Brain and Biopolitics.

Martin WeißWhether it is a question of medical ethics or the organization of health care, human life is increasingly becoming the subject of politics these days. This was not always the case, at least if the French philosopher Michel Foucault (1926-1984) is to be believed. According to Foucault, politics, or the sovereign, whether it was an absolutist ruler or a democratically decisive popular assembly, was for a long time more concerned with gaining land and organizing public life, while the private sphere of citizens and their biological life functions did not interest politics. Then, in the course of the 17th and fully in the 18th century, the state suddenly begins to be interested in the bare life of its citizens. State hospitals and insane asylums are established, hygienic regulations are enacted, and the reproduction and multiplication of citizens becomes a primary concern of the state. Life as such becomes the object and resource of politics. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (b. 1942) assumes that bare life has always been the actual object of politics, because to be a citizen of a state means, as the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) already stated, to grant the sovereign a monopoly on the use of force and to renounce any use of force oneself. But this also means that being a citizen means being at the mercy of the state, insofar as it is the sovereign who exercises the "power over life and death," as Foucault defines it. That an essential characteristic of politics consists in this power of the sovereign over the lives of its citizens is shown, for example, in the determination of general conscription in the case of war, the at least considered justification of torture, or the discussed possibility of shooting down hijacked passenger planes together with the innocent passengers, if thereby "worse things" could be prevented. All these examples show that the state, "founded for the sake of survival" and "existing for the sake of the good life," as Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) puts it, always has a dark side, because the protective power over life always includes the permission to kill. Admittedly, it remains to be hoped with Agamben that there is an alternative to this politics based on the idea of sovereignty. What this community beyond state structures should look like, however, remains an aspect that Agamben also leaves in the dark.

Martin Weiß, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Mag. Martin G. Weiss is head of the Institute for Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt. He studied philosophy, German and Italian language and literature at the University of Vienna. Afterwards research assistant at the German Dictionary of the Brothers Grimm in Berlin, at the Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic Theological Faculty of the University of Graz. Scholarship holder of the Centro per gli Studi Religiosi in Trento, the Nietzsche-Kolleg in Weimar, the Research Platform Life-Science-Governance of the University of Vienna and Visiting Scholar at the Rhetoric Department of UC Berkeley. Head of research project Ethical Aspects of DNA-Analysis for Family Reunification in Austria, Finland and Germany. Research interests: Bioethics, biopolitics, Italian philosophy, phenomenology. Publications (selection): Bios and Zoë. Human Nature in the Age of its Technical Reproducibility. Ed. by M. G. Weiß. Frankfurt/M. Suhrkamp 2009; Gianni Vattimo. Introduction. 3rd ed. Vienna Passages 2012; At the Border. The biotechnological surveillance of migration. Ed. by T. Heinemann & M. G. Weiß. Frankfurt/M. 2016; From Existentialism to National Socialism? Martin Heidegger's thinking after the Black Notebooks. In: History and present of existential philosophy. Ed. v. D. Sölch. Basel 2021, 160-180.

Silvia Stoller
What "insights into the brain" (Simon Hippenmeyer) are actually available to us? To what extent do people have access to their own brains? How do we – as ordinary people – experience something like a "brain"? If at all. Silvia Stoller explores these questions from a phenomenological perspective, that is, from the perspective of a philosophy of experience. She thus expands the scientific approach with a lifeworld approach. This again gives rise to many new questions. One of these questions is how scientific and life-world knowledge can be related to each other.

Silvia Stoller is a university lecturer and teaches at the University of Vienna (Gender Department, Institute of Philosophy) and the Karl-Franzens-University Graz (Institute of Pedagogy and Educational Science). Main areas of teaching and research are: Phenomenology, Gender Studies, Masculinity Studies, Animal Studies, Body Theory, Posthumanism as well as Existential Philosophy (Gender, Age, Love, Pain, Laughter, Play).