Biocriminality and the borders of public order

Abstract

In this presentation, I aim at exploring the notion of public order from a biopolitical point of view. It draws on the analysis of the state of exception by Giorgio Agamben, through which he studied the tendency of Western democracies to re-produce forms of sovereign power that bypass parliamentary democratic control. Departing from his analysis, I will argue that public order is one of the main forms through which these forms of sovereign power disseminate in a microphysical form, in almost every instance of the judicial system. Moreover, in a similar vein that the state of exception represents, for Agamben, a crucial dimension of the relation between the order of life and the order of the law, public order represents, in my view, a fundamental dispositive through which biopower regulates the social life of gender, sexuality, reproduction and kinship.