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

本研究旨在通过借鉴民粹主义研究和生物政治理论，对当前资本主义民主条件下的种族化暴力提供更具体的见解，以便我们可以审问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是更民主的生物政治实践。我们目前生活在一个“民粹主义时刻”（Mouffe，2018），“精英”和“人民”之间的内部对立被右翼民粹主义行为者利用，以种族为由建立社会边界。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年）。此外，尽管生物政治理论确实提供了种族主义的解释（Foucault，1975-76; Agamben，1998; Esposito，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督“人民”及其外部的问题已经成为最前沿。我认为，有必要通过借鉴民粹主义和生物政治学来研究这个问题，因为民粹主义强调制定和政治策略，这意味着没有彻底调查历史及其对基于种族的“人民”建设的影响，它只是提供了重新解释这些社会运动的话语建设的手段。然而，这种规范性元素是生物政治理论所缺失的。尽管Mbembe（2003）等理论家提供了一个将种族置于其工作核心的生物政治学解释，但它过于关注诊断。生物政治机制并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研究。然而，在这两种思想体系中，种族化的身体特征仍然存在着深刻而未被正视的模糊性。需要一个理论上的遭遇，这将通过这个研究项目来克服这一点。

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.