The reader documents the results of a research project at the Jan van Eyck Academy and three symposia on the subject of “biopolitics”, which dealt with the topos of biopolitics in the context of the medium of film, “film” understood as a medium that was to assume a key function for the historical avant-gardes of the first half of the 20th century and in their revivals of the 1960s to 1990s.
The reader's questioning begins with the contradictions and aporias of “biopolitics” and pursues the “imperative of life optimization” postulated by Michel Foucault in the social revolutionary, transgressive practices of the aesthetic and political avant-gardes of the 20th century. Despite the methodological diversity of the contributions, the aim of this publication is to comprehensively examine the outlined field of life sciences from a philosophical, art | film studies and discourse theory perspective.
