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.

Offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid-18th to the mid-19th century

Contributor: Richard A. Barney 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. --- Contributor: Warren Montag 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). --- Contributor: Richard A. Barney 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. --- Contributor: Timothy C. Campbell Timothy C. Campbell is professor of Italian at Cornell University. In addition to his translations of Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, he is most recently the author of The Techne of Giving: Cinema and the Generous Form of Life (2017) from Fordham University Press. --- Contributor: Mrinalini Chakravorty 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. --- Contributor: James Edward Ford 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. --- Contributor: Amanda Jo Goldstein Amanda Jo Goldstein is an assistant professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Sweet Science: Romantic Materialism and the New Logics of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2017). --- Contributor: Pierre Macherey Pierre Macherey is a professor emeritus of philosophy at L’Université de Lille III, France. He was a student of Louis Althusser and a coauthor of Reading Capital (1965). His other works include A Theory of Literary Production, The Object of Literature, and Hegel or Spinoza. --- Contributor: Annika Mann Annika Mann is an assistant professor of English at the New College of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University. Her primary fields of research are eighteenth-century and Romantic British literature, with special interest in the history of medicine. She has been published in Eighteenth-Century Fiction and is a coeditor of Transforming Contagion: Risky Contacts among Bodies, Disciplines, and Nations (Rutgers University Press, 2018). --- Contributor: Christian Marouby Christian Marouby is a professor of French and Francophone studies at Mills College. He holds an MA from Université Paris 7 and a PhD from UC Berkeley. His scholarly interests were first focused on early anthropology in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and have gradually become concerned with economic theory, still with an anthropological focus. He is the author of two books at Éditions du Seuil, Utopie et primitivisme (1990) and L’économie de la nature (2004), and a number of articles and book chapters. --- Contributor: Warren Montag 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). --- Contributor: Catherine Packham Catherine Packham is a senior lecturer in English and Head of English Literature at the University of Sussex, UK. She is the author of Eighteenth-Century Vitalism: Bodies, Culture, Politics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) and a coeditor of Political Economy, Literature, and the Formation of Knowledge, 1720–1850 (Routledge, 2018). --- Contributor: Joseph Serrano Joseph Serrano is a graduate student in the English Department at University of California, Berkeley.

In its willingness to hold multiple registers in tension, Systems of Life models how these kinds of collections can continue to expand our analyses of the relationships between disciplines, cultures, and aesthetic traditions. --- This is an unusually strong collection of interdisciplinary essays. Barney and Montag have brought together a group of mostly younger or mid-career scholars who pursue questions of economy, biopolitics, and literature in a variety of fascinating ways. There is not another collection quite like it in print.---Robert Markley, University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign