N.F. (Nicolas) Gäckle, MA
Experiential biopolitics: Pandemic essays on the life of experience
My thesis outlines a conceptualisation of experiential biopolitics and empirically grounds it in an observation of a transversal governmental concern for experiences of living-through the Covid-19 pandemic. I argue that experiential biopolitics marks a variation of a traditional biopolitics of the population. Enabled through a recalibration of the biopolitical imaginary of life that acknowledges life’s capacity to nurture experience, experiential biopolitics is conceptualised as a mode of governance that reflexively observes experiences of governance to gauge the limits of its own functioning.
The first part of the thesis engages in a theoretical reflection that reconstructs a peripheral yet pervasive concern for the life of experience permeating Foucault’s discussion of biopolitics. Not only is this concern analytically prefigured in an acknowledgement of the dynamic interplay between subjects engaging with their experience of being governed and recursive governmental attempts to re-enclose this experience. I argue that it is also genealogically encountered through traces of an experiential underside complementing the modern imaginary of life in reference to which biopolitics emerges. This underside surfaces in various archival moments that maintain a commitment to the normativity of life yet loosen it from the grip of the narrow confines of biological knowledge. Instead, they consider how this normativity expresses itself through the capacity to experience and to render environments experienceable, specifically when it comes to human life. Compiling and (re-)combining these traces allows for conceptualising experiential biopolitics along two vectors. First, experiential biopolitics alters the ontopolitical commitment of biopolitics, shifting from the observable reality of biological life to the reality-making reality of experiential life. Second, by acknowledging that the life of experience includes experiences of being-governed, experiential biopolitics probes a reflexive outlook on biopolitics that gauges how its functioning affects the livability of life and thus comes up against immanent limits.
The second part of the thesis analyses how experiential biopolitics unfolds in practice. It follows three problematisations of specific experiences that become subject to governmental discussions at different levels during the Covid-19 pandemic. First, it observes a concern for pandemic fatigue by which the World Health Organization alerts to the negative consequences that biopolitical emergency measures focused solely on a preservation of biological life have for the experiential livability of this pandemic life, which eventually risks undermining biopolitical goals themselves. Second, it turns to the concern for pandemic hope/lessness by which McKinsey acknowledges the risk of disillusionment confronting pandemic workforces oriented towards the promise of a progressively unfolding future. In doing so, the business consultancy encounters the limits of the horizon as the temporal imaginary underlying the biopolitical governance of liberal lives and probes practical ways of settling into a stretched crisis present. Third, it explores a concern for pandemic dreams that emerges as a topic of widespread public discussion. Mobilising dreams provided a vehicle for pandemic subjects to grasp their exposure to the pandemic event on an affective level and thus responded to a desire to go beyond relating objective biopolitical markers rationalising the pandemic everyday to their own lives. These empirical spaces allow for sketching a specifically pandemic variant of an experiential biopolitics that mobilises observations of pandemic experience to reflexively assess the interrelated limits of biopolitical imaginaries of governance, temporality, and subjectivity.
The thesis adds to various literatures in International Relations (IR). To critical discussions of modes of (global) governance that experiment with transcending the limits of modernist assumptions, its inquiry into experiential biopolitics adds for consideration that by pursuing a concern for its own limits, biopolitics mobilises a reflexive diagnosis of its own exhaustion to rejuvenate itself. Developing its conceptualisation of experiential biopolitics, the thesis picks up on a more recent interest in the status of experience in Foucault’s work in social theory and contributes an innovative re-reading of the biopolitical. Lastly, the thesis enriches IR’s discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic by interrogating a set of seemingly minor empirical spaces that subvert the biopolitical consensus by which the discipline has approached the event.
Supervisors:
This project is funded by the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture (ICOG).
| Last modified: | 17 September 2025 09.37 a.m. |