"Bio-politics and Peace"
KURIHARA Akira
last update: 20151223
Bio-politics and Peace
KURIHARA Akira
Abstract:
Bio-politics could be defined as the politics controlling human life and other life-systems. Appeared in the 18th century,
it has expanded all over the world in the 20th century. It decides which life is valuable to live and trains persons based on
the standard of productivity, normalcy, and usefulness for the nation and the society. It designes the nation and the society
on the one hand to improve the greatest happiness of the 'useful' majority, on the other to remake or expel 'useless' minority.
The social sphere has been organized in place of the public sphere based on economy to reproduce useful nation and homo-economics.
Bio-politics could be seen in demography, family-planning, education, medicine, health-care, sterilization, euthanasia, genocide, birth-defect
examination, and gene manipulation. Economy principle penetrates through the life sphere, the intimate sphere, the market sphere, and the social
sphere. The public sphere has vanished, and the eugenic peace has been resulted.
Alternative politics of the sufferers appears from the matter of life and death alongside bio-politics. It could appear in Japan among Minamata sufferers,
Hansen's disease sufferers, Hiroshima and Nagasaki sufferers, the Ainu, the Okinawa, handicapped persons, and others. Alternative politics could join universal
hospitality and the geopolitical thought of living together over the spherical surface of the globe. The sufferers of the bio-politics needs to find another
intimate sphere apart from economic family, or to reconstruct family. It also needs to construct plural public spheres directly on the new intimacy, passing over
or reorganizing the social sphere. In case of Minamata sufferers, they have picked up and conceptualized vernacular words: moyai (tie), nosari (gift),
tamashii (communality of lives) meni-sugaru (prayer and memory) and others, with which plural public spheres have been constructed. Alternative peace
would be realized on the rights of existence and difference.
REV: 20151223