From Biopolitics to Necro-Economics

So far, there has been no adequate consideration of Jean Baudrillard’s contribution to the discourse of biopolitics in Symbolic Exchange and Death. Following Frankfurt school philosopher Martin Saar’s study on genealogy as a distinct form of Nietzschean/Foucauldian critique, From Biopolitics to Necro-Economics: Towards a Genealogical Critique of the Political Economy of Death reconstructs Baudrillard’s theoretical intervention as a genealogy of the political economy of death while critically engaging central texts on biopolitics by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. Finally, the study links Baudrillard’s critique to Mike Hill and Warren Montag’s investigation into the lethal logic at the heart of liberal and neoliberal economic theory in The Other Adam Smith.

• Published in German by the German publishing house Transcript, July 2022