Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.
Table of Content
Introduction: Systems of Life, or Bioeconomic Politics
Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag 1
1. Looking for (Economic) Growth in the Eighteenth Century
Christian Marouby 35
2. An African Diasporic Critique of Violence
James Edward Ford III 56
3. Rousseau: Vital Instinct and Pity
Pierre Macherey 82
4. System and Subject in Adam Smith’s Political Economy: Nature, Vitalism, and Bioeconomic Life
Catherine Packham 93
5. Vitalism’s Revolution: John Thelwall, Life, and the Economy of Radical Politics
Richard A. Barney 114
6. Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Political Economy
Annika Mann 135
7. William Blake and the Time of Ontogeny
Amanda Jo Goldstein 162
8. Concerning Hunger: Empire Aesthetics in the Present Moment
Mrinalini Chakravorty 201
9. The Hero Takes a Fall: Gravity, Comedy, and Darwin’s Entangled Bank
Timothy C. Campbell 236
List of Contributors 257
Index 261
About the author
Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. His most recent books include Althusser and His Contemporaries (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2014).
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