Biocapitalism: a new older conception

From a few years, some authors like Nikolas Rose or Monica Greco, are talking about the relationship between some bio-concepts, as life, living or the biotic; and neoliberalism or capitalism. Despite of their proposals are quite interesting because they allows us to understand how our current economic realm is impacting on what is life and how is this life; today we want to show another approach to the concept of Biocapitalism. 

Classically, biocapitalism has been understood within a new economic space (bioeconomy), whose new form of capital is biocapitalism. In this sense, they are emerging a new kind of regime of truth, based on the true of the economy. Thus, life can be isolated, dilimited, mobilized, etc. at the basis of a value (Rose, 2006).

Currently, our research group are working in a turn of the screw over this concept. In this vein, etymologically, capital means "head" or "leader", "the center or the top of something", "the most important thing on a set of things"; then, the word "biocapitalism" has to do with locating the bio, that is to say, life or the living, in the center or in the spotlight. 

Although it may seem that this is a naïf definition, it makes sense within our previous work, where we have inquired about the key rol of life in the current world (you can check it here and here or in our recent papers, here and here), Our next aim is to develop this concept in order to write a paper where biocapitalism can be linked with the notion of scenario, and illustrated with some extracts from some documents and images. We will show an abstract when this work is finished.

References: 

Rose, N. (2006). The Politics of Life Itself: Biomedicine, Power, and Subjectivity in the Twenty-First Century. New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Photo Credit: Flickr, User Andrew Hudson