Here’s a deep dive into Will Conway’s essay “Preliminary Questions to an Investigation into Eugenic Modernity and its Metaphysics”:
🧠 Overview & Framing
Conway opens by asking big questions tethered to the term refinement:
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What does it mean to philosophize in an era where the ideal of refinement dominates?
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How does "refinement" function as both the apex and core concern of modernity?
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What stakes are involved in beginning to philosophically interrogate the refinement of the human being itself?
This sets the stage for a meditation on how eugenic logic operates within the metaphysical assumptions of modern life.
Key Themes & Concepts
1. Refinement as Modernity's Telos
Refinement isn't cosmetic — it's a normative ideal toward which society converges. Conway suggests this drive shapes not only aesthetic values but also mechanisms of biopolitical governance. The ideal human, polished and efficient, becomes the normative model. Divergence from refinement—whether through disability, race, or poverty—is cast as a deficiency.
2. Eugenic Modernity and Its Metaphysics
Conway situates refinement within eugenic modernity: the project of aligning human life with selective ideals, justified via evolutionary theory and political rationality. This isn't past history; it's a metaphysical structure still operating in how certain lives are deemed expendable or abnormal. Foucault’s biopower frames how states administer populations, while eugenics provides the conceptual armature that justifies hierarchies of worth .
3. Ontology & Political Norms
Conway isn’t merely diagnosing social pathology; he's exposing how categories of “normal” and “abnormal” are ontologically baked into modern systems. He draws on Foucault and Deleuze to show how philosophy itself—through the discipline’s discursive formations—becomes an apparatus of normalizing power.
Political Stakes & Critical Ethics
Conway implicates the institutions of bioethics in this structure: not as curative or protective, but as instruments that sustain the eugenic impulse. Criticism of abuses—like forced sterilization or selective abortion—is often framed within a liberal moral paradigm of choice and autonomy. But Conway argues this narrative obscures deeper issues: bioethics functions to normalize, to individualize, and to conceal structural violence under a veneer of neutrality and consent training.
Broader Context & Relevance
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Revolting Bodies is structured around disability, embodiment, and the politics of classification—Conway brings precision to how suffering becomes legible only as pathology or performance.
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He frames eugenics not as historical relic, but a present metaphysical condition in which the drive for refinement defines who is visible, valuable, or disposable.
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This piece enriches your analysis of Han by shifting from affective erasure to the structural categorization of suffering bodies.
🧷 Why It Matters for Your Critique
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Adds Political Materiality — Where Han diagnoses emotional erasure, Conway adds flesh: how disabled and 'abnormal' bodies are assigned meaning—and death—under our shared metaphysics.
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Intersects Affect and Ontology — The drive for refinement interpellates bodies emotionally and existentially. It governs both feeling and being.
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Radicalizes Resistance — Instead of reclaiming vulnerability, Conway proposes dismantling the categories that produce vulnerability as deficiency. Ethical responses must go beyond empathy to anti-normative justice.
✂️ Précis Table
| Concept | Conway’s Insight |
|---|---|
| Refinement | A normative axis shaping both aesthetics and political form |
| Eugenic Modernity | A structure that designates worth and reproduces hierarchy |
| Philosophy as Apparatus | Knowledge production itself enforces normalization and exclusion |
| Bioethics as Technology | Institutional reinforcement of eugenic logic under market norms |
| Political Intervention | Ethics must oppose the normative regimes of life/value itself |
In moving from Han’s affective violence to Conway’s metaphysical critique, you gain sharper tools to argue that society’s cruelty is not only emotional but ontological—structured into how we think, categorize, and “refine” human existence.
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