Biopolitics of security in the twenty-first century

This chapter addresses two questions. First, it asks what happens to security practices when they take species life as their referent object. Second, it then asks what happens to security practices which take species life as their referent object when the very understanding of species life undergoes transformation and change. It also theorises beyond Foucault when it interrogates the impact in the twentieth century of the compression of morbidity on populations and the molecular revolution on what people understand life to be. If the so-called compression of morbidity refers to the transformation of populations, the molecularisation of biology has profoundly transformed the very modern understanding of Life itself. The chapter concludes its revision of the analytic of the biopolitics of security by arguing that biopolitics of security in the twenty-first century are best conceived as a recombinant biopolitics of what the molecular life sciences would call pluripotent life.