Josef Barla: Making Death Through Producing Life

Organized by the Center for Environmental and Technology Ethics - Prague (CETE-P), Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences

Detailed information

Josef Barla is Interim Professor of Sociology at the Institute of Sociology of the Goethe University Frankfurt and PI in the German Research Foundation (DFG)-funded research training group Fixing Futures: Technologies of Anticipation in Contemporary Societies. He is the author of The Techno-Apparatus of Bodily Production: A New Materialist Theory of Technology and the Body (transcript, 2019), Biokapital: Beiträge zur Kritik der politischen Ökonomie des Lebens (co-edited with Vicky Kluzik and Thomas Lemke, Campus, 2022) and Living Techno-Natures: Biohybrid Objects, Life, and Technology (co-edited with Marco Tamborini, Routledge, in preparation).

Abstract
In this talk, I will explore how advances in synthetic biology and genetic engineering transform the relationship between life and death under contemporary biocapitalism. Discussing two cases of synthetically produced mosquitoes designed to combat vector-borne diseases by targeting their own species, I will argue that these organisms function not only as (lively) commodities but also as metabolically working bodies. These mosquitoes, as I will show, engage in a specific form of labor, termed ‘metabolic death work’, which aims at the eradication of fellow members of their species, thereby generating a unique form of value, introduced as ‘necrovalue’. Complementing the notion of ‘biovalue’, the concept of necrovalue highlights how death is reimagined as a site of value production in molecular biology and beyond. By applying these concepts to the analysis of both cases of synthetically produced organisms, I will demonstrate that death enters the realm of the political economy in novel ways, as capital gains full control over the reproductive capacities of such engineered life forms.

The event is funded by Strategy AV21.

For further information please see the CETE-P website