ABSTRACT
As is evident from the previous chapters, biopolitics has largely been seen as a problematic political formation, one that requires critique and resistance or overcoming in some way or another. This is starkest in Agamben’s work, where biopolitics centrally involves the production of bare life, and is more accurately understood as a thanatopolitics, or politics of death. In this view, the only hope for living well is through the development of a new political formation that does not partake in the biopolitical capture of life. However, while this has been the dominant mode of thinking about biopolitics, in recent years a different approach has emerged, one which strives toward developing an affirmative biopolitics. There are two predominant models for an affirmative view of biopolitics. The first of these is developed by Antonio Negri and his co-author Michael Hardt in works such as Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004), in which they contrast the stifling hegemony of Empire and biopolitical production with the revolutionary significance of the multitude. The second form of affirmative biopolitics argues that although the modern formation of biopower has been deadly, resources can be found within it that turn it toward a more positive and life-affirming condition. This is most developed in the work of Italian political theorist Roberto Esposito, particularly in his books Immunitas (2011) and Bios (2008).
