Stuart J. Murray

Rhetoric • Ethics • Death • Biopolitics

“Neoliberal biopolitics advances a kingdom of ends: it’s a siren’s song and a glittering abyss in which we’re meant to find ourselves reflected and perfected.”

“The refrain speaks, if it speaks at all, in fragments and echoes, in a voice that is never entirely one’s own, and never entirely alive.”

“How shall I attend (to) the deaths of those who are allowed to die, when I remain, in time, my own livingness conjugated with their dying?”

“What passes for life under the biopolitical order is often no life at all—it is the absence of death masquerading as vitality.”

“Against an enforced livingness, and against its deceitful terms of recognition: the instant of death, whose murmuring claim must in time take hold, even as 'life itself' would eclipse forever this black sun.”

Stuart J. Murray – Bio

Bio

Professor of Rhetoric and Ethics
Department of English Language and Literature
Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada

Stuart J. Murray is Professor of Rhetoric and Ethics in the Department of English Language and Literature at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. He holds affiliate appointments in the Department of Health Sciences and the Institute for Comparative Studies in Literature, Art and Culture.

His research moves across multiple disciplines to demonstrate how biopolitical logics enable and justify the death of certain populations in the name of life for others. Addressing "sacrificial" social and political economies, his work contributes both to the understanding of ethics and to the ways in which human life and death are figured today. He is the author of The Living from the Dead: Disaffirming Biopolitics (Penn State University Press, 2022), a rhetorical analysis of contemporary biopolitical discourse.

He was Canada Research Chair in Rhetoric and Ethics (2012–2021), and in 2014 he was elected to the College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists of the Royal Society of Canada.

Google Scholar profile

Murray faces the impossible, ethical injunction: How, then, to “deal” with these ghosts—with all these dead and dying with whom I have some complicity—by my very “livingness”? He turns/tropes his thanatographical eye from other systems to himself—to the very act of writing about the dead, about those lives that have been allowed (accelerated or mandated) to “let die.” The repetition is palpable. The lament has a corporeal texture. One feels the weight of corpses; the burden is heavy. This grave acknowledgment, however, is not cause for despair—but rather hope; here for a future-to-come, for a new way of being—for a new relation between the living and the dead.

—Michelle Ballif

Murray’s account of biopolitics in an age of neoliberalism is timely, lucid, and original. Rather than attending to the management of populations and the production of norms of life, Murray poses the urgent and necessary question of the deaths that make life and its affirmation possible. Arguing for a political paradigm shift in the norms and demands of life, Murray focuses on the loss, death, and silence that makes contemporary biopolitics possible.

—Claire Mary Colebrook

Image credit: Si Lewen, Ghost, ca. 2013, from the Ghosts Series, gift to Art Spiegelman. Rights to reproduce the image thanks to the International Institute for Restorative Practices and the Restorative Practices Foundation.