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Pharmacopornographic Epistemology

1881 Words8 Pages

Deconstructing the pharmacopornographic epistemology. Miguel Ángel Ferrer Gil In this paper I want to deconstruct the concept of pharmacopornography, introduced by the Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado in his book Testo Junkie. To do this it seems essential to me to rescue the sovereign and biopolitical epistemologies in the work of Foucault. The emergence of the concept of pharmacopornographic power happens thanks to Preciado’s criticism to the inability of Foucault to identify new subjective technologies and current body technologies, and therefore, the identification of resistant powers of sexual movements of his time. The emergence of this new pharmacopornographic regime doesn’t override these epistemologies but use them to fulfil …show more content…

The biopower instead is the "power that exerts a positive influence on life, that endeavours to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting it to precise controls and comprehensive regulations" . Biopower is a power that manages life, understood as an agent that increases, manages and distributes life. According to Foucault, this power makes a calculation of life, which is accompanied by the implementation of a series of institutions such as schools, the army, factories etc. This is divided mainly in two extremes, the first being the so-called anatomo-policy. This type of biopower coding is characterized by the disciplinary society that aims at the body, therefore, is anatomical and individualizing. The second differentiation corresponds to the biopolitics of populations, which differs sharply with the anatomical policy because no longer focuses exclusively on the body, but on the populations. If in the sovereign society the dying and letting to live prevailed, in the biopolitical society, the anatomo-politics and the biopolitics of the populations, it is the cousin, instead, to make live, to let die. In the words of Foucault, the strategic objective to which the heterogeneous devices of power are directed is …show more content…

It must be acknowledged beforehand that Foucault turns out to be an inspiration for critical theory of contemporary genre and queer politics, since: “Despite his distrust of affirmative policies of gays and lesbians, his original analyses on power, the margins of reason, the manufacturing processes of the abnormal and the perverse, the capacity to produce bodies and subjects that have institutions like the clinic, the prison or the scientific disciplines, are going to suppose one of the fundamental theoretical sources of the militancy and the queer

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