ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the slim dossier of the remarks on Soviet biopolitics by the three authors most associated with this problematic: Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Robert Esposito. It explores the way socialism in these three accounts is either subsumed under the Western experience or removed from the account of biopolitics. The experience of Soviet socialism was strongly heterogeneous to the naturalist governmentalities that characterized, in different ways, both liberalism and Nazism. The chapter expresses that the renewed engagement with socialist biopolitics does not merely set the historical record straight but also permits to understand the ontological foundations of biopolitics as such. Roberto Esposito's theory of biopolitics, developed in his Communitas-Immunitas-Bios trilogy and other works, follows Agamben in interpreting biopolitics in ontological terms, tracing its thanatopolitical turn to the immunitary logic of the protection of life by negative means.
