The Chance of a Life: A New Materialist Comparative Study on Biopoiesis

Abstract

The Chance of a Life: A New Materialist Comparative Study on Biopoiesis analyzes works of fiction, film, and poetry in order to develop a notion of biopoiesis. The dissertation grounds its analytic methodology in the writings of the French biochemist Jacques Monod, the French post-structuralist philosopher Louis Althusser, and the dissertation of Karl Marx. In so doing, the methodology consciously joins humanistic and scientific modes of thinking in order to articulate a concept of biopoetics that, in dialogue with biopolitics, diverges from the latter’s efforts to administer or control life. The role of the aleatory is explored as a material substrate for thinking the emergence of life that, in a new materialist spirit, challenges notions of teleology and dialectics. Insights from this discussion are then deployed in analyses of the novel Truismes, by the French author Marie Darrieussecq; the film La caza, by the Spanish director Carlos Saura; and selected poetry by the Spanish poets José Angel Valente and Fernando Merlo. Chapter 1 contemplates the figure of flesh Truismes in order to develop a bioepoetic understanding of the role of flight in a deterritorializing dynamic. Chapter 2 examines how, in La caza, the matter of biological disease bears on the questions of biopolitics and democracy. Chapter 3 analyzes poetic iterations of corporeality by Valente and Merlo in order to reveal an ethics of supplementarity in new materialism. The conclusion of the dissertation situates the chapters’ findings within received understandings of historical or vulgar materialism so that the dissertation’s own intervention can be contextualized.