We are living in a time where the sketched epistemes of political rationality for which ‘life’ is the organizing object of politics (i.e., biopolitics) is being challenged. During the 1970s and beginning of 1980s theorists such as Foucault argued that the sovereign right to kill was increasingly displaced by the administrative compulsion to make live. That is, instead of ending violence or killing especially in the context of Europe and North America lethal conflict was redistributed through out the population turning politics into war by other means such as the withdrawal of the state from the household (i.e., oikos) and national life and hence with a more focus on biopolitics. In the Global South though theorists like Mbembe challenge Foucauldian biopolitics to argue that outside Europe and North America this governing of life (zoe) took a different form: necropolitics resulting from the histories of power relations such as slavery and colonization. Yet, theorists in the Global North such as Foucault insisted that the 1970s the life of power mutated increasing the neoliberal turn in government leaving our times and more concretely “the future as yet unthought.” This class begins with Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and Mbembe’s idea of necropolitics and asks: what are the stakes in thinking and practicing power today through the locus of biopolitics and/or necropolitics? What are the stakes in reading these tensions with respect to yesterday—and to tomorrow for the art of governing and power relations?

We begin by asking what and how relevant are these concepts today and also what directions politics have taken that would challenge or disrupt or even complicate what theorists like Foucault and Mbembe had in mind for the art of governing and the power of constituting life. For instance, is the notion of biopower sufficient to account for the contemporary