This paper shows that contemporary Polish politics under the tutelage of Law and Justice (PiS) can fruitfully be analysed as a biopolitical production of political subjects. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s take on biopolitics, this paper asks how biopolitics and sovereign power materialized in two recent Polish parliamentary debates on EU sanctioned refugee quotas. The paper uses linguistic tropes to operationalize sovereign power and applies them to the analysis. The findings demonstrate the centrality of contingent factors in the ways to which biopolitics materializes in the debates and reveals the radically politicizing effects for a contemporary democratic system. © 2018, © 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.

biopolitics Agamben Parliamentary debate sovereignty Poland Refugees

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