Paper short abstract:

This paper aims to widen the notion of biopolitics to the new scenario of twenty-first century bios, by incorporating the key epigenetic notion that injustice can be temporal and not merely spatial (Guthman and Masfield, 2013; Kabasenche and Skinner, 2014).

Paper long abstract:

That "the tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living" (Marx, 1852), was known by social theorists even before the rise of neuroscience, epigenetics, and their postgenomic combination. This paper aims to widen the notion of biopolitics to the new scenario of twenty-first century bios. Notions like microbiopolitics and symbiopolitics have already been proposed to enlarge the spatial dimension of biopolitics to "the scales and values through which human lives are entangled with microbial life" (Helmreich and Paxson 2011; Paxson, 2008; Helmreich, 2009). Here I suggest to coin (possibly through a collective discussion) some new notion that help us thinking that our human boundaries are not only broken horizontally by unseen forces like microorganisms (McFall-Ngai, 2002) but also vertically by various slices of past exposures of our own or our most direct ancestors. If epigenetics points to the multiple and often delayed temporalities that act simultaneously on the present of our biological time, if the tradition of all dead generations (what they ate, the toxins, stressors, exploitations they were exposed to, but also, why not? the social conquests they achieved in their lives) weighs as never before on the brains and genetic functioning of the living generation, what kind of justice, biopolitics, responsibility should we think for our postgenomic times?