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PROJECTION OF THE CONCEPT OF BIOPOLITICS IN THE LATVIAN NOVEL SERIES "WE. LATVIA, THE 20th CENTURY"
Abstract
Biopolitics is an interdisciplinary field combining biology and politics. It is a study of politics whose subject is life administration according to the residence of citizens in order to “secure and sustain the manifold manifestations of human life and order them” and “to study the strategies and mechanisms by which human life processes are managed according to the knowledge of authoritarian regimes, power and process of subjectivizing” [1]. This term was created by Rudolf Kjellen in his work “The Great Powers”. One of the meanings assigned to the term “biopolitics” is social and political power over life. Biopolitics is an innovative interdisciplinary concept whose principles can be formulated by opening up different perspectives and comprehensions between biology and political science. Biopolitics is characterized by both inheritance and overlapping, which, in terms of identity, open up the possibility of comprehending and describing “one’s own”, i.e. belonging to one, as well as recognizing the adopted or the inherited. Biopolitics is questioning and analyzing resistance and practices of freedom and biopolitical theories are focusing on the concepts of ‘care of the self’. Such approach is closely related to self-representation of the post-totalitarian society, support to explain the concepts of domination, power, “silencing” of public opinion as the factors that determine the domination and control, and foster false consciousness and one-dimensional life. These processes are vividly demonstrated by the biopolitical concepts related to the identity representation of the totalitarian and post-totalitarian literature: victimization and self-involvement (self-colonization), the concept of the powerless or the infirm, commemoration. They will be excerpted and analyzed in the historical novel series “WE. Latvia, the 20th Century”, dwelling on the previous century in Latvia, each with a certain time line.
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