In the wake of Foucault’s claim that we have crossed the ‘threshold of biological modernity’(‘seuil de modernité biologique’), numerous thinkers have acknowledged the importance of further developing Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics. Two broad responses have resulted. On the one hand, ‘Italian Theory’ offers long genealogies, going as far back as Spinoza, Hobbes or even Aristotle, while failing to grasp the specificity of ‘biological modernity’. On the other, the critical investigation of life sciences, developed for instance by Nikolas Rose, remains chiefly empirical, and beyond the heterogeneity of the biopolitical practices fails to grasp their common philosophical presupposition.
The aim of this paper is to demonstrate that the theory of evolution by natural selection developed by Charles Darwin has profoundly changed, if not determined tout court, the modern notion of life, consequently contributing in a decisive manner to the crossing of the ‘threshold of biological modernity’. Drawing on the work of contemporary political philosophers and scientists, I will isolate the theoretical nucleus that has allowed the interpretation of the revolutionary theory proposed by Darwin as a normative ground for politics. I will finally maintain that the short circuit between politics and biology can take two forms. If the former introduces a positive, or better, positivistic, normative ground prescribing a biopolitics of purity; the latter determines a negative normative ground, which prescribes a biopolitics of contamination.
