Books by Amedeo Policante
Pluto Press, 2022
Mutant Ecologies traces the spinning of new synthetic threads into the web of life. It is a criti... more Mutant Ecologies traces the spinning of new synthetic threads into the web of life. It is a critical cartography of the shifting landscapes of capital accumulation conjured by recent developments in genomic science, genome editing and the biotech industry.
CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™ cows, Friendly™ Mosquitoes, humanised mice, pigs growing human organs – these are but a few of the dazzling new life-forms that have recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world, all promising to lubricate the circuits of capital accumulation in distinct ways. The deliberate induction of genetic mutations is increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.
While the Nobel Committee recently proclaimed the life sciences to have entered 'a new epoch', the authors show how these technological innovations continue to operate within a socio-historical context defined by the iron rules of capitalist competition and exploitation. Capital no longer contents itself with simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs their internal metabolism, and in that way it redesigns the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. It is driving a biological revolution, which will ripple through the everyday lives of people everywhere.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Pluto Press, 2022
Mutant Ecologies traces the spinning of new synthetic threads into the web of life. It is a criti... more Mutant Ecologies traces the spinning of new synthetic threads into the web of life. It is a critical cartography of the shifting landscapes of capital accumulation conjured by recent developments in genomic science, genome editing and the biotech industry.
CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™ cows, Friendly™ Mosquitoes, humanised mice, pigs growing human organs – these are but a few of the dazzling new life-forms that have recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world, all promising to lubricate the circuits of capital accumulation in distinct ways. The deliberate induction of genetic mutations is increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.
While the Nobel Committee recently proclaimed the life sciences to have entered 'a new epoch', the authors show how these technological innovations continue to operate within a socio-historical context defined by the iron rules of capitalist competition and exploitation. Capital no longer contents itself with simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs their internal metabolism, and in that way it redesigns the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. It is driving a biological revolution, which will ripple through the everyday lives of people everywhere.
See: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745344522/mutant-ecologies/
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
IL MANIFESTO - (Federico Rahola) Recensione di Policante, I Nuovi Mercenari
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The image of the pirate is at once spectral and ubiquitous. It haunts the imagination of internat... more The image of the pirate is at once spectral and ubiquitous. It haunts the imagination of international legal scholars, diplomats and statesmen involved in the war on terror. It returns in the headlines of international newspapers as an untimely ‘security threat’. It materializes on the most provincial cinematic screen and the most acclaimed works of fiction. It casts its shadow over the liquid spatiality of the Net, where cyber-activists, file-sharers and a large part of the global youth are condemned as pirates, often embracing that definition with pride rather than resentment. Today, the pirate remains a powerful political icon, embodying at once the persistent nightmare of an anomic wilderness at the fringe of civilization, and the fantasy of a possible anarchic freedom beyond the rigid norms of the state and of the market. And yet, what are the origins of this persistent ‘pirate myth’ in the Western political imagination? Can we trace the historical trajectory that has charged this ambiguous figure with the emotional, political and imaginary tensions that continue to characterize it? What can we learn from the history of piracy and the ways in which it intertwines with the history of imperialism and international trade? Drawing on international law, political theory, and popular literature, The Pirate Myth offers an authoritative genealogy of this immortal political and cultural icon, showing that the history of piracy – the different ways in which pirates have been used, outlawed and suppressed by the major global powers, but also fantasized, imagined and romanticised by popular culture – can shed unexpected light on the different forms of violence that remain at the basis of our contemporary global order.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
In questo libro si esplorano i modi in cui la guerra è cambiata: privatizzandosi, diventando onni... more In questo libro si esplorano i modi in cui la guerra è cambiata: privatizzandosi, diventando onnipresente, integrandosi sempre di più ai normali processi economici cui tutti partecipiamo. Ci invita a soffermarci sul legame costitutivo che da sempre lega il mercato alla guerra, il commercio alla violenza, l'espansione economica all'imperialismo. Tratteggia la storia di questo rapporto seguendo le vicende della figura storica del mercenario e del corsaro, simboli di una rinascita dell'organizzazione mercantile della guerra, il cui nuovo volto emerge passo dopo passo. Il libro lindaga quindi le attività delle potentissime compagnie militari che oggi fanno e disfano paesi, proteggono con le armi governi corrotti da popoli in rivolta, e permettono il continuo sfruttamento da parte delle grandi multinazionali delle risorse della terra. Mettendo in fila le vicende dei nuovi mercenari del mercato globale, dall'Africa all'Afghanistan, dall'America Latina all'Iraq, scopriamo fino a che punto la guerra sia parte integrante del mercato mondiale, una componente fondamentale del suo funzionamento complessivo. La mercificazione della sicurezza non è semplicemente la nascita di un nuovo fiorente settore imprenditoriale, è la traduzione diretta della logica del mercato nel mondo della sopraffazione e della violenza.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Papers by Amedeo Policante
Human Geography, Dec 5, 2023
New genome editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 aspire to automate and standardize laboratory p... more New genome editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 aspire to automate and standardize laboratory practices of genetic engineering at the molecular scale. They have been promoted as a 'revolutionary' means of production, which will revitalize industry, transform agribusiness and adapt it to changing climatic conditions. To realize this vision, a fundamental regulatory shift is now being enacted by multiple national governments around the world from Argentina to Canada, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, China and the European Union. As corporate science is directly in the service of private entities guided by a strict market rationality, while public research is increasingly pushed to prioritize immediate 'industrial applications' and the achievement of measurable 'socio-economic impact', genomic interventions are mostly geared towards expanding, accelerating and securing the accumulation of capital on a global scale. Structural market demands are embodied in gene-edited bodies produced for commercialization. While the emerging international regulatory regime for gene-edited organisms has been largely shaped by discussions focused on technical questions of health and safety, this tendency indicates the necessity of a wider democratic debate that would include the socioeconomic , ethical and ecological concerns recently stressed by indigenous and peasant movements around the world. How will these new GM bodies transform the way people live and work in agricultural lands, industrial facilities, barnyards and slaughterhouses, in biotech labs and medical clinics? How will they affect lived ecologies? What types of multi-species worlds are being constructed through bioengineering practices, by whom and according to what political visions?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Lo Squaderno: Explorations in Space and Society, 2024
The article sets out to explore the surfacing of the cybernetic notion of life that has become so... more The article sets out to explore the surfacing of the cybernetic notion of life that has become so relevant in the life sciences – namely, the understanding of the living body as interfacing with the environment via continuous feedback loop mechanisms – all the way to contemporary cybernetics and its expanded experimentation with synthetic biology and metabolic engineering. Since the 1970s, the convergence of cybernetics and genetics has engendered new conceptions of life and speculative futures of biopolitical control. Today, cybernetic loops increasingly function as an abstract diagram of control, which enables the government and direction of life processes at multiples scales from the molecular to the planetary.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Scienza&Politica, 2024
The article investigates the growing role played by living infrastructures in the Anthropocene. I... more The article investigates the growing role played by living infrastructures in the Anthropocene. In particular, it investigates the complex biopolitical economy underlying the infrastructuralisation of the poplar tree – a botanical genus, whose metabolism is increasingly mobilised in public and private initiatives aimed at fighting desertification, environmental toxicity and climate change. Focusing on the ongoing expansion of poplar plantations, it discusses the integration of living infrastructures into financial markets and carbon credit schemes and interrogates the new frontiers of capital accumulation opened by the molecular engineering of living infrastructures.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Human Geography, 2023
New genome editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 aspire to automate and standardize laboratory p... more New genome editing techniques such as CRISPR-Cas9 aspire to automate and standardize laboratory practices of genetic engineering at the molecular scale. They have been promoted as a 'revolutionary' means of production, which will revitalize industry, transform agribusiness and adapt it to changing climatic conditions. To realize this vision, a fundamental regulatory shift is now being enacted by multiple national governments around the world from Argentina to Canada, Brazil, Australia, South Africa, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, China and the European Union. As corporate science is directly in the service of private entities guided by a strict market rationality, while public research is increasingly pushed to prioritize immediate 'industrial applications' and the achievement of measurable 'socio-economic impact', genomic interventions are mostly geared towards expanding, accelerating and securing the accumulation of capital on a global scale. Structural market demands are embodied in gene-edited bodies produced for commercialization. While the emerging international regulatory regime for gene-edited organisms has been largely shaped by discussions focused on technical questions of health and safety, this tendency indicates the necessity of a wider democratic debate that would include the socioeconomic , ethical and ecological concerns recently stressed by indigenous and peasant movements around the world. How will these new GM bodies transform the way people live and work in agricultural lands, industrial facilities, barnyards and slaughterhouses, in biotech labs and medical clinics? How will they affect lived ecologies? What types of multi-species worlds are being constructed through bioengineering practices, by whom and according to what political visions?
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Archivio antropologico mediterraneo
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Archivio Antropologico Mediterraneo, 2023
The article follows the ongoing transformation of genomic science into an industry – dedicated to... more The article follows the ongoing transformation of genomic science into an industry – dedicated to the systematic extraction, abstraction and manipulation of genetic material – and considers the new types of oceanic exploration that genomic research both presupposes and fosters. We argue that emergent practices of ocean bioprospecting are sparking new ways of thinking, living and exploiting marine ecosystems as «genomic mines». We chart the recent history of genomic bioprospecting operations in the global ocean – focusing on the Sorcerer II expedition (2004-2006) and the Tara Oceans project (2009-2013) – and recount the rise of the «ocean genome» as an object of knowledge and a target of extractivist practices. Finally, we theorize the peculiar global mobility of bioprospecting vessels as constituting a practice of social construction of the ocean: a peculiar form of scientific navigation, which is already engendering new social uses of marine biodiversity, new strategies of capital accumulation, as well as innovative representations of ocean ecosystems.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Archivio antropologico mediterraneo, 2023
L'articolo traccia la trasformazione della genomica in un'industria dedicata all’estrazione, astr... more L'articolo traccia la trasformazione della genomica in un'industria dedicata all’estrazione, astrazione e manipolazione di materiale genetico e si sofferma sui nuovi tipi di esplorazione oceanica che quest’industria presuppone e promuove. Ci soffermiamo in particolare sulla storia recente delle spedizioni scientifiche di bioprospezione in alto mare, concentrando la nostra attenzione sulle vicende della Sorcerer II e della Tara Oceans, ed evidenziando l’avvento dell’ocean genome come oggetto di studio e target estrattivo. Infine, l’articolo interpreta la mobilità delle navi scientifiche impiegate nel campionamento genomico e meta-genomico come una praxis nautica sui generis: una forma di navigazione estrattiva che sta già generando nuovi usi degli spazi marini, nuove strategie di accumulazione e nuove rappresentazioni degli spazi oceanici. Le pratiche di bioprospezione oceanica stimolano nuovi modi di pensare, esperienziare ed estrarre valore dalle profondità marine.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
This thesis has as its subject piracy and its relation to Empire. Through a methodological approa... more This thesis has as its subject piracy and its relation to Empire. Through a methodological approach, it investigates the ways in which different discourses, throughout modernity, have contributed to the construction of a ‘pirate legend’ that continue to animate our present. The first part of the dissertation is dedicated to a study of the pirate figure as it appears in the context of various global orders from antiquity until the early eighteenth century. In this context, I argue that the suppression of piracy was a constitutive moment in the early history of the world market. The second part follows the ways in which the spectre of eighteenth century piracy has continued to haunt modern international law, well after the dawn of the classic ‘golden age of piracy’. I argue that the evocation of the ‘pirate analogy’ has played an important role in: the history of nineteenth European imperialism, in the escalation to total war in the twentieth century, and today in the context of the w...
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Radical Philosophy, 2019
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Política Común, 2014
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
The Pirate Myth, 2016
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Global Discourse, 2013
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Books by Amedeo Policante
CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™ cows, Friendly™ Mosquitoes, humanised mice, pigs growing human organs – these are but a few of the dazzling new life-forms that have recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world, all promising to lubricate the circuits of capital accumulation in distinct ways. The deliberate induction of genetic mutations is increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.
While the Nobel Committee recently proclaimed the life sciences to have entered 'a new epoch', the authors show how these technological innovations continue to operate within a socio-historical context defined by the iron rules of capitalist competition and exploitation. Capital no longer contents itself with simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs their internal metabolism, and in that way it redesigns the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. It is driving a biological revolution, which will ripple through the everyday lives of people everywhere.
CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™ cows, Friendly™ Mosquitoes, humanised mice, pigs growing human organs – these are but a few of the dazzling new life-forms that have recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world, all promising to lubricate the circuits of capital accumulation in distinct ways. The deliberate induction of genetic mutations is increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.
While the Nobel Committee recently proclaimed the life sciences to have entered 'a new epoch', the authors show how these technological innovations continue to operate within a socio-historical context defined by the iron rules of capitalist competition and exploitation. Capital no longer contents itself with simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs their internal metabolism, and in that way it redesigns the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. It is driving a biological revolution, which will ripple through the everyday lives of people everywhere.
See: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745344522/mutant-ecologies/
Papers by Amedeo Policante
CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™ cows, Friendly™ Mosquitoes, humanised mice, pigs growing human organs – these are but a few of the dazzling new life-forms that have recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world, all promising to lubricate the circuits of capital accumulation in distinct ways. The deliberate induction of genetic mutations is increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.
While the Nobel Committee recently proclaimed the life sciences to have entered 'a new epoch', the authors show how these technological innovations continue to operate within a socio-historical context defined by the iron rules of capitalist competition and exploitation. Capital no longer contents itself with simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs their internal metabolism, and in that way it redesigns the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. It is driving a biological revolution, which will ripple through the everyday lives of people everywhere.
CRISPR crops, fast-growing salmons, heat-resistant Slick™ cows, Friendly™ Mosquitoes, humanised mice, pigs growing human organs – these are but a few of the dazzling new life-forms that have recently emerged from corporate and university laboratories around the world, all promising to lubricate the circuits of capital accumulation in distinct ways. The deliberate induction of genetic mutations is increasingly central to business operations in a number of sectors, from agriculture to pharmaceuticals.
While the Nobel Committee recently proclaimed the life sciences to have entered 'a new epoch', the authors show how these technological innovations continue to operate within a socio-historical context defined by the iron rules of capitalist competition and exploitation. Capital no longer contents itself with simply appropriating the living bodies of plants and animals. It purposefully designs their internal metabolism, and in that way it redesigns the countless living vectors that constitute the global biosphere. It is driving a biological revolution, which will ripple through the everyday lives of people everywhere.
See: https://www.plutobooks.com/9780745344522/mutant-ecologies/
also available in Italian (in Italiano): https://animaloci.org/guerre-ursine-immaginari-alpini-e-genealogie-animali/
of anaesthetic technologies – or as an analysis of the
contemporary medicalisation of everyday life – it is first
and foremost an attempt to perform what Foucault once
defined as ‘a critical ontology of ourselves’, a political
introspection ‘in which the critique of what we are is at
one and the same time the historical analysis of the limits
that are imposed on us and an experiment with the
possibility of going beyond them’.