The human sciences in a biological age

We live, according to some, in the century of biology where we now understand ourselves in radically new ways, as the insights of genomics and neuroscience have opened up the workings of our bodies and our minds to new kinds of knowledge and intervention. Is a new figure of the human, and of the social, taking shape in the twenty-first century? With what consequences for the politics of life today? And with what implications, if any, for the social, cultural and human sciences? These are the issues that are discussed in this paper, which argues that a new relation is required with the life sciences, beyond commentary and critique, if the social and human sciences are to revitalise themselves for the twenty-first century