Artificiality and Enlightenment: From Sociobiology to Biosociality

Abstract

Michel Foucault identified a distinctively modern form of power, “bio-technico-power.” Sociobiology, as Marshall Sahlins and so many others have shown, is a social project: from liberal philanthropic interventions designated to moralize and discipline the poor and degenerate; to Rassenhygien and its social extirpations; to entrepreneurial sociobiology and its supply-side social sadism, the construction of society has been at stake. In sum, the new knowledges have already begun to modify labor practices and life processes in what Enlightenment botanists called nature's second kingdom. Contemporary normative judgments continue to affirm the superiority of the biological, the insecurity of human works, the risks linked to artificiality and the certitude that the initial situation-the Golden Pond or the Sierra-was incomparably better. Dagognet argues that nature has not been natural, in the sense of pure and untouched by human works, for millennia.

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