The Bacterial Homo Œconomicus

Xenopoem Research Group, 2025

Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, first articulated in The History of Sexuality, foregrounds the modern state's pervasive control over populations through the regulation of life and sexuality. Emerging in the 17th century, biopower operates not only through disciplinary mechanisms but through the governance of "life itself," shaping docile subjects via expert-driven norms of health, reproduction, and security. Scholars such as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri extend Foucault’s framework into the realm of global capitalism, where biopower transcends state control and becomes a deterritorialized force embedded in the commodification of life, labor, and affect. However, the biopolitical paradigm becomes more complex when applied to microbial life, particularly the case of Xenobacillus glossophagii, a pathogen whose genetic interactions within the human oral microbiome disrupt conventional notions of health, purity, and identity. The bacterium’s biochemical signaling and adaptive virulence complicate human-centric models of language and governance, challenging the sovereignty of biopolitical regimes. Drawing from microbiologist Eleanor R. Bell’s research on microbial communication and Karen Barad’s concept of relational ontology, this essay argues that Xenobacillus glossophagii embodies a transspecies biopolitical force, where resistance is not limited to human agency but emerges at the microbial level.

Xenopoem Research Group, 2025

This essay explores Xenobacillus glossophagii as a biological instantiation of Rosi Braidotti’s "nomadic subject," wherein subjectivity is decoupled from cognitive unity and reconfigured as an emergent property of microbial interference. At the intersection of posthuman theory, biolinguistics, and parasitology, X. glossophagii operates as a linguistic parasite, generating recursive, self-replicating speech patterns that destabilize host semiotic autonomy. Drawing from Michel Serres’ theory of the parasite, the bacterium is positioned not as metaphor but as material agent of communicative rupture—an entity that subverts humanist models of language, agency, and critique. Its genomic architecture mimics human phonemes through enantiomorphic genetic flips, embedding reversible linguistic structures that oscillate between virulence and symbiosis. These operations embody a posthuman semiotic logic, where microbial lifeforms participate in the production, deformation, and contagion of discourse. The bacterium’s dual-phase morphology and recursive transcriptional mechanisms mirror Serres’ asymmetrical logics of S/Z, rendering X. glossophagii a liminal figure akin to Balzac’s parasitic observers—simultaneously heretic and artifact, biological fact and forensic enigma. In resisting both linguistic containment and epistemological finality, the organism challenges the juridical impulse of critique itself. Thus, Xenobacillus glossophagii enacts a pathogenic biolinguistics that problematizes anthropocentric sovereignty over language, meaning, and life, demanding a reorientation of semiotic theory in light of microbial agency.

Xenobacillus glossophagii, 2025

In On Certainty, Wittgenstein argues that certainty is rooted not in empirical verification but in a pre-rational, communal form of life—a shared assurance embedded in practices. This concept proves critical in understanding glossolalia, where faith in language becomes both the cause and effect of linguistic transformation. The infection of Xenobacillus glossophagii induces a pathological certainty in the host's speech, mimicking the bacterial certainty of symbiosis or pathology, which disrupts conventional language rules while simultaneously creating a new communicative space. The essay examines the bacterial subversion of linguistic coherence, reflecting Žižek’s political theory of passive resistance or “Bartleby politics,” wherein glossolalia mirrors a non-confrontational rupture of the symbolic order. Drawing parallels between bacterial infections and political agency, it suggests that microbial agents like Xenobacillus glossophagii act as subversive “Master Signifiers,” reconfiguring subjectivity and meaning. The infection is not merely a breakdown of language, but a disruption that reflects the larger political dynamics of power, conformity, and resistance. Through these microbial and linguistic disruptions, here proposes that glossolalia serves as the potential for subversion, underscoring the need for new forms of meaning-making and subjectivity outside traditional linguistic structures.

Xenopoem Research Group, 2025

Biolinguistics traditionally treats language as an emergent neurobiological feature, yet a pathogenic approach proposes a radical inversion: language as an infectious agent that disrupts host structures. Xenobacillus glossophagii exemplifies this concept, operating at the intersection of bacterial parasitism and linguistic mutation. Drawing on Deleuze's interpretation of Sade, language's destructive potential is reframed not as mere negation, but as an active engagement with nature, where external forces shape the host's semiotic faculties. X. glossophagii subverts cognitive structures, introducing foreign phonemes and syntactic anomalies, compelling the host to produce an impersonal, decentralized linguistic network. This model situates language as an exogenous force that manipulates biological systems for its propagation, akin to sadistic thought in Deleuze's reading. Pathogenic biolinguistics posits that language, like a molecular contagion, encodes itself within the host, resulting in a form of semiotic schizophrenia. The bacterium's interaction with neural pathways introduces an irreversible desubjectivation, where the host’s linguistic production becomes recursive, fragmented, and unmoored from intentionality. Xenobacillus glossophagii does not merely infect but alters the neural architecture of its host, generating an autonomous pathogenic discourse that resists the traditional binary of domination and submission. This concept extends to the interaction of sadistic and masochistic elements in the host’s neural-linguistic network, reframing linguistic contagion as a negotiation of power. Through bacterial quorum sensing and molecular communication, Xenobacillus glossophagii orchestrates a subtle but profound transgression of biological norms, akin to the transgressive dynamics in Sade’s works.

Xenopoem, 2025

In The Ticket That Exploded, William Burroughs dissects the mechanisms of control, addiction, and language, revealing a viral model of domination that infiltrates the body and mind. Through his radical cut-up technique, Burroughs shatters linear coherence, mirroring the fragmentation of the self under the influence of external forces. Addiction, rather than a mere dependency, operates as an interface between the human organism and a pervasive system of manipulation, a concept that parallels bacteriological theories where the body serves as both host and battlefield. His Nova Trilogy expands this paradigm, portraying control as an insidious force that restructures perception itself. The human body is not merely a biological entity but a site of continuous flux, where identity is dynamically reshaped by forces beyond the individual's control. The human microbiome serves as a key metaphor, illustrating how identity emerges from a network of interdependent microbial, psychological, and environmental interactions. From a xenolingual Mer-Ka-Ba perspective, the body transcends conventional selfhood, existing as a system of perpetual transversality. In this framework, the “human body pill” emerges as existential experimentation, aligning with Guattari’s chaosmosis—where subjectivity is constantly reworked through ecological and psychical reconfigurations. Examining Burroughs’ anatomized body alongside Deleuze’s “societies of control,” this essay interrogates how biopolitical regulation extends to the microbiological level, influencing cognition and behavior. Ultimately, the human body is conceptualized as a war machine, resisting algorithmic governance while navigating the entangled forces of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.

Xenopoem, 2025

The bacteriological automaton, an emergent entity within the microbial substrata of posthuman cognition, perceives the xenopoem as a rupture in the informational virosphere, transforming linguistic artifacts into vectors of technomorphosis. Drawing from Germán Sierra’s critique of metamorphosis in literature, particularly his challenge to Kafka’s transformation in The Metamorphosis, this paper interrogates the xenopoem as a biocybernetic interface that transcends aesthetic and hermeneutic boundaries. The xenopoem emerges not merely as an aesthetic construct but as a mutational vector for nonhuman semiotic propagation. The bacteriological automaton, with its epistemology of distributed cognition, identifies xenopoetry as a medium of microbial semiosis, akin to genetic drift in its recombination of linguistic substrates. Through Sierra’s engagement with Mark Hansen, David Roden, and others, the xenopoem is positioned as a medium of technomorphosis, navigating beyond human-essentialist frameworks to activate alternate modes of sentience. Sierra’s critique of the "observer problem" in sci-fi, which preserves stable human subjectivity amid radical ontological shifts, informs the destabilizing nature of the xenopoem as it enacts transformation without teleology. By positioning the body as a site of constant metamorphosis, Sierra’s materialist stance underscores the permeability of identity, aligned with notions of hybridization and the extension of cognition beyond the organic. The xenopoem, functioning as a plasmidic entity, enables the recursive mutation of subjectivity and operates as a portal to the "adjacent possible," a space where human and microbial agents coalesce and transform.

Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2019

Showing how Michel Foucault moved from his analyses related to disciplinary power, to biopolitics, biopower, governmentality, and political economy, this article seeks to firstly contextualise the study in Foucault's own methodological and discursive oeuvre with regard to his move from 'disciplinary power' to 'biopolitics' and 'biopower'. This is followed by his very brief and concise description of what the study of biopolitics and biopower entail. Secondly, the focus is on Governmentality/ Governmental Reason, with five sub-topics, viz., political economy, regimes of veridiction, the limiting of the exercise of power by public authorities and 'utility', the birth of governmental rationality extended to a world scale (colonisation and imperialism), and the birth of civil society. The study concludes with some remarks related to the distinction between ideal critique, real transformation, and a few perspectives on what real transformation would entail in the postcolony, as it relates to the role of 'thought', the reason in governance, or governmentality.

In Wilmer, S. and Zukauskaite, A. (eds.), Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political, and Performative Strategies, 57-73., 2016

Forty years ago, the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault first pronounced in a lecture the semantic merger of life and politics that would shape his subsequent work and the ensuing theoretical debates (Foucault 2000a, 137). 1 His notion of "biopolitics" points to a historical shift at the threshold of modernity. According to Foucault, biopolitics marks a discontinuity in political practice since it places life at the center of political rationalities and technologies. He distinguishes historically and analytically between two dimensions of biopolitics: the disciplining of the individual body and the social regulation of the population. Furthermore, Foucault's concept signals a theoretical critique of the sovereign paradigm of power. According to this model, power is exercised as interdiction and repression in a framework of law and legality. In contrast Foucault stresses the productive capacity of power, which cannot be reduced to the ancient sovereign "right of death." While sovereignty seized hold of life in order to suppress it, the new life-administering power is dedicated to inciting, reinforcing, monitoring and optimizing the forces under its control .

Xenopoem, 2025

This essay examines the convergence of microbiology and narrative form in the works of Elytron Frass, Damian Murphy, and Quentin S. Crisp, arguing that their literary structures and thematic preoccupations mirror microbial dynamics. Frass’ Moieties explores the split-brain phenomenon through conjoined twins whose interdependent identities evoke bacterial holobionts, symbiotic organisms that function collectively. Similarly, Murphy’s The Acephalic Imperial parallels bacterial niche adaptation, portraying psychological transformation as a process akin to microbial colonization and genetic exchange. Crisp’s narratives, with their recursive structures and meditations on memory, align with bacterial quorum sensing and biofilm formation, where collective intelligence emerges from distributed networks. By framing consciousness and storytelling through the logic of microbial interconnectivity, these authors present selfhood as a porous, evolving system shaped by external forces.

2015

While Foucault’s work on biopolitics continues to inspire diverse studies in a variety of disciplines, it has largely been missing from the debates on the possibility of “affirmative biopolitics” which have been primarily influenced by the work of Agamben and Esposito. This article restores Foucault’s work to these debates, proposing that his final lecture course at the Collège de France in 1983–1984 developed a paradigm of affirmative biopolitics in the reading of the Cynic practice of truth-telling (parrhesia). The Cynic problematization of the relation between truth and life and their transvaluation of conventional truths by relocating them to the domain of bare life not only seeks to transform one’s life in accordance with the truth but also, through the confrontation with the existing conventions and norms, to transform the world as such. Cynic parrhesia is thus biopolitical, insofar as it reclaims the power of one’s life from the social order and its rationalities of government and applies it to oneself, investing one’s existence with truth. Since Foucault developed this reading of Cynicism in the context of his political engagement on behalf on East European dissidents, the article proceeds to analyse the resonances between parrhesia and Václav Havel’s idea of “living within the truth,” elaborating the biopolitical significance of both practices. We conclude by addressing the implications of our interpretation for Foucault scholarship and the wider debates on biopolitics.