German Primera Villamizar

My research has focused on the relationship between politics, life and violence. Drawing upon the works of Michel Foucault, Nikolas Rose, Roberto Esposito, Giorgio Agamben (to whom I devoted my PhD thesis) among others, I have approached questions surrounding the way in which biological life enters the political terrain, recasting the very nature of political power. Indeed, my research has been focused on biopolitics but it has also developed an original argument as to how Italian biopolitical theory relates to Deconstruction and Post-Structuralism. For instance, in a chapter entitled ‘Violence, Biopolitics and Resistance: The Meaning of Violence in the work of Giorgio Agamben’ published in Gavin Rae and Emma Ingala eds. The Meanings of Violence: From Critical Theory to Biopolitics (London: Routledge, Forthcoming), I trace the notion of resistance as a suspension of the metaphysical machine in the traditions of Critical Theory, Deconstruction and Biopolitical Thinking from Walter Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben, via Jacques Derrida.

In my first book The political Ontology of Giorgio Agamben (London:Bloomsbury) I interrogate the relation between radical philosophy, archaeology and political ontology. Indeed, I am interested in the ways in which forms of relational ontology underpin the entire history of contemporary critical theory and radical philosophy.

In previous years, I have written and published about neoliberalism, sovereignty and governmentality from the perspective of French Poststructuralism and Italian Thought. I have presented this work at specialised conferences in New York, Madrid, Bristol, Palermo and Brighton with some of the leading scholars in radical theory. Moreover, through my research on political violence and biopolitics, I have approached questions surrounding the notion of exclusion and its relation to liberal democracy. This work has allowed me to take part in post-marxist debates on Populism and radical democracy that have taken place in Buenos Aires (2015) and Brighton (2016 and 2017) within the framework of the project: Transnational Populist Politics.