Norman MacLeod's (2016) response to my essay ‘One Life Only: Biological Resistance, Political Resistance’ is extremely helpful because it allows for a long-awaited discussion, that is, for a new type of exchange among biologists and philosophers. The problem is that this discussion is not the one imagined by MacLeod. Rather, it is generated, in a certain sense, by the holes in his response and argument.

When I speak of a ‘new type of exchange among biologists and philosophers’, I mean a discussion that goes beyond the classical, well-known ethical debate on the one hand (which questions what should be the ethical limits of biotechnologies), and the no-less-famous assimilation of biology to biopolitics on the other (which demonstrates how biological science always necessarily ends up being an ideological servant of biopower). In both cases, philosophers – such as Monique Canto-Sperber in France, Martha Nussbaum in the United States, as representatives of the first debate, or Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, as representatives of the second – have always tried to elaborate a strategy of resistance to the political hazards and threats potentially and actually contained in biological scientific practices. The exchange I am talking about is clearly not the only ‘bio-ethico-techno-politico-scientific’ one.

In my essay, I challenge the critical skills of current biology – molecular biology in particular – namely, its assertion of itself not only as a research field but also as an autonomous sphere of discourse. I state that biologists have never reacted to the meaning conferred by Foucault to the prefix bio in the concept of biopolitics – which is that of a pure vehicle of power. I suggest that biologists have never affirmed the capacity of both biology and life itself to resist biopolitical hegemony. My claim that ‘the biological operator in the transition [from sovereignty to modern biopolitics, as Foucault analyses it] has been entirely passive’ nonetheless calls for further clarification (qtd. in MacLeod 2016: 193).