I am the other; therefore I am not: Biopolitics of otherness in Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet

In our biopolitical age, modern power, which Foucault refers to as biopolitical power, regulates and categorizes human life by degrading it into bodily existence and designating certain lives as life-worthy while excluding and letting subjects deemed undeserving die through various means. Like many contemporary novels, Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet addresses the biopoliticization and marginalization of modern subjects through human landscapes from the recent past and post-Brexit Britain. Thus, this dissertation aims to explore biopolitical modernity and the biopolitical construction of otherness in Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet in light of the theories of biopolitics advanced by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Judith Butler. This thesis not only discusses borderization portrayed through physical borders and cultural and psychological borders that shape mindsets but also analyses individuals' reduction into biological lives denied of political existence and the disintegration of society with an 'us versus them' mentality through bodies that do not adhere to normative identity definitions. Still, Smith's protagonists become the autonomous storytellers of their life stories, the power of their own lives and the coauthors of the quartet by recollecting, imagining, dreaming and telling stories against biopolitical power manifested through the all-seeing narrator and the governing power. Thus, by probing the political possibilities of literature and storying to confute the biopolitically constructed normality, Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer suggest the possibility of a non-politicized, non-hierarchal and uncontrolled life by connecting with the Other and engaging with art, which, with its transformative, de-othering and unifying power, can reveal the human out of the political and construct the bond between the self and the other as a counter-discourse. Keywords: Biopolitics, Otherness, Seasonal Quartet, Ali Smith, Foucault.