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

这项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暴力提供更具体的见解，以便我们能够审问右翼民粹主义产生的种族暴力，并使我们更好地讨论是什么构成了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描述了种族主义(福柯，1975-76；阿甘本，1998；埃斯波西托，2008)，但自新冠肺炎大流行以来，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，有必要同时借鉴民粹主义和生物政治学来研究这个问题，因为民粹主义对提法和政治策略的强调意味着，没有以种族为由对历史及其对“人民”建设的影响进行彻底的审视，它只是提供了重新解释这些社会运动的话语建构的手段。然而，生物政治理论中缺失了这种规范元素。尽管像Mbembe(2003)这样的理论家提出了将种族置于他们工作的核心的生物政治学，但它过于专注于诊断。生物政治机制不是在政治真空中运行的，支撑这些机制的意识形态和话语值得调查。然而，在这两种思想中，关于如何将身体特征种族主义的问题上，仍然存在一个深刻而又无法面对的歧义。为了克服这一点，需要通过这个研究项目进行一次理论上的相遇。

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.