Josephine Berry: Art and (Bare) Life – A Biopolitical Inquiry [Book review]

This is Josephine Berry’s first book, after years editing the sadly all-but-defunct Mute magazine, which now maintains only a vestigial online presence. In keeping with that publication, which often concerned itself with many of this book’s central themes, Berry’s prose bears a deftness of touch at no expense to the sophistication of the theory which she deploys. The central thesis of Art and (Bare) Life is that the Enlightenment processes of disenchantment which led, on the one hand, to the administration of everyday life in the service of private profit whose techniques Michel Foucault referred to as ‘biopower’ and, on the other, to art’s emancipation from its former courtly and ecclesiastical functionality, should not simply be read in parallel, but rather are utterly imbricated and inform one another’s development.