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Agamben even introduces the term pure communicability in order to emphasize his assertion that communication should be emancipated from every exterior criterion. In addition, Agamben investigates whether a new, common use of the world is possible. His term “common use” refers to a community beyond mere consumption and exhibition – a community that can destroy the society of the spectacle that separates life from itself. It implies a commonly shared world in which life is grounded in itself alone and not in instrumental aims. Although this vision is somewhat unclear, it is supposed to address the question as to whether it is possible to render the occidental binary pairs inoperative, in this case, as a new community consisting of singularities engaged in the common use of the world. As such, the coming community should be able to emancipate itself from exterior, instrumental criteria, such as the burden of Western juridicopolitical categories.

Biopolitics According To Michael Hardt And Antonio Negri

The work of the Italian-American philosopher tandem Michael Hardt (1960–) and Antonio Negri (1933–) on biopolitics also relies noticeably on Foucault’s approach. At the same time, Hardt and Negri seek to channel Foucault’s ideas into a different and somewhat radicalized appropriation. The basic tendency in Hardt and Negri’s work gives primary importance to what they perceive to be the ontological and political consequences of the biopolitical design of modern and postmodern society. Taking up Foucault’s conceptualization of the historically changing forms of biopower as power over life, Hardt and Negri argue that, in the contemporary context, a new paradigm of power has emerged. Within this paradigm, power tends to operate at the same level as, yet internal to, social life. Thus, according to Hardt and Negri, the analysis of biopolitics should focus its attention on the biopolitical fabric of being, that is, the socio-ontological conditions that make it possible for embodied and social life in contemporary capitalist society to no longer be constantly produced by and invested in the operations of sovereign power, but through the dynamics of immanent power relations maintained by individuals and collectives (Hardt and Negri 2000). On the other hand, and precisely for this reason, Hardt and Negri see the biopolitical condition as the target of a new and strategically signiﬁcant political reappropriation. They claim that biopolitics as a mode of being has the potential to persistently modify the current forms of social control in society by inventing new forms of resistance and producing hitherto unseen ﬁgures of subjectivity (Hardt and Negri 2009).

Hardt and Negri’s analysis of biopolitics is embedded in a politico-philosophical diagnosis of the global capitalist system they call “Empire” (and is sometimes indiscernible from this diagnosis). In its broadest portrayal, they consider biopolitics to be equivalent to the sphere of the political, as well as to the dominant, forms of production and communication that shape the modes of life of contemporary man (Negri 2003). In this sense, they call biopolitics the nature and the mode of distribution of power, information, and affectivity in contemporary societies. Nevertheless, Hardt and Negri’s approach to biopolitics also maintains its speciﬁcity, as they interpret the biopolitical fabric of social being with respect to some of its most salient concrete manifestations. These latter are considered to be the result of various forms of social and economic production that have increasingly blurred the boundaries between labor and life, material and immaterial, and natural and artiﬁcial.

In light of this, in their various co-written works (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004, 2009), Hardt and Negri analyze speciﬁc forms and ﬁgures of biopolitical production and invention, which they claim to be formative of the contemporary social and political situation: the management of life through labor, the emergence of new constellations of affectivity and work, the hybridization of the natural and the artiﬁcial, the growing concordance between human needs and machines, and the correlations and antagonisms between the human reproductive desire and the dominant scene of the capitalist economic and social order of bio power. From this perspective, recognizing the current capitalist system as a regime of social and economic relations that places the phenomena of individual and collective life at the center of production, exploitation, and liberation is the key to understanding Hardt and Negri’s approach to bio politics.

Another decisive aspect of Hardt and Negri’s biopolitical theory is its emphasis on the fact that bio political production is designed to be, and increasingly takes place as, a production of subjectivity (Hardt and Negri 2009). This means that the production of ideas, codes, images, affects, values, and material and immaterial relations in contemporary society is directly related to how the constitutive elements of human life and the potential for self-realization are managed. Subjectivity thus appears as the very locus that both is inherently regulated by the current biopolitical production and allows new forms of such productivity to emerge. By consequence, Hardt and Negri’s theory of productive subjectivity not only involves an ontological claim about the status of the body and life within the current biopolitical juncture but also advocates for the implementation of a new and subversive political approach. According to them, the production of social subjectivity through the orchestration of common networks of biopolitical resistance and invention may prove to be central to subverting existing forms of control and domination in capitalist society and to establishing alternative social institutions of liberation. These networks are supposed to involve a multitude of social, informational, affective, and spatial components. In this sense, in Hardt and Negri’s work, biopolitics represents a radical strategy for social and political emancipation.

The Theory Of Biopolitics Of Roberto Esposito

Another Italian philosopher, Roberto Esposito (1950–), has developed a theory of biopolitics in which the problem of immunity plays a central role. Esposito analyzes the historical examples of the logic of immunization in order to unveil its essentially paradoxical nature (Esposito 2008, 2011). Esposito argues that, while the politico legal practice of immunization serves to protect and promote life by maintaining security, property, and freedom, the very same logic negates life by separating it from the community and reducing it to mere biological self-preservation and bodily existence. Thus, immunization is a two-sided mechanism that is both productive and destructive at the same time. Similarly to Agamben, Esposito claims that bio politics always involves a politics of death – a thanatopolitics – as its constitutive other. For instance, the Nazi afﬁrmation of life and racial supremacy launched the bureaucratic–medical–eugenic war against those who were perceived to be a threat to German–Aryan immunity. In other words, the Nazis aimed at securing life precisely through death camps. Indeed, there can be no biopolitics without destruction, exclusion, or elimination. Yet, the paradoxical, self-destructive nature of immunization is not only grounded in the fact that the very condition of self-preservation implies the negation of a constitutive other; immunization as a negative, closed mechanism always requires a positive side – certain normalizing extrinsic mechanisms (i.e., mediating forces such as sovereignty and property law) that can ensure the protection of life. From this perspective, it is clear that immunization necessarily fails to protect life and, what is more, reduces its productivity by separating it from and subjugating it to external forces.

Esposito draws important biopolitical conclusions from the historical–etymological analysis of the terms communitas, immunitas, and munus (which means both obligation and gift) (Esposito 2004). By emphasizing the etymological link between these expressions and suggesting that communitas and immunitas are being rooted in munus, he claims that every community is based on the excess of an originary communal gift that is given to its members and requires something in exchange. In effect, an “absent gift,” which cannot be expropriated by anybody, connects the members of a community to one another. Within this context, immunization refers to the refusal of reciprocity and common obligations by individuals, which breaks the connection between the community and its members. According to the immunitary logic, these mechanisms are full of paradoxes. For one, immunity presupposes community, but at the same time refuses to participate in communal activities and protects itself from the excess of communal gifts. Esposito suggests that this contradictory logic prevails in contemporary societies.

As far as other biopolitical theories are concerned, even though Esposito criticizes Agamben for his ahistorical method and for accentuating the modern roots of contemporary biopolitics, they have much in common in terms of their analyses of the paradoxical nature of biopolitics. Esposito also criticizes Hardt and Negri’s biopolitical theory for being one-sidedly optimistic and ignoring the than at opolitical aspects of life. Nevertheless, he shares with Hardt and Negri the quest for an afﬁrmative form of biopolitics. For Esposito, this afﬁrmative approach involves the establishment of a radically communal biopolitical paradigm that moves beyond the immunitary logic prevalent in the contemporary context. In this new paradigm, individual openness to differences and singularities would serve to eliminate the threat of identiﬁcation and uniﬁcation by taking into consideration the vulnerability and ﬁnitude of individuals. Under such conditions, even immunity would gain a positive meaning as something integral to the diversity of individuals. Esposito formulates afﬁrmative biopolitics as a politics that is no longer over life, but of life – as a paradigm reﬂecting the immanent normativity of life.

Conclusion

Despite its conceptual plasticity, the notion of biopolitics is being harnessed by pioneering empirical and theoretical research today. Biopolitical approaches offer innovative strategies for analyzing the ways in which social and political considerations play an increasingly signiﬁcant role in shaping what counts in terms of the biological and bodily features of the human condition in a society. Thus, biopolitics underlines the co-occurrence and synergy between the phenomena of life and social normativity and promotes a rapprochement between the disciplines dealing with these issues. The advantage of this term, along with its underlying principles, lies also in the fact that it is able to incorporate various research perspectives and assumptions in a more or less transparent way. The ﬁeld opened up by biopolitical approaches can equally accommodate empirical, historical, philosophical, and political research methods and theorizations. Moreover, biopolitics seems to provide a perspective that renders some of the doctrinal and conceptual contents elaborated in the ﬁeld of bioand life sciences accessible to the human and social sciences and vice versa. In particular, bioethics appears to be one of the major ﬁelds today that allows for both the expansion and radicalization of biopolitical approaches by keeping the question of normativity inherent in life constantly on the agenda.

Bibliography :

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