ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how the subject might be reinvented so that it can contest the limits and conditions of liberal imaginaries on some of the terrains which liberalism holds most dear: life, humanity, security, freedom, and autonomy. The doubly political and philosophical problem is how to reinvent them, by breathing new life into them. The question of how to reinvent the subject is, when opened up to inquiry via a more properly Foucauldian methodology, a question not of how to refuse the care for life via which biopolitical regimes facilitate subjection, but to rethink the relations of the subject to its life differently, with a view to being able to reconstitute practices of freedom and security so that it might recover a more fundamentally human capacity for autonomy. Contesting the global injunction to give up on aspirations for security and rethink freedom as exposure to danger requires a subject capable of seeing itself as something more than merely biological material.
