Timothy Mathews

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Poetic Biopolitics
Practices of Relation in Architecture and the Arts
Edited by Peg Rawes, Stephen Loo, and Timothy Mathews
I B Tauris/Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016

https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/poetic-biopolitics-9780857725714/




As the French philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault defined the concept, biopolitics is the extension of state control over both the physical and political bodies of a population. Poetic Biopolitics is a positive attempt to show how the often destructive effects and affects of biopolitical power structures can be deconstructed not only critically but poetically in the arts and humanities: in architecture, art, literature, modern languages, performance studies, film and philosophy. It is an interdisciplinary response to the contemporary global community conflict, and the crisis in social and environmental wellbeing. Structured in three parts - biopolitical bodies and imaginaries, voices and bodies, and social and environmental turbulence - this innovative book meshes performative and visual poetics with critical theory and feminist philosophy. It examines the complex expressions of our physical and psychic lives through artefact, body, dialogue, image, installation, and word.


I remember how free I felt, working on this book with many different kinds of thinker and practitioner, all differently appealing to the aesthetic in trying to reshape the relation of life to politics, and the environment. I remember how encouraged I felt by the space of the book, how it allowed me to develop my own sense of creativity in critical writing, and how much I needed that creative support to write about vulnerability, and the seductions of power.  


Saying anything impersonalises what we are trying to say. It seems we need a poetry to say what is personal, but also to say what escapes us personally.
To make sense to you, I appeal, and not just freely, to a place which is occupied by many bodies, not just mine. Perhaps we will find a poetry to show the abstraction we make of the body in speaking, in seeking to understand and seeking to be understood.  
What these two writers share, Roland Barthes and Luce Irigaray, is a deep disquiet about the vulnerability of any sense of difference at all. What I want to explore is the different kinds of optimism which each one in her writing, in his writing, places in the idea of rebuilding difference, of living with difference and through it.
Timothy Mathews,
Towards a Loving Embrace, in this book. 



This is a profoundly optimistic book – a collection or collective of fascinatingly diverse, attentive chapters, working together to examine the many “expressions of positively differentiated life” and singing out for the vital part aesthetic practices play in producing relations between bodies and space, opening out newly affirmative ways of thinking, conversing, making writing and living.
Kate Briggs


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