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Biopolitics Between Romanticism and Liberalism Intertwined with Romantic-Era Liberalism and Biopolitics

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Biopolitics Between Romanticism and Liberalism Intertwined with Romantic-Era Liberalism and Biopolitics Mitchell Literary Criticism | Political Theory | Science Studies “Infectious Liberty generatively reconceives Romantic literature as a set of counter-hegemonic techniques of biopolitical experimentation. Cast- Infectious Liberty ing Romanticism as an attempt ‘to steer the biopolitical techniques of liberalism toward more liberatory shores,’ Mitchell uncovers resources for our own grasp of neoliberalism and its relation to ecological crisis. In so doing, his scholarship serves the immense purpose of reconnecting the study of Romantic literature to each of the disciplinary domains that Infectious Liberty cohere, transformed, in Foucault’s theory of biopolitics.” —Amanda Jo Goldstein, University of California, Berkeley BIOPOLITICS BETWEEN Infectious Liberty traces the origins of our contemporary concerns about public health, world population, climate change, global trade, and government regula- ROMANTICISM AND LIBERALISM tion to a series of Romantic-era debates and their literary consequences. Through a series of careful readings, Robert Mitchell shows how a range of elements of modern literature, from character-systems to free indirect discourse, are closely Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism intertwined with Romantic-era liberalism and biopolitics. Eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century theorists of liberalism such as Adam Smith and Thomas Malthus drew upon the new sciences of population to develop a liberal biopolitics that aimed to coordinate differences among individuals by means of the culling powers of the market. Infectious Liberty focuses on such authors as Mary Shelley and William Wordsworth, who drew upon the sciences of population to develop a biopolitics beyond liberalism. These authors attempted what Rober- to Esposito describes as an “affirmative” biopolitics that rejects the principle of establishing security by distinguishing between valued and unvalued lives, seeks to support even the most abject members of a population, and proposes new ways of living in common. Infectious Liberty expands our understandings of liberalism and biopolitics—and the relationship between them—while also helping us to understand better the ways creative literature facilitates the project of re-imagining what the politics of life might consist of. ROBERT MITCHELL is Marcello Lotti Professor and Chair of English at Duke University, where he directs the Center for Interdisciplinary Studies in Science and Cultural Theory. His most recent book, Experimental Life: Vitalism in Romantic Science and Literature, won the Michelle Kendrick Memorial Book Prize and the BSLS Book Prize. Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors ROBERT MITCHELL FORDHAM UNIVERSITY PRESS New York www.fordhampress.com Cover image: Claudia Fontes, Foreigners, 2015. Photo by Bernard G Mills Cover design by Mark Lerner FORDHAM INFECTIOUS LIBERTY Sara Guyer and Brian McGrath, series editors Lit Z embraces models of criticism uncontained by conventional notions of history, periodicity, and culture, and committed to the work of reading. Books in the series may seem untimely, anachronistic, or out of touch with contemporary trends because they have arrived too early or too late. Lit Z creates a space for books that exceed and challenge the tendencies of our field and in doing so reflect on the concerns of literary studies here and abroad. At least since Friedrich Schlegel, thinking that affirms literature’s own untimeliness has been named romanticism. Recalling this history, Lit Z exemplifies the survival of romanticism as a mode of contemporary criticism, as well as forms of contemporary criticism that demonstrate the unfulfilled possibilities of romanticism. Whether or not they focus on the romantic period, books in this series epitomize romanticism as a way of thinking that compels another relation to the present. Lit Z is the first book series to take seriously this capacious sense of romanticism. In 1977, Paul de Man and Geoffrey Hartman, two scholars of romanticism, team- taught a course called Literature Z that aimed to make an intervention into the fundamentals of literary study. Hartman and de Man invited students to read a series of increasingly difficult texts and through attention to language and rhetoric compelled them to encounter “the bewildering variety of ways such texts could be read.” The series’ conceptual resonances with that class register the importance of recollection, reinvention, and reading to contemporary criticism. Its books explore the creative potential of reading’s untimeliness and history’s enigmatic force. INFECTIOUS LIBERTY Biopolitics between Romanticism and Liberalism Robert Mitchell Fordham University Press New York 2021 Publication of this open monograph was the result of Duke University’s participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), a collaboration of the Association of American Universities, the Association of University Presses, and the Association of Research Libraries. TOME aims to expand the reach of long- form humanities and social science scholarship including digital scholarship. Additionally, the program looks to ensure the sustainability of university press monograph publishing by supporting the highest quality scholarship and promoting a new ecology of scholarly publishing in which authors’ institutions bear the publication costs. Funding from Duke University Libraries made it possible to open this publication to the world. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Copyright © 2021 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third- party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com. Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data available online at https://catalog.loc.gov. Printed in the United States of America 23 22 21 5 4 3 2 1 First edition Contents Preface vii Introduction 1 Part I: Romanticism, Biopolitics, and Literary Concepts 1. Biopolitics, Populations, and the Growth of Genius 23 2. Imagining Population in the Romantic Era: Frankenstein, Books, and Readers 50 3. Freed Indirect Discourse: Biopolitics, Population, and the Nineteenth- Century Novel 77 Part II: Romanticism and the Operations of Biopolitics 4. Building Beaches: Global Flows, Romantic- Era Terraforming, and the Anthropocene 113 5. Liberalism and the Concept of the Collective Experiment 148 6. Life, Self- Regulation, and the Liberal Imagination 186 Acknowledgments 231 Notes 233 Works Cited 291 Index 313 Preface When I first began working on the chapters of the project that eventually became this book, I did not intend to write a book about liberalism. Lib- eralism was not an intellectual movement that had ever particularly inter- ested me, and though as an undergraduate and graduate student I had dutifully read classics of liberal thought by authors such as John Locke, David Hume, Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, Isaiah Berlin, John Rawls, and Richard Rorty, I often battled against a sense of greyness and boredom as I worked through their texts. In comparison with the tradition of con- tinental philosophy that excited me—authors such as Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze— the “theorists” of liberalism seemed cramped, provincial, and reactionary. Moreover, the aspects of liberal theory that interested me—for example, Hume’s and Smith’s reflections on sympathy—seemed like points at which their liberalisms revealed theoretical contradictions. And yet I have ended up writing a book that is, at least from my perspective, quite fundamentally about liberalism. It thus may be useful to explain how my interest in lib- eralism developed, as this narrative clarifies the stakes of my project. Michel Foucault’s recently published lectures from the 1970s on both liberalism and biopolitics were, without a doubt, the key vector that linked my interest in continental philosophy with liberalism. Roberto Esposito’s rereading of Foucault in terms of what Esposito calls “the immunitary paradigm” further cemented that link. As a consequence, the understand- ing of liberalism articulated in this book is rather different from what I encountered as a student, and I am not sure that the classical authors of liberalism noted above would fully agree with my reading, heavily influ- enced by Foucault and Esposito, of liberalism as a mode of biopolitics. Or, to put this another way, I see the traditional understanding of liberalism that I encountered as a student as failing to grasp fully what was at stake in the work of authors such as Locke, Smith, Mill, and Hayek. Yet even as Foucault provided an important theoretical lens with which to reenvision liberalism, his work was not the origin of this project but rather a means for me to think further the relationship of my research interests to a series of existential commitments and hopes. To begin
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