Slow death
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Slow death is the process of physical wearing down of a specific population or people, described by Lauren Berlant. It can be considered a structurally motivated form of attrition under capitalism, and an instance of racialization. As an addition to the concepts of biopower and necropolitics, slow death describes the daily, lived attrition of subjects within “spaces of ordinariness”[1] that is not always encapsulated by biopower’s conceptual focus on sovereignty, agency, and disciplinary regimes.
Necropolitics[edit]
While Achille Mbembe's conceptualization of necropolitics as the exposure of populations to danger and death offers a picture of the structural wearing down of “the living dead”[2], slow death prioritizes the subject’s experience as often entwined between reproductions of biopower and bare life maintenance (see “Globesity” below). Mmbembe uses slavery, apartheid, and other racialized regimes as differing instances of necropower wielded over the body, exposing populations to life conditions of precarity. Meanwhile, slow death prioritizes certain subject’s “unheroizable”[3] life maintenance, including fast food consumption, drinking, and other ‘unhealthy’ habits – as a primary scene for the lived-in deterioration of populations.
"Globesity"[edit]
As a particular example of Berlant’s framework, the “obesity epidemic” or “globesity” becomes a scene of slow death in which the subject may be worn down by the very demands of reproducing life. In Berlant’s analysis, slow death thus allows for a disengagement from the rhetoric of crisis (see also: crisis theory; state of exception) that endemics and epidemics typically recall, allowing us instead to apprehend the ordinary acts of life maintenance in certain, exposed populations. In other words, “while death is usually deemed in contrast to life’s ‘extensivity’, in this domain dying and the ordinary reproduction of life are coexetensive”[4]. Obesity, understood in this way, can thus be reframed as the longer-term, embodiment of zoning, processed food-regimes, as well as to everyday life maintenance, most prevalent among working class and people of color[5]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ↑ Berlant, Lauren (Summer 2007). "Slow Death". Critical Inquiry. 33 (4): 758.
More particularly, I want to suggest that to con- tinue to counter the moral science of biopolitics, which links the political administration of life to a melodrama of the care of the monadic self, we need to think about agency and personhood not only in normative terms but also as activity exercised within spaces of ordinariness that does not always or even usually follow the literalizing logic of visible effectuality, bourgeois dramatics, and lifelong accumulation or fashioning.
- ↑ Mbembe, Achille (2003). "Necropolitics" (PDF). Public Culture. 15 (1): 11–40. doi:10.1215/08992363-15-1-11. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2015-10-10.
- ↑ Berlant, Lauren (Summer 2007). "Slow Death". Critical Inquiry. 33 (4): 760.
Of course this deployment of crisis is often explicitly and intention- ally a redefinitional tactic, a distorting or misdirecting gesture that aspires to make an environmental phenomenon appear suddenly as an event be- cause as a structural or predictable condition it has not engendered the kinds of historic action we associate with the heroic agency a crisis seems already to have called for.
- ↑ Berlant, Lauren (Summer 2007). "Slow Death". Critical Inquiry. 33 (4): 762.
- ↑ Ailshire, Jennifer (Summer 2011). "The Unequal Burden of Weight Gain: An Intersectional Approach to Understanding Social Disparities in BMI Trajectories from 1986 to 2001/2002". Social Forces. 90 (2): 397–423. doi:10.1093/sf/sor001. PMC 3570259. PMID 23413316.
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