Biopolitics and Apartheid: In Texts Philosophical and Literary

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Taking Roberto Esposito's Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy as its point of intervention, this course will think of South African apartheid as a biopolitical event. Using the philosophy of figures such as Michel Foucault, Friedrich Nietzsche, Baruch Spinoza and Jacques Derrida, as well as two South African literary texts, Ezekiel Mphahlele's Down Second Avenue and J.M. Coetzee's The Life and Times of Michael K. this course grapples with the Esposito-derived difficulty: how, in an age when biopolitics is - viscerally, one could say - is understood as negative (that is, thanatopolitical), are we to think in the terms of an affirmative that Esposito proposes in Bios? Mphahlele and Coetzee write in very different historical moments, not to mention out of (racially) distinct literary registers. Mphahlele is widely recognized as the founding figure of urban black South African literature. The Life and Times of Michael K., on the other hand, is among the earlier work of the Nobel Laureate Coetzee. However, what they share is something on the order of an affirmative biopolitics. An affirmative biopolitics as understood in Esposito's terms. That is, both Mphahlele's early autobiography, detailing the coming-of-age of a disenfranchised young black man making his way in a segregated township, and Coetzee's title character, Michael K., another disenfranchised young man but in this case, one who abandons the apartheid city for an undisclosed rural environ, a place where undertakes to make a form of life that will untether him from all political dispositifs. Form of life is, in an insufficient word, how Esposito proposes bios - a politics of/for life that is not unaware of the negative but offers instead a mode of being in the world that pursues such a form as will enable it live.