One of the most established and well-known claims in the field of biopolitics is that political universalism recedes when life steps to the foreground. When the general aim is to save, improve, secure, modify or foster life, the attention is eventually focused on particular biological differences, regardless of universal ideas that might inspire this governance. And yet, recently different theorists of biopolitics have brought forward different ideas on how political universalism might still be made operative in relation to the domain of life. These so-called theories of ‘affirmative biopolitics’, however, have remained somewhat cryptic and no general consensus have been reached over how life and politics could be brought together in a way that would make it possible, for instance, to speak about politics of life that also in practice affirms everyone’s freedom and equality. This paper contributes to this discussion and considers what affirmative biopolitics might be in practice by contrasting the theory of affirmative biopolitics to the concrete politics of the global HIV/AIDS crisis. Through this comparison it is brought forward how especially against the certain tendencies of the theory of affirmative biopolitics, the idea of affirmative biopolitics is never fully realizable in practice if affirmative biopolitics is one-sidedly understood only in terms of resistance, revolt or protest against all institutions that normatively contain our lives. Instead, it is claimed that the idea of affirmative biopolitics actually demands that it is always practiced in order to transform such institutions.
