Systems of Life

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.

Richard A. Barney is an associate professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford University Press, 1999) and has edited several volumes, including Rhetorics of Plague, Early and Late for the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (Winter 2010–11). He is currently at work on a book about the biopolitics of the sublime in eighteenth-century Britain.

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).

Timothy C. Campbell is Professor of Italian at Cornell University. His most recent book is The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life (Fordham, 2017).

Mrinalini Chakravorty, an associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, is the author of In Stereotype: South Asia in the Global Literary Imaginary (Columbia University Press, 2014), as well as articles on transnationalism, film, Arab women writers, dystopias as a genre, and contemporary global fiction that have appeared in PMLA, MFS, differences, and other journals and collections. She is at work on a book on representations of global hunger.

James Edward Ford III is Associate Professor of English at Occidental College. His writings on the aesthetics of black radicalism, black popular culture, and political theory have appeared in the journals Novel, Biography, Cultural Critique, College Literature, New Centennial Review, ASAP Journal, and multiple edited collections. He is currently working on “Phillis, the Black Swan: Disheveling the Origins” and “Hip-Hop’s Late Style: Disheveling the Origins,” two projects that rethink the origins and ends of black American cultural production.