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Outlawry And The Experience Of The (Im)Possible: Deconstructing Biopolitics, Mary J. Bunch

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

Outlawry is a legal penalty that banishes wrongdoers from the community; it refers to a refusal to obey the law and a withdrawal of legal rights. Although outlawry is obsolete in western criminal law, Giorgio Agamben links it to modern biopolitics. As outlawry is appropriated to preserve the law, and as the law takes life as its object, the subject of politics disappears. Yet biopolitics also occurs alongside a threat to sovereignty posed by outlawry, and a shift away from the subject as a site of emancipatory politics, toward a politics of difference. Taking a post-structural approach, this project examines …