Amount Awarded: $10,516
"Political Economies of Life in Early Modern France" proposes to hold a 2.5-day workshop on the Berkeley campus. Our subject is the emergence of "life" as a problem in the early modern period. This period witnessed the rise of demography and population statistics, the origin of modern economics in the specifically French science of "physiocracy" which argued that only agriculture created wealth and which focused attention on the physical state of the peasantry and away from the fearsome hunger of the urban poor. While many scholars and critics have noted the rise of economic man, they have been less interested in the specific power effects of the fact that the economic subject, as opposed to the legal or the political one, was conceived of above all as a form of life. Life itself, moreover, became a resource to be managed, regulated, and watched over. Our aim is to study the specific contribution of literature to the problem of life. We seek to understand how literature participated in and contested the new discourses and practices of life. Our project will make an important contribution to literary and cultural studies and will intervene in critical political-philosophical debates.