The paper ventures to relocate contemporary discussions of 'affirmative biopolitics' in continental political philosophy to the terrain of democracy. It has become commonplace to say that Western liberal democracies have become biopolitical. But does this mean that Western biopolitics has thereby become democratic? Most theorists of biopolitics do not think so, pointing to the fundamental incompatibility of democratic and biopolitical governmental rationalities. The universalist and egalitarian assumptions of democracy appear to clash with the particularistic and quasi-naturalist presuppositions of biopolitics. While the concept of the democratic subject was developed through purposeful abstraction from the bodily, biological or physical attributes of living beings, biopolitics dispenses with this disembodied figure through the explicit focus on the most minute and particular aspects of concrete corporeal existence. Since living bodies are irreducibly different, the principle of democratic equality is also rendered inoperative, along with such key distinctions as public/private and culture/nature. For this reason, such leading authors in the field of biopolitics as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito have argued that the ascendancy of biopolitics in the late-modern politics renders democracy meaningless or at least reduced to a purely formal arrangement of organizing government. This paper probes the alternative hypothesis: while not being inherently democratic or anti-democratic, biopolitics remains to be democratized. The decision on the proper form of life is removed from the field of expert knowledge and management and restored to popular sovereignty. Drawing on Claude Lefort's influential theory of democracy we analyze the process of the democratization of biopolitics through the institutionalization of the fundamental contingency of forms of life.
