The paper addresses the relationship between democratic politics and biopolitical governance in the context of contemporary post-truth politics, characterized by the devaluation of the authority of expert knowledge and the proliferation of alternative media. Post-truth politics appears to pose particular problems for the operations of biopower that are justified with reference to the founded knowledges of biology, economics and other sciences. The devaluation of these knowledges might appear as conducive to the democratization of biopolitics, the opening of its rationalities to contestation in the public sphere. The paper argues that insofar as it rejects the very idea of truth in favour of plurality of opinions, the post-truth regime does not serve to democratize biopolitics but rather risks dispensing with democracy as such. Drawing on Foucault’s ‘Subjectivity and Truth’ lectures, we suggest that the democratization of biopolitics rather proceeds through the affirmation of the contingency of truths that enables the continuous generation of true discourse that remains fallible and hence contestable.
