Colloque

Le biopouvoir : la biométrie et les disparus des États-Unis

Julian Vigo

Membre a labase

Julian Vigo

Résumé de la communication

My paper examines the use of biopower in the aftermath of 9/11 in which over 14,000 Muslim men were disappeared within the United States of America. As Foucault discusses biopower as a technology of power for managing and controlling populations, I take this theory and expand it to the terrain of Muslim communities in New York City, specifically an Egyptian tailor, who was bureaucratically disappeared--kept in a holding pattern with his documents taken by the government, given no legal way of living in the USA, while forced to stay in the country awaiting judgement for his (and his family’s) pending resident status visa. In the case of the Muslim disappeared, biopower has been constructed in such as way as to survey and control Muslim men between the ages of 16 and 40 and likewise seeks to pervert the then current immigration laws in order to "excise" these "troublesome bodies" by putting these men into a bureaucratic or somatic disappearance and keeping them virtually out of the reach of media, legal representation and due process. Concomitant to the dispearance of these 14,000 men came an equally disturbing form of biopower: biometric information which attempts to, as Agamben has stated, strip the individual to a condition of "bare life"; hence rendering the "homeland security" of the USA as a governance of disappearing Muslim bodies and biologically controlling immigrant bodies in order to maintain a certain order of "known bodies" within the "homeland".

Résumé du colloque

Parmi les conférenciers de renom, pensons aux professeurs Frédéric Gros et Aubin Deckeyser. Des nouveaux chercheurs tels que Jean-François Bert seront aussi de l'événement majeur auquel rien moins que le centre Michel Foucault se joindra. Une activité de lancement scientifiquement significative pour la recherche en Foucault et la politique est en cours. Le projet de création d'une équipe de recherche francophone sur les nouveaux enjeux de la biopolitique, bioéthique et biosécurité, est en cours.