ABSTRACT
Biopolitics is concerned with managing cattle and corn, microbes and mosquitos. Biopolitics enacts a kind of double movement that runs parallel to the distinction between homo and anthropos, bios and zoe, and which is of essential importance for the Anthropocene. In contrast to the Malthusian biopolitics of scarcity, Erle Ellis is sketching a biopolitics of abundance which is predicated on the assumption that ecological carrying capacity can always be increased through a more intensive management of biological and social processes. Michel Foucault’s failure to address T. R. Malthus is even more remarkable if one considers that he proposed the concept of biopolitics at the very moment when population growth had moved into the center of public debate. A biopolitics fit for the Anthropocene can no longer focus on the reproductive success of individual biological species. In the Anthropocene, how people define their needs and how they go about satisfying them becomes a political issue.
