The Biopoiltics of Right-Wing Populism: The People, The Population and Racializing Assemblages

本研究旨在通过民粹主义研究和生命政治理论，为资本主义民主的当前条件下的种族暴力提供更具体的见解，以便我们能够质疑右翼民粹主义产生的种族暴力，并使我们能够更好地讨论什么构成了更民主的生命政治实践。我们目前生活在一个“民粹主义时刻”（Mouffe,2018），右翼民粹主义演员利用“精英”和“人民”之间的内部对抗，以种族为基础制造社会边界。这是由于对普通人生活的许多方面仍然缺乏民主控制（Canovan,1999）。此外，尽管生物政治理论确实提供了种族主义的解释（福柯，1975-76；阿甘本，1998；埃斯波西托，2008），但自2019冠状病毒病大流行以来，关于如何部署生物政治机制来监管“人民”及其外部的问题已经成为人们关注的焦点。我认为有必要通过民粹主义和生命政治来研究这个问题，因为民粹主义强调制定和政治策略，这意味着它没有对历史及其在种族基础上对“人民”建构的影响进行彻底的调查，它只提供了重新解释这些社会运动的话语建构的手段。然而，这种规范因素是生命政治理论所缺失的。尽管Mbembe（2003）等理论家提供了一种将种族置于其工作核心的生命政治描述，但它过于关注诊断。生命政治机制不是在政治真空中运作的，支撑它们的意识形态和话语值得调查。然而，在这两种思想体系中，关于种族化的身体特征仍然存在着深刻而未被正视的模糊性。理论上的相遇是必要的，这需要通过这个研究项目来克服。

This research aims to offer a more specific insight into racialised violence under current conditions of capitalist democracy by drawing upon populism studies and biopolitical theory so that we can interrogate racial violence produced by right-wing populism as well as put us in a better position to discuss what constitutes a more democratic practice of biopolitics. We currently live in a "populist moment" (Mouffe,2018) whereby the internal antagonism between "the elite" and "the people" has been exploited by right-wing populist actors to produce a social frontier on the grounds of race. This is due to the continued lack of democratic control over many aspects of ordinary people's lives (Canovan,1999). Additionally, although biopolitical theory does offer an account of racism (Foucault,1975-76; Agamben,1998; Esposito,2008), since the Covid-19 pandemic, questions around how biopolitical mechanisms are deployed to police "the people" and its outside have come to the forefront. I argue that it is necessary to study this problem by drawing on both populism and biopolitics because populism's emphasis on formulation and political strategy means that there is no thorough survey of history and its effects on the construction of "the people" on the grounds of race, it only offers the means to reinterpret the discursive construction of these social movements. Yet, this normative element is something that is missing from biopolitical theory. Although theorists such as Mbembe (2003) offer an account of biopolitics that situates race at the heart of their work, it is too focused on diagnoses. Biopolitical mechanisms do not operate in a political vacuum, and the ideologies and discourses which underpin them warrant investigation. Yet, in both bodies of thought, there remains a profound yet unconfronted ambiguity in how racialised body features. A theoretical encounter is required, which shall be staged through this research project to overcome this.