Domesticating the Thermal: Sense of Warmth as the Object of Biopolitics

Foucauldian biopolitics overall remain “bound to the notion of an integral body” (Lemke 2011, 94); however, in the modern context, the body politics do not have just one singular subject of control. The body has become fragmented and peripheral, extended to the point of objectification and domestication of nature (Macauley 2010), allowing us to believe that humans can own not just the material, physical nature but even the natural processes like fire (encaging it within furnaces, ovens and lava lamps). Nature has become another “field of difference” (Haraway 1991, 162), which somehow is “both a resource and a sacral ground” (Sauka 2023, 39). Nature, on the one hand, is owned and reproduced, and, on the other, neglected and treated like a landfill, leading to a loss of connection with the nonhuman – the more-than-human agencies that sustain life (Hird 2012). The nonhuman – more than non-human – becomes an essential aspect of sustaining humanity. However, because we try owning “nature” and exercising power over it, humans have disconnected from both nature and the selfhood