Broadcast: Tuesday 5th May 2009.
The guests were Ben Dawson, Sean Legassick and Alex Douglas.
An examination of permanent states of emergency that use the threat of various forms of collapse and crisis as a means for sovereign control. Looking at empirical evidence and philosophical reasoning, we ask how might we better understand the notion of emergency and its relationship to state power.
The show was hosted by Seph Rodney.
Guest biographies:
Drawing on recent theorisations of the biopolitical, and responding to a new vitalism in much contemporary philosophy, Ben Dawson’s PhD investigates the allegation that, in modernity, ‘life’ is immediately politics, and focuses on connections in the late eighteenth century between the evolving discourse of rights, physical and metaphysical conceptions of the ‘vivifying principle’, and the ‘birth of biopolitics’.