Esposito begins with a long and careful discussion of Foucault’s understanding of biopolitics, finding it lacking on two points. Not unlike Lemke, Esposito also finds that in Foucault the veritable relationship between life and law still remains enigmatic. One is never sure in Foucault if biopolitics, as part of the evolution of governmentality in the West, is perhaps the last mask of sovereign power, or whether it effects a radical break with all logics of sovereignty. Additionally, since Foucault does not himself provide a logic of biopolitics (as Agamben does), there remains a structural ambivalence on his part with respect to biopolitics: understood as the exercise of political power over life which leads to a politics of death, to modern racism and totalitarianism, biopolitics is to be rejected; but understood as a new kind of power that develops out of life itself, biopolitics is to be considered positive, containing the promise of a new politics. Bios is an attempt to resolve both the enigma of and the ambivalence toward biopolitics by explaining clearly how and why biopolitics turns out to be a politics of death, and how it could be articulated differently in order to bring about a new (emancipatory) political philosophy of life.
*From the Miguel Vatter’s paper Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life, published in “Publications”