Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

About the Author
Richard A. Barney (Edited By)
Richard A. Barney is an associate professor of English at the University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of Plots of Enlightenment: Education and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (Stanford University Press, 1999) and has edited several volumes, including Rhetorics of Plague, Early and Late for the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies (Winter 2010-11). He is currently at work on a book about the biopolitics of the sublime in eighteenth-century Britain.
Warren Montag (Edited By)
Warren Montag is the Brown Family Professor of Literature at Occidental College in Los Angeles. His most recent books include Althusser and His Contemporaries (Duke University Press, 2013) and The Other Adam Smith (Stanford University Press, 2014). He is also the editor of Decalages, a journal on Althusser and his circle, and the translator of Etienne Balibar's Identity and Difference: John Locke and the Invention of Consciousness (Verso, 2013).



Book Information
ISBN 9780823281718
Author Richard A. Barney
Format Paperback
Page Count 280
Imprint Fordham University Press
Publisher Fordham University Press