mobilized in educational settings to control, repress, order and impose rules as a form of fascism—when control and order have dangerous consequences such as limiting students’ basic political freedoms. If educators are attentive to their own microfascisms and those elicited by their students, then it will become clearer to understand how and why the desire to follow rules and see others conform to them is central to formulating pedagogies that problematize the consequences of this desire. It is crucial, then, for educators to understand how the diverse range of students’ as well as their own affective responses to rules and control constantly run up against social- and politicalwide ways of knowing and feeling about the self and others. Therefore, a point of departure for educators is to examine how affective dynamics work micropolitically to organize students’ affective responses (e.g., towards racism, nationalism, extremism, sexism, and ableism) and under which circumstances there can be an antidote to the microfascist practices in everyday life (M. Zembylas, 2020b). A key pedagogical question then is: How and with which pedagogical resources can educators and students first of all identify forms of fascism and its damage micropolitically?

What is needed are pedagogical strategies that render the burdens of microfascism unbearable, namely, strategies that show to students how they are prevented from reimagining reality and opening new potentials in their lives, if they are trapped into fixed desires and anxieties about themselves and their relations to others. In other words, educators need to cultivate spaces of resistance micropolitically through the ‘diligent unmaking of the various subordinated subjectivities’ (Mohammed, 2020, p. 208) that students develop in schools and classrooms. Students often learn in schools to submit to an order and a set of rules, and they become attached to the idea that if their bodies, health or citizenship were ‘properly ordered’ then everything would be fine; thus they take such ordering as desirable and treat every complexity encountered as distraction (Fitzpatrick & Tinning, 2014). A valuable pedagogical strategy, therefore, would be to create opportunities for students to ‘refuse to allow any fascist formula to slip by, on whatver scale it may manifest itself, including within the scale of the family [and I could add the school as well] or even within the scale of our own personal economy’ (F. Guattari, 2009, p. 166). This implies that students need to be given opportunities to understand that the reduction of the complexity of each subjectivity into a fascist formula forecloses countless other ways to apprehend and negotiate relations with others.

Law remains a crucial site of analysis to consider within biopolitics. Yet, attention must be paid to the discursive and regulatory power of the law and how it is embedded. How does patent law act as an ethico-legal norm privileging certain forms of knowledge production, bodies, and subjectivities over others? How are patent law, scientific knowledge, and the life science industries co-constituted? How is patent law employed as a technique to optimize and manage life in the service of neoliberal capitalism? These questions begin to frame a feminist analysis of patent law that opens up space to consider the multiple and contradictory implications of patent law on different women’s lives.

How could humanity be better attuned with the powers of naturing nature, in a posture of co-creation rather than of a reactive technocratic war? Importantly, this is a matter of philosophical health and the answer cannot be primarily logistical – the healing-growth future of humanity does not rely on distributive numbers of vaccine doses. What follows is an exercise of critical speculation concerning the meta-pandemic future of humanity – rather than post-pandemic since pandemics are not likely to disappear and are metaphorically proteiform. We advocate here the possibility of an ontological “regenerative politics” (Haraway 1991), a generative philosophy or “thought in the act” (Manning and Massumi 2014), via the renewal of a shared cosmology based on natural creativity (Whitehead 1929), a life-affirming creative Real that is termed “Creal” (de Miranda 2017b).

Risking the future