The Biopolitical Child

• In Event: Early Modern Biopolitics

Abstract

Does it make sense to speak of an early modern biopolitics? If so, which models, what subjects, and what objects of analysis make sense? In this paper, I consider the figure of the child not only as a primary interlocutor with respect to notions of sovereignty but also as a uniquely dense node for the politicization of life in early modernity. I test out and revise a variety of biopolitical notions—population, security, bare life, immunity—with respect to the early modern child. With reference to the unusually child-filled works of William Shakespeare, I find in the child a primary figure of the corporeal transfer of sovereign perpetuity, the intended recipient of the humanizing technology of humanist educational thought, an instance of population (not the people), a primary figure associated with risk, precarity, and political futurity, and an instance of what I refer to as maximal and minimal instances of life.

Author

• Joseph A. Campana, Rice University