Preconceiving Life: Response to Gentile’s “Troubling Temporalities”

Drawing on the resources of psychoanalysis, feminism, and queer theories of temporality, this essay considers time as a key aspect of the neoliberal management of life. All subjects are not equal in time, and the author explores the crossing points—and points of no return—between the endlessly potentiating fetus, that vessel of pure futurity, and the dead time of imprisonment. How does time coat and code some bodies as life, for living, while remanding some others to the slow dying of life in prison?