From Critical to Affirmative Biopolitics

Abstract

The panel features interdisciplinary contributions to the debate on affirmative biopolitics, initiated in Italian political theory. The works of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri and Roberto Esposito go beyond the negative diagnosis of the violent and authoritarian potential of bio-power but also address the possibility of the conversion of biopolitics in affirmative terms, whereby the power of life is reclaimed from governmental apparatuses. Of particular importance is the positive relation these theories establish between biopolitics and democracy: while the two concepts have often functioned as opposites, in the discourse of affirmative biopolitics they imply and intensify one another.

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