• Media type: E-Article
  • Title: Wertkörper : Zur Ökonomisierung des menschlichen Körpers im Zeichen von Globalisierung und Neoliberalismus : Zur Ökonomisierung des menschlichen Körpers im Zeichen von Globalisierung und Neoliberalismus
  • Contributor: Kunow, Rüdiger
  • Published: Vereinigung zur Kritik der politischen Okonomie e.V., 2015
  • Published in: PROKLA. Zeitschrift für kritische Sozialwissenschaft, 45 (2015) 178
  • Language: Without Specification
  • DOI: 10.32387/prokla.v45i178.228
  • ISSN: 2700-0311; 0342-8176
  • Keywords: Environmental Engineering
  • Origination:
  • Footnote:
  • Description: Recent advances in the fields of genomics and biotechnology have greatly expanded the discretionary autonomy of human beings over their bodies. Biology has so become a new and alluring terrain for the enlightenment project of self-realization and selffulfilment. These developments have been co-evolving with the global expansion of neoliberal capitalism. This article states that there is a common logic at work in both areas, leading not only to the emergence of a global market in biological materials but also to a re-calibration of the biology of human life into lively capital. For this reason, the new „freedom“ of constructing the body according to one’s own preferences and desires in a dialectical inversion entails new obligations and constraints. In the end, only the technologically enhanced human body is fit for the neoliberal world of social cut-backs and can avoid being consigned to a new, this time biologically defined underclass.
  • Access State: Open Access