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Melinda Cooper's forceful Life as surplus is a political economy of the exploitation of life in the biotech era that exposes the modes of re/production attuned to late twentieth-century neoliberal capitalism. The book concentrates on the processes by which the 'emergent possibilities' in the life sciences became increasingly entangled with the 'project of U.S. neoliberalism'. It traces convincingly the concrete mechanisms--political, legislative and regulatory--operating at the level of international relations by which post-welfare US bioeconomic trends extended globally, for instance through intellectual property laws. Cooper's fascinating account offers a gripping analysis of the accelerated rush for the 'untapped biovalue stored in life' (BioSocieties, 2007: 287). What she firmly and vividly exposes, however, is that biovalue, the promissory surplus of life, has come to be perceived less as a stored resource than a permanent source of regeneration. Accordingly, the expectation of a return of investment in life itself has lost any sense of limits to growth. At the core of Life as surplus is the unveiling of an economic logic and a life culture that goes beyond the commodification of life to engage in a 'delirious' venture, 'an excess of promise'--economic, scientific and even religious--that aims to capture the process of emergent life. At the same time, Cooper doesn't mince her words about the global inequalities, violence, ecological destruction and reinstatements of oppressive moral orders involved in this course for limitless life: an 'actual devastation' of life in the present.
This book is not about an economic superstructure determining contemporary life sciences, its originality is rather to expose a dynamic tissue in which socio-political interests and scientific developments integrate, opening possibilities for 'life itself' to collaborate in its own reproduction as surplus. Studying sites of coalescence between biological and economic epistemologies, Life as surplus engages in its first section with developments in molecular biology, microbiology, infectious disease research and space biology. The second section approaches the emerging sciences of tissue engineering, contemporary assisted reproductive technologies and embryonic stem cell research. Drawing upon diverse sources (policy texts, theories of biology, political economy), this book offers different points of insertion which will appeal to different audiences across the disciplinary spectrum--those interested in contemporary life sciences (biology, environmental sciences, global...