Manhua Li

Royal Holloway, University of London, Philosophy, Lecturer in Political Theory; Marie Sklodowska-Curie Research Fellow

École Normale Supérieure, Philosophy, Graduate Student

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Hi, I am a Doctor of Philosophy, working at the University of London, Royal Holloway College as a Marie-Curie Research Fellow since 2022.

I received my PhD in philosophy at École Normale Supérieure de Paris in 2020. My research focuses on Chinese philosophy (both ancient and modern), contemporary French philosophy, 19th and 20th centuries German philosophy. My writing of the body engages actively with current affairs such as biopolitics and technologies, gender, and the environment. I remain curious about how Chinese ancient philosophy could contribute to contemporary feminist and ecologist causes. Before I work at Royal Holloway College University of London, I researched and taught at institutions in Paris, Shanghai, and Freiburg.

You can find out more about my research and events on the following websites: manhuali.org and pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/en/persons/manhua-li .
Supervisors: Marc Crépon, François Jullien, and Nathan Widder

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Jana Rosker

University of Ljubljana, Faculty of Arts

Eric S Nelson

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Fabian Heubel 何乏筆

Academia Sinica

David Chai

The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Lucian Green

Dawid Rogacz

Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań

Academia Sinica

Santa Clara University

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The Biopolitics of Nourishing Life: Daoism as Environmental Philosophy

In this paper, I argue that nourishing life (yangsheng 養生) as a self-cultivating practice stands ... more In this paper, I argue that nourishing life (yangsheng 養生) as a self-cultivating practice stands as an alternative model of biopolitics that challenges the neoliberal one. Existing scholarship on nourishing life focuses much on its ethical significance, for instance, as an effective way to lead a long life, whereas Nelson's most recent monograph Daoism as Environmental Philosophy: Nourishing Life provides new insights into the socio-political aspect of it, in terms of an ecological way of government. However, Nelson's discussion of biopolitics rarely engages with the Seven Sages in the Bamboo Forest (zhulin qixian 竹林七賢) that nonetheless practice nourishing life themselves, as an art of living and a political strategy. Focused on nourishing life in Ji Kang as one of the Sages, I situate my position against Jullien's claim that the self-cultivating sage is uncritical due to his incapacity to think of conflict in the face of power. And in the context of his book I also highlight Heubel's negligence of the neoliberal political economy underlying Foucauldian biopolitics in the context of his intercultural study of nourishing life as a possible model of biopolitics. As such, based on Nelson's consideration of the non-coercive ethos and praxis of Dao, I propose a biopolitics of nourishing life as opposed to the neoliberal "environmental technology" that normalizes materialist lifestyle and attitudes, the production of freedom as commodity.

Manhua Li

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