Re-Imagining Biopolitics: Life in a Time of Techno-Capital
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Central
The Centre for Law and the Humanities invites you to a book launch and discussion with Serene Richards, Biopolitics as a System of Thought (Bloomsbury, 2024), and Ian Alan Paul, The Reticular Society (PM Press, 2025).
How is social life organised under techno-capitalism? How do urgent concerns like climate change, migration, and artificial intelligence shape the idea of biopolitics? Join the authors in conversation with Nathan Moore, Birkbeck Law School, on the current possibilities of destituent politics.
Speakers:
Serene Richards
Serene Richards is a Lecturer in Law at New York University, London.
About Biopolitics as a System of Thought:
The Smart will inherit the earth. Smart Being is seduced by convenience, minimising the risk of encounters, of suffering, of pain, and the horror of the unexpected. Applications exist for every need and want, even for their invention. And yet, smarting besieges being, a sharp sting testifies for an existential angst, the unfulfilled promises of a future that does not exist. Smart Being believes in the solutions of techno-capital, the very source of its alienation and atomisation. Biopolitics as a System of Thought outlines a genealogy of Smart Being to ask how, in an era of planetary exploitation and annihilation of life, we remain impotent.
Ian Alan Paul
Ian Alan Paul is an artist and theorist, and presently teaches at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Barcelona.
About The Reticular Society:
If we can sense a symmetry between the totality of what is online and the particularity of each of our lives, we can only do so because what holds the internet together is what holds each of us together too. As capitalism’s coordinates increasingly drift across webs as data, life has come to be reformalized in the image of its online circulation, made ever more connected and separated, informatic and algorithmic, flexible and disposable. Written as both a critique and a call to revolt, The Reticular Society theorizes the network form as that which now subsumes and subordinates life and as that which life must now struggle to destitute and destroy.
Chair: Nathan Moore, Birkbeck Law School
Contact name:
Kanika Gauba