Privateers in the Sea of Signs
Biopiracy and Politics of Translation

Tom Waibel

Patenting life forms is a contemporary way of hijacking common goods, and thereby an actual way of spatializing and territorializing knowledge. But the promotion of bioprivateering is no aberration of the idea of patent law moreover it is intrinsic to it. Patent Right legislation of the emerging nation-states of the 19th Century was to define the legal terms of transformation and translation of innovations from other nation-states. Novelty was reduced to the not yet used among national production even while being well known and practiced by other countries or societies. Extending such kind of legislation on life forms and their genetic modifications gives way to a global biocolonization based on biopiracy. In my contribution I will take a closer look on this problematic from the perspective of translation politics: Does capitalist globalization proceed by meanings of a monstrous translation machine? And how are signs to be translated within the exodus from copyright and trade related intellectual properties?

Thomas Waibel

biography

conference