A meticulously conceptualized and eloquently argued ethico-rhetorical critique of neoliberal modernity and an impassioned disaffirmation of its biopolitical rationality. Murray excuses no one, least of all himself, from complicity in the necessarily lethal but disavowed infrastructural conditions and social norms of our economic and political present. Making live and letting die: A necessarily twinned, fateful, but cunningly intransitive symmetry. This is a book not just to be read and then read again, but also to be thought about for a very long time.
Barbara A. Biesecker, author of Addressing Postmodernity: Kenneth Burke, Rhetoric, and a Theory of Social Change Stuart Murray is a beautiful writer and a meticulous thinker. Each of the case studies in this pathbreaking book offers a moving close-up designed to challenge biopolitics from the inside, mounting a defense against its ontologizing of life by homing in on the death that it necessitates. Murray invites the dead and dying to haunt the logics and spaces of biopolitical life and (so) exposes our complicity in a regime that delivers death in the name of life.
Diane Davis, author of Inessential Solidarity: Rhetoric and Foreigner Relations Murrays account of biopolitics in an age of neoliberalism is timely, lucid, and original. Rather than attending to the management of populations and the production of norms of life, Murray poses the urgent and necessary question of the deaths that make life and its affirmation possible. Arguing for a political paradigm shift in the norms and demands of life, Murray focuses on the loss, death, and silence that makes contemporary biopolitics possible. This is a remarkable and valuable book.
Claire Mary Colebrook, author of Deleuze and the Meaning of Life
