ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the biopolitical implications of Friedrich Nietzsche's considerations of human culture from the perspective of life. It presents Roberto Esposito's reading of Nietzsche's biopolitics as inscribed in the dialectic of immunity and community. The chapter explores the various elements of the thanatopolitical reading of Nietzsche's biopolitics. It highlights the main features of liberal and neoliberal readings of Nietzsche's biopolitics, from his critique of state power to his defense of heightened individualism and addresses the way affirmative biopolitics responds to these features. The chapter also elaborates on the central ideas underlying a reading of Nietzsche as a philosopher of an affirmative biopolitics and how the later addresses the reading of Nietzsche's biopolitics as thanatopolitical and racist. The affirmation of the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of all forms of life and their equivalence is so important for affirmative biopolitics because it counteracts both the racism and the speciesism found at the basis of thanatopolitics.
