Cary Wolfe (Rice University, Houston)
›Life‹ Is Not Enough: The Biopolitics of Bioart
This talk examines a fundamental problem in current biopolitical thought: the problem of vitalism and (a related problem) an insufficiently differentiated concept of life. Focusing on the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jacques Derrida, and others, we will explore the philosophical and pragmatic problems inherent in a vitalist concept of biopolitics before turning to examine how particular projects in contemporary bioart force us to separate problems of meaning and form from the substrate of life or the living that they use as their medium, even as those very same works invite us to confuse living matter and dead meaning.