That a resistance to what is known today as biopower – the control, regulation, exploitation and instrumentalisation of the living being – might emerge from possibilities written into the structure of the living being itself, not from the philosophical concepts that tower over it; that there might be a biological resistance to the biopolitical; that the bio- might be viewed as a complex and contradictory authority, opposed to itself and referring to both the ideological vehicle of modern sovereignty and to that which holds it in check: this, apparently, has never been thought.

Philosophy's Anti-biological Bias

What am I saying? It's a fact that in our time we have witnessed the definitive erasure of the limit between the political subject and the living subject that for centuries was believed to be secure. Michel Foucault illuminated magnificently the erasure of this limit, an erasure that marked the birth of the biopolitical and that acts as the characteristic trait of modern sovereignty: ‘For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question’ (1990: 143).

These celebrated remarks define biopower as the means by which life is introduced ‘into political techniques’. On the threshold of modernity, power was exercised over ‘life processes and undertook to control and modify them’ (Foucault 1990: 142). In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben returns to the analysis of this undifferentiated zone between biological life and political life that has defined the space of community. In the eighteenth century, the living being entered politics once and for all.

And yet we have to admit that this ‘entry’ is unilateral, non-dialectical, unreciprocated. The ‘double and crisscrossing politicization of life and the biologization of politics’ take place without tension because the biological is deprived of the right to respond and appears to flow simply into the mould of power (Esposito 2013: 71). It's as if, since its birth in the eighteenth century, biology were preparing itself for its political investiture by offering renegade categories to power.