ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the excess of biopolitics present in, and constitutive of, life insurance. It analyses the politics of fear that derive from life insurance products and practices. The chapter presents an analysis of three dimensions of valuation immanent to the ways in which life insurance transforms livelihoods and lifestyles into investment capital: valuation as a practice of inclusion, valuation as vital ontology, and valuation as the basis for moral economies. An analysis of how value is constituted and how processes of valuation proceed is therefore a way to explore a condition of possibility for political community, a link which is central to the possibility of liberalism and needs to be explored in great detail. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the relationship between the 'vital excess' and the resistance to life's valuation immanent in life insurance practices.
