My research project—in its current conceptualization—aims to advance the theoretical discussions of biopolitics and its mutations, by way of discussing death-related practices in 20th and 21th century Sweden. That is, instead of regurgitating prominent thinkers of biopolitics or its offsprings in an exegetical manner, the focus of the project is rather to take their approach further by way of a historical material. Thus, the past is used genealogically to, ultimately, intervene in the present. Previous areas of focus for me have been the changing of death-declaring practices—i.e. excluding previously living and rights-bearing bodies from the realm of rights through death—in relation to desirable transplantations from said body, where as of now I’m delving into death-help and euthanasia: on the one hand, to historize a contemporary, heated debate—potentially revealing a set of presuppositions, paving way for different perspectives—, on the other hand to discern biopolitical governance and its subjectivations of optimization with regards to its seemingly opposite end: the (desired) death of the biopolitical subject.

Central areas of interests among others, apart from the ones outlined above, are critical theory, health, suicide, control, economic rationality.

A selection from Stockholm University publication database

• Att styra de döda: hjärndöda undantag och rätten att dödförklara

  2019. Johan Jönsson.

  This study shows how the official death-declaring of bodies in 20^th century Sweden became inextricably linked to the modulation of a population’s health through transplantations. In its critical examination of the terms of possibility to declare a body as dead in the latter half of 20^th century Sweden the study not only relates to medicinal humanities and studies in contemporary biopolitics but, more broadly, the diverse field of Queer Death Studies. With its interdisciplinarity, the study approaches Swedish official governmental material in a genealogical manner and aims not only to show how bodies historically became declared as dead but, more importantly, to shed light on hidden points of intersections within western biopolitics. While the study reveals several distinctive trajectories—e.g. death-entry from self-evident to dissolved to eventualized—it also highlights biopolitical tactics in attempts to reach desirable outcomes and circumvent obstacles such as the public. Among these, it exposes an ambiguous right to declare bodies as dead with its possibility to produce exceptions from the judicial system—exceptions brought forth through a truth-telling of bodies bare life in tandem with an extraction of previously unattainable organs. Thus, the study suggests that to further understand contemporary governing, and not risking an intensification of it, Agamben’s approach towards hidden intersections between juridico-institutional and biopolitical needs to be extended to encompass a third vector of truth-telling.

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