ABSTRACT
The text of Bios initially develops through a reconsideration of the theoretical framework of biopolitics. The constant possibility for a politics of life - biopolitics - to transform itself into a politics of death is, for Roberto Esposito, what remains unexplained in the most distinctive contemporary conception of biopolitics represented by the work of Michel Foucault. The type of philosophical interrogation, which Foucault identifies as originating in Kant's 1784 essay of the same title, is of 'the outline of what one might call the attitude to modernity'. The break flows from the underlying affinity of Foucault's thought with 'Nietzschean genealogy'. The acknowledgement of definitive exhaustion of the categories of sovereignty, property and liberty and, beyond them, the disclosure of 'a new horizon of sense' arises, for Esposito, in the work of Nietzsche. For Esposito, the categories of modern political philosophy perform an essential role, once one understands biopolitics from within the paradigm of immunisation.
