Anticipating and suspending: the chronopolitics of cryopreservation

Abstract

AbstractThe article brings together two disparate and so far largely disconnected bodies of research: the critical analysis of cryopreservation technologies and the debate on modes of anticipation. It starts with a short review of the state of the research on the concept of cryopolitics. In the next part I will suggest two revisions. I will problematize the idea of latent life and the focus on potentialities that have been central to the research on cryopolitics so far, proposing to shift the analytic frame to suspended life on the one hand and to modes of anticipation on the other. I argue that cryopreservation practices are part of contemporary technologies of anticipation. They are linked to a politics of suspension by mobilizing a liminal biological state in which frozen organisms or biological material are neither fully alive nor ultimately dead. This seeks to avert and/or enable distinctive futures by extending temporal horizons and keeping vital processes in limbo.