Macalester College DigitalCommons@Macalester College Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects Media and Cultural Studies Spring 2010 The iopB olitical Unconscious: Not-All Persons Are Political Ross G. Shields Macalester College,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/hmcs_honors Part of the Comparative Literature Commons, Continental Philosophy Commons, Ethics and Political Philosophy Commons, Feminist Philosophy Commons, German Literature Commons, Logic and Foundations of Mathematics Commons, Metaphysics Commons, and the Other Philosophy Commons Recommended Citation Shields, Ross G., "The iopoB litical Unconscious: Not-All Persons Are Political" (2010). Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects. Paper 3. http://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/hmcs_honors/3 This Honors Project is brought to you for free and open access by the Media and Cultural Studies at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in Media and Cultural Studies Honors Projects by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. The Biopolitical Unconscious: Not-All Persons Are Political Ross Gillum Shields An honors thesis for the Department of Humanities and Media and Cultural Studies Advisor: A. Kiarina Kordela, German Studies and HMCS Macalester College – May 3, 2010 Abstract: It is a tenet of post-structuralist theory that discursive series fail in their attempts to constitute themselves as totalities. A system can fail in two distinct ways—from Kant’s dynamic and mathematic failures of reason, to Jacques Lacan’s equation of the two failures of language with the two failures (male and female) of sex. Biopolitical theory offers the most recent account of failure and collapse, now on the geopolitical scale.