New paper by Aécio Amaral

AMARAL, Aécio. Bioinformatics and excess of biopower. In Claus Leggewie, Ursula Renner, Peter Risthaus (Hg.), Prometheische Kultur: Wo kommen unsere energien her? Paderborn, Deutscheland: Wilhelm Fink, 2013.  pp. 175-193.


Abstract: The article argues that contemporary biotechnologies install an epistemological shift in the link between technics and experience in Modernity. It suggests that the technological propitiation of life brought about by techniques of sequencing and representing DNA requires a

---

reformulation of the Foucauldian thesis about the way in which an anthropo-philosophical understanding of finitude underlies the understanding of experience in Modernity by informing the spheres of life, labour and language. Insofar as computer language manages to reconfigure these fields of positivity, one should focus on Bernard Stiegler’s claim that life differs from itself by means others than life, by means of technical objects. Such claim seems to install a novel index for the sociological understanding of the current pattern of experiences that is typical of the contemporary technological culture, one in which the immanence of life to knowledge is not in debt to an anthropological self-referential finitude.

Keywords: Bioinformatics; biopower; contemporary technological culture; Michel Foucault; Bernard Stiegler