My previous research on biopolitics posed for me an unresolvable theoretical question: does biopolitical power ever reach its end and is it at all possible to resist biopolitical power? Is biopolitics such an assemblage of micropowers that it incorporates every attempt to resist it? Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze provide an answer that doesn't seem very elucidating or obvious: it is life itself that can resist biopower. As Deleuze points out, quoting Foucault, ‘when power in this way takes life as its aim or object, then resistance to power already puts itself on the side of life, and turns life against power: “life as a political object was in a sense taken at face value and turned back against the system that was bent on controlling it”’ (Deleuze 2006a: 76). When power starts to interfere with different domains of life, not only manipulating the human species but also re-engineering all other species and environments, it is the potentiality of life that allows one to resist it.

More recently, Catherine Malabou makes similar claims by pointing out that ‘a resistance to what is known today as biopower – the control, regulation, exploitation, and instrumentalization of the living being – might emerge from possibilities written into the structure of the living being itself’ (Malabou 2016b: 429). She suggests that there might be biological resistance to the biopolitical which is revealed in new developments in biology and medicine such as epigenetics, cloning or regeneration. All these developments propose new transformations, such as reprogramming, replicating or regenerating the body through a combination of external factors and its own genetic material. These transformations imply that a body is transposable, changing and full of potentialities, hence it might evade the grasp of power.