This document provides instructions for Assignment 2 of an English 106 course. It includes 3 passages for analysis on the topic of biopolitics from the book Biopolitics: A Reader. Students are instructed to summarize one passage in 5 sentences or less, choose 1-2 examples from the TV show The Night Of to analyze how the show informs our understanding of biopolitics, and comment in the final paragraph on how the analysis comments on current affairs. Guidelines for formatting, length, and submitting the paper are also provided.

1. 1
ENGLISH 106
Dr. Kurt Voss-Hoynes
ASSIGNMENT 2
DUE DATE: Friday, November 4, 2016 by 5:00pm. The
REVISION is DUE ON THE LAST DAY OF
CLASS.
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106 H1” and
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LENGTH and FORMAT: 3 pages MAXIMUM, double-spaced
with 1 inch margins. Please
refer to the formatting sheet I provided.
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Guidelines:

2. —see selections on attached
sheet—and paraphrase it in
NO MORE than 5 sentences. In your summary you should
identify key points and
articulate what you think the passage means.
you should then pick 1–2
examples from The Night Of and
explain how your chosen aspect of biopolitics informs our
understanding of the show and
how the show alters the theoretical implications of biopolitics.
Remember, your analysis of
each example should answer the “how,” “why,” “what,” and,
most importantly, “so what.”
single argument or question.
Instead, your final paragraph (no more than 4 sentences) should
comment on how your
analysis of The Night Of using a biopolitical lens comments on
current affairs.
2
ASSIGNMENT 2 PASSAGES

3. 1. For a long time; one of the characteristic privileges of
sovereign power was the right
to decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt
from the ancient patria potestas
that granted the father of the Roman family the right to
“dispose” of t he life of his children
and his slaves; just as he had given them life, so he could take it
away. By the time the right
to life and death was framed by the classical theoreticians, it
was in a considerably
diminished form. It was no longer considered that this power of
the sovereign over his
subjects could be exercised in an absolute and unconditional
way, but only in cases where
the sovereign’s very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of
rejoinder. If he were
threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or
contest his rights, he could
then legitimately’ wage war, and require his subjects to take
part in the defense of the state;
without “directly proposing their death,” he was empowered to
“expose their life”: in this
sense, he wielded an “indirect’’ power over them of life and
death. But if someone dared to
rise up against him and transgress his laws, then he could
exercise a direct power over the
offender’s life: as punishment, the latter would be put to death.
Viewed in this way, the
power of life and death was not an absolute privilege: it was
conditioned by the defense of
the sovereign, and his own survival. (Michel Foucault, “Right
of Death and Power over Life”
from The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1)
2. The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of

4. homo sacer (sacred man),
who may be killed and yet not sacrificed, and whose essential
function in modern politics we
intend to assert. An obscure figure of archaic Roman law, in
which human life is included in
the juridical order [ordinamento]1 solely in the form of its
exclusion (that is, of its capacity to
be killed), has thus offered the key by which not only the sacred
texts of sovereignty but also
the very codes of political power will unveil their mysteries. At
the sa me time, however, this
ancient meaning of the term sacer presents us with the enigma
of a figure of the sacred that,
before or beyond the religious, constitutes the first paradigm of
the political realm of the
West. The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or,
at least, completed, in the
sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the
inclusion of zoē in the polis
which is, in itself, absolutely ancient-nor simply the fact that
life as such becomes a principal
object of the projections and calculations of State power.
Instead the decisive fact is that,
together with the process by which the exception everywhere
becomes the rule, the realm of
bare life-which is originally situated at the margins of the
political order-gradually begins to
coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion,
outside and inside, bios and
zoē, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.
At once excluding bare life
from and capturing it within the political order, the sta te of
exception actually constituted, in
its very separateness, the hidden foundation on which the entire
political system rested.

5. When its borders begin to be blurred, the bare life that dwelt
there frees itself in the city and
becomes both subject and object of the conflicts of the political
order, the one place for
both the organization of State power and emancipation from it.
Everything happens as if,
along with the disciplinary process by which State power makes
man as a living being into its
own specific object, another process is set in motion that in
large measure corresponds to
the birth of modern democracy, in which man as a living being
presents himself no longer as
an object but as the subject of political power. These processes-
which in many ways oppose
and (at least apparently) bitterly conflict with each other-
nevertheless converge insofar as
both concern the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical
body of humanity.
If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to
classical democracy,
3
then, it is that modern democracy presents itself from the
beginning as a vindication and
liberation of zoē, and that it is constantly trying to transform its
own bare life into a way of
life and to find, so to speak, the bias of zoē. Hence, too, modern
democracy’s specific aporia:
it wants to put the freedom and happiness of men into play in
the very place —“bare life”—
that marked their subjection. Behind the long, strife-ridden
process that leads to the
recognition of rights and formal liberties stands once again the

6. body of the sacred man with
his double sovereign, his life that cannot be sacrificed yet may,
nevertheless, be killed. To
become conscious of this aporia is not to belittle the conquests
and accomplishments of
democracy. It is, rather, to try to understand once and for all
why democracy, at the very
moment in which it seemed to have finally triumphed over its
adversaries and reached its
greatest height, proved itself incapable of saving zoē, to whose
happiness it had dedicated all
its efforts, from unprecedented ruin. Modern democracy’s
decadence and gradual
convergence with totalitarian states in post-democratic
spectacular societies (which begins to
become evident with Alexis de Tocqueville and finds its final
sanction in the analyses of Guy
Debord) may well be rooted in this aporia, which marks the
beginning of modern democracy
and forces it into complicity with its most implacable enemy.
Today politics knows no value
(and, consequently, no nonvalue) other than life, and until the
contra dictions that this fact
implies are dissolved, Nazism and fascism-which transformed
the decision on bare life into
the supreme political principle will remain stubbornly with us.
According to the testimony of
Robert Antelme, in fact, what the camps taught those who lived
there was precisely that
“calling into question the quality of man provokes an almost
biological assertion of
belonging to the human race” (L’espece humaine, p. 11).
(Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer:
Sovereign Power and Bare Life)

7. 3. Any historical account of the rise of modern terror needs to
address slavery, which
could be considered one of the first instances of biopolitical
experimentation. In many
respects, the very structure of the plantation system and its
aftermath manifests the
emblematic and paradoxical figure of the state of exception.
This figure is paradoxical here
for two reasons. First, in the context of the plantation, the
humanity of the slave appears as
the perfect figure of a shadow. Indeed, the slave condition
results from a t riple loss: Joss of a
“home,” loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political
status. This triple loss is
identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social
death (expulsion from
humanity altogether). To be sure, as a political-juridical
structure, the plantation is a space
where the slave belongs to a master. It is not a community if
only because by definition, a
community implies the exercise of the power of speech and
thought. As Paul Gilroy says,
“The extreme patterns of communication defined by the
institution of plantation slavery
dictate that we recognize the anti-discursive and extralinguistic
ramifications of power at
work in shaping communicative acts. There may, after all, be no
reciprocity on the plantation
outside of the possibilities of rebellion and suicide, flight and
silent mourning, and there is
certainly no grammatical unity of speech to mediate
communicative reason. In many
respects, the plantation inhabitants live non-synchronously.” As
an instrument of labor, the
slave has a price. As a property, he or she has a value. His or
her labor is needed and used.

8. The slave is therefore kept alive but in a state of injury, in a
phantomlike world of horrors
and intense cruelty and profanity. The violent tenor of the
slave’ s life is manifested through
the overseer’s disposition to behave in a cruel and intemperate
manner and in the spectacle
of pain inflicted on the slave’s body. Violence, here, becomes
an element in manners, like
whipping or taking of the slave’s life itself: an act of caprice
and pure destruction aimed at
instilling terror. Slave life, in many ways, is a form of death-in-
life. As Susan Buck-Morss has
4
suggested, the slave condition produces a contradiction between
freedom of property and
freedom of person. An unequal relationship is established along
with the inequality of the
power over life. This power over the life of another takes the
form of commerce: a person’s
humanity is dissolved to the point where it becomes possible to
say that the slave’s life is
possessed by the master. Because the slave’s life is like a
“thing,” possessed by another
person, the slave existence appears as a perfect figure of a
shadow.
In spite of the terror and the symbolic sealing off of the slave,
he or she maintains
alternative perspectives toward time, work, and self. This is the
second paradoxical element
of the plantation world as a manifestation of the state of
exception. Treated as if he or she

9. no longer existed except as a mere tool and instrument of
production, the slave nevertheless
is able to draw almost any object, instrument, language, or
gesture into a performance and
then stylize it. Breaking with uprootedness and the pure world
of things of which he or she
is but a fragment, the slave is able to demonstrate the protean
capabilities of the human
bond through music and the very body that was supposedly
possessed by another. (Achille
Mbembe, “Necropolitics”)
All selections come from Biopolitics: A Reader, edited by
Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, 2013.
5
GRADING RUBRIC
A
45–50
Points
THIS TYPE OF PAPER…
text.

10. -organized, logical, and coherent.
described below .
B
40–44
Points
THIS TYPE OF PAPER…
issue or idea not previously discussed
in class.
-organized, logical, and coherent
but may have some weak spots
(occasional gaps in logic, awkward transitions, and other
structural inconsistencies).
guidelines described below.
C
35–39
Points

11. THIS TYPE OF PAPER…
pports claims with evidence from the text.
inconsistencies and a pronounced lack of
structure).
low the formatting
guidelines described below.
D
30–34
Points
THIS TYPE OF PAPER…
F
≤ 29

12. 6
PAPER 1 EVALUATION SHEET
NAME:
ORIGINAL TREATMENT OF CONTENT
/12 POINTS
Comments:
ATTENTIVENESS TO FORMAL DETAILS
/15 POINTS
Comments:

13. LOGIC AND USE OF EVIDENCE
/15 POINTS
Comments:
USE OF LANGUAGE, GRAMMAR, AND SPELLING
/8 POINTS
Comments:
TOTAL (50 POINTS):
7
PAPER 2 FORMATTING SHEET
John Smith

14. ENG 106
Professor Kurt Voss-Hoynes
26 November 2016
A Tribute to the Best Paper in the World
This is where you begin writing your tribute to the best paper
in the world. This
is not actually the best paper in the world; it is only a tribute.
Voss-Hoynes
1
Kurt Voss-Hoynes
English 106
Dr. Kurt Voss-Hoynes
4 November 2016
The Culture Created by The Night Of
Horkheimer and Adorno’s culture industry is a product of the
market that does not permit

15. or facilitate any form of escape from that very same market.
Indeed, it fosters an environment
that eliminates all possibility of avoiding the machine that it
creates. Even when one sits down to
watch a film, he or she is doing nothing more than becoming
inculcated in ways of the culture
industry and its machine. As such, the individual stops being
imaginative, stops thinking, and
stops developing mentally. The culture industry, then, creates
automatons that accept their own
defeat. Ultimately, this creates market-driven cultural cycles
that prevent the individual from
ever organizing and from ever resisting oppression.
The Night Of can and, in some instances for some people, does
fall into this trap. If one is
to accept the notion that the system itself is unfair, then that
individual is forced to witness that
which he or she know happens. If, however, one is unaware of
how the system is unfair, then he
or she is forced to confront the fact that these things happen and
are forced to try to reconcile his
or her worldview with that of the show. In each instance, the
way that the culture industry

16. presents itself is different. In the first example, we become
acutely aware of the issue and may,
theoretically, begin to think about ways to foster resistance. In
the second, we have to make a
decision between calling the show fiction and disregarding its
critique of our culture or accepting
that our worldview is skewed and try to begin to change. Both
possibilities and the outcomes that
Voss-Hoynes
2
they produce articulate the power of the culture industry by
exposing how it facilitates the
creation of cultural products that directly impact the way that
society perceives reality.
Though the show does illustrate how the culture industry is all
encompassing, there are
moments where it does push back on Horkheimer and Adorno’s
ideas. For example, the
outcomes that come out of thinking about how the generic
expectations that one has about a
crime drama/law procedural foster a critique of the way that
viewers respond to such shows. In

17. so doing, the show tests the limits of the idea of the culture
industry. Both supporting previously
held personal convictions and forcing an individual to both
recognize and change a skewed
worldview, forces a reevaluation of genre and questions whether
Horkheimer and Adorno’s idea
extends to things that explicitly critique modern culture. If a
product of the culture industry uses
realism address an issue in modern culture, then reality is never
suspended. As a result, viewers
always-already consider the artifact in conversation with “real
life,” meaning that this artifact
does not need to work to extend its reality into reality outside of
the “theatre.”
The Night Of and the importance of narrative that it creates
exposes the problematic
reliance of stereotypes in our cultural moment. More
specifically, by being set in a post-
September 11 New York City and by focusing on a first-
generation Pakistani-American, the
show demonstrates how preconceived attitudes about cultures
and people, directly alter how
individuals interact in their daily lives. For example, because
Naz is a minority, Detective Dennis

18. Box automatically assumes that Naz is guilty, fails to pursue
other leads, and ultimately destroys
a young man’s life. The Night Of, then, forces a reevaluation of
worldviews, preconceived
notions, and how one engages with other individuals.
Leo Xuanren Li
English 106
Dr. Kurt Voss-Hoynes
7 November 2016
Assignment 2
The sovereign power had the characteristic privilege to decide
the death and life since long. The father of family of Romans
had the authority to take the life of his slaves and his children,
since is the one who gave birth to them (Foucault, 2014). The
classical theoreticians disregarded all these concepts except in
some cases where the existence of sovereign was at stake. If the
condition of war is imposed by the external enemies, the
sovereign has the right to use his slaves and children for his
defense. The sovereign power has the authority to punish
someone who tried to rise up in mutiny, in the situation of both
war and peace. Therefore, the power of life and death was not
an absolute privilege of sovereign power and has some
conditions of his self-defense.
In the Beginning of 20th century, the basic concept of Bio
Politics emerged in the intellectual settings and was subjected
to critical examination. Rudokf Kjelle who is a Swedish
scientist can be considered as the first to employ it. Until the
time of death in 1922, Kejel-len, was a professor at the
University of Uppsala, always considered individual las
creatures that were always disproportionally bigger and more
powerful in development (Cheung, 1938).

19. Kjellen introduced the concept of bio politics with his firm
conviction. Keeping in view the tension type life as described,
there was an inclination to immerse the discipline after the
special employment of Biology in Bio politics. It is an
important consideration that in the civil war that is fought
ruthlessly between different groups, there is life struggle for
existence and growth in various aspects.
The conservative character of organicist concept of any state
acquired a bias of race in the period of National Socialism and
in condition of Antidemocratic. The use of a famous metaphor
of Volkskroper (the people body) at this time designated
racially homogenous community, authoritarian and the
structural hierarchy (Foucault, 2014).The question is “What are
the central features of National Socialist concept of State and
the Society?” However, there are two central features including
in this concept. The first one promoted the concept and idea that
the various subjects of history didn’t include individuals,
classes and groups but are self-help basis communities having
one common genetic heritage. The assumption of Natural
Hierarchy of races and peoples in accordance with different
inherited biological quality was complemented by this idea.
The question of the principles of imprisonment and its
punishments remained a concern for the most of the period in
past. There was a different way to deal it in all passing phases.
The discrimination in races amongst people is the only thing at
which the human beings are good at.
The question is how to improve all these feature of bio
politics. The cultural inheritance and bringing in it new changes
is the essence of successful understanding of the culture of any
class. Karl Haoushofer has been considered as one of the most
significant figures in the German Geopolitical Scenario and has
occupied the chair in the geography department in University of
Munich. Hounsher was the Roudolf Hess teacher and has
significant contributions to form Geopolitics (Foucault, 2014).
Kohl envisioned the biology state and geopolitical concepts and
examined the development of people and state from the two

20. different but complementary view as a whole. The questions is
how and why both the views are different from each other and
complementary as well. It can be observed as an answer to this
question that the people and state place a great emphasis either
on spatial observations and temporal ideas. Therefore, there was
a need to speak and consider both the geo politics and bio
politics. However, the concept of Bio politics is concerned with
the historical development improved with time, the geopolitics
with the actual space distribution along with an interplay
between the space and people. The example puts a more focus
towards betterment in social conduct and various other political
influences amongst people. The bio politics concept remains a
prime concern for the most of the time for the years to come in
Future.
With the recent developments the concept of Bio politics
emerged as a slogan and a symbol. The concept was known to a
limited number of experts a few years ago and has been in use
by many discourses and disciplines. The term refers to the
polices of political asylum, the various preventive measures of
AIDs and the demographic change overall. The term also
encompasses the promotion in medical research, rules of
abortion, right to kill or murder, financial support required for
various agricultural products and an advanced directive of
various patients with a specification of their preferences
concerned with the life extending measure (Cheung, 1938).
The “Nights of” encompasses a vast range of diverse and most
often conflicting views regarding the various empirical objects
and the normative analysis of the study of Bio Politics. The
concepts and ideas are both critic and always advocates a bio
technological progress used by the unapologetic racists. A part
of another disagreement is the historical delimitation and
various historical definitions.