This article offers a series of critical theorizations on the biopolitical dimensions of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA), with specific attention to what has recently been referred to in the United States as the ‘MRSA Epidemic’. In particular, we reflect on the proliferation of biomedical discourses around the ‘spread’, and the pathogenic potentialities, of community-associated methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (CA-MRSA). We turn to the work of Roberto Esposito and Jean-Luc Nancy to better make sense of how, during this immunological crisis, the individualized fleshy and fluid body is articulated to dimensions of community and corporeal proximity; the body is thus conceived in popular biopolitical framings as a site of transmission, inoculation, and isolation – as a living ecological and pathological vessel. We give emphasis to the spatial relations of flesh, namely in how biomedical ‘experts’ have sought to (bio-)technologize spaces of heightened communal bodily contact (such as playgrounds or gymnasia).

A direct action shunt selector has been designed that pre-selects the appropriate shunt so that widely different mass spectrometer ion currents can be recorded linearly on a standard chart. In conjunction with a linear direct current amplifier and a Leeds and Northrup Speedomax pen recorder, this unit allows rapid and accurate recording of a given mass spectrum, which can be scanned by varying either the magnetic field or the ion accelerating potential of the mass spectrometer. When used with a 180° Nier type mass spectrometer with well stabilized circuits, a precision of ± 0.2% in measuring the ratio of [Formula: see text] and [Formula: see text] was obtained. Also, samples of xenon were investigated and the abundances of the isotopes determined.

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Taking up the critical theorization of death as an important, though ambivalent, popular hermeneutic, this article attempts to expand upon existing arguments by examining death in the popular framings of an ever-growing U.S. militaristic biocitizenship (Mbembe, Giroux, Butler, Murray, Arendt). By understanding death as posing an existential crisis to collective and individual (social) life-as it is constructed through formations of moving embodiment-we argue that certain forms of death are required to be both knowable and of meaning to define the boundaries of a living body politic and the defense thereof. Whereas death within late modern society has become both increasingly knowable (through advances in medical knowledge) and anomalous (through the biopolitical attribution of most deaths to faulty cells, tissues, or organs, failures that are theoretically preventable), death that is relegated to zones of war and achieved in the service of nationalist ideals is theorized here as particularly certain and non-ambivalent. To understand this complex configuration of life, we interrogate three military deaths: that of the soldier who dies in battle, the living-death of the veteran, and the death of soldier who commits suicide. We argue that such deaths are both necessary and productive features of the protracting military State; soldiers who return from combat-bringing with them the trauma of dismemberment and the re-memberment of their deathly encounters-carry the potential to reproduce, and challenge, the hegemony of a contextually specific militaristic biocitizenship.

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