ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the affirmative biopolitics of Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben and Robert Esposito as three distinct but related attempts to rethink the relation between subjectivity and community from a post-Marxist horizon. The main point of contention between these theorists remains the role played by political theology within affirmative biopolitics. For Negri, political theology has no affirmative uses: it is the index of the autonomy of the political domination from the creative power of living labour, and thus belongs with ideology. For Agamben, the priority of the dimension of species-life is visible in his neologism 'form-of-life', where 'life' refers to zoe and not bios. The chapter focuses attention on Agamben and Esposito to try to shed more light on the connection between subjectivity and community through the 'phenomenology' of life and body, and the role played by political theology in Italian biopolitics.
