Re: <nettime> Agamben: No to Bio-Political Tattooing

["Soenke Zehle" <soenke.zehle@web.de>]

Eugene,

I have come across an essay recently that addresses the politico-economic
aporias you mention, maybe that'll be of use. German as well as a somewhat
bumpy English
version available via eurozine (see below), best, sz

Broeckling, Ulrich. "Human economics, human capital - a critique of
biopolitical economics." Mittelweg 36 11.1 (2003).
<http://www.eurozine.com/article/2003-03-04-broeckling-en.html>

"While biopolitics has become a catchword in present debates on applied
life-sciences, the Foucauldian origin of the concept is almost forgotten.
Foucault, and in his pathways Giorgio Agamben, analysed the efforts towards
a political regulation of the population as a biological entity, but did not
focus on the specific economic rationality of biopolitics. The contribution
highlights this dimension by studying two different approaches to an
economic theory of human life: first the concept of "Menschenökonomie", as
formulated by the austrian social philosopher and sociologist Rudolf
Goldscheid in the years before World War I; second the theory of human
capital, whose most famous exponents are the US-economists Theodore W.
Schultz and Gary S. Becker."

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