The Politics of Life Itself

TLDR

The article examines contemporary biopolitics through Foucault’s claim that modern politics interrogates life itself. It proposes that recent advances in life sciences, biomedicine, and biotechnology can be fruitfully analyzed along three dimensions. The authors identify three dimensions: risk politics (logics of control), molecular politics (regime of truth in the life sciences), and ethopolitics (technologies of the self). They argue that these developments render humans as somatic individuals whose personhood is defined by corporeality, linking biology to conduct, while simultaneously opening this individuality to choice, responsibility, experimentation, and contestation—constituting a politics of life itself.

Abstract

This article explores contemporary biopolitics in the light of Michel Foucault's oft quoted suggestion that contemporary politics calls `life itself' into question. It suggests that recent developments in the life sciences, biomedicine and biotechnology can usefully be analysed along three dimensions. The first concerns logics of control - for contemporary biopolitics is risk politics. The second concerns the regime of truth in the life sciences - for contemporary biopolitics is molecular politics. The third concerns technologies of the self - for contemporary biopolitics is ethopolitics. The article suggests that, in these events, human beings have become `somatic individuals': personhood is increasingly being defined in terms of corporeality, and new and direct relations are established between our biology and our conduct. At the same time, this somatic and corporeal individuality has become opened up to choice, prudence and responsibility, to experimentation, to contestation and so to a politics of `life itself'.