Davide Tarizzo is an Italian philosopher. After a Phd with Gianni Vattimo e Pier Aldo Rovatti (authors of the Weak Thought, Pensiero debole). Tarizzo further developed his research under the supervision of Jacques Derrida in Paris. Over the past years, he has closely collaborated with Roberto Esposito, at the Italian Institute of Human Sciences, and with Ernesto Laclau. His work covers various topics in social and political thought, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and metaphysics. The aim of this paper is to critically introduce his biopolitical thought which is laid out in 'Life. A Modern Invention' (2017) and in a series of essays still only partially published in English.
During the 1970s, Michel Foucault introduced the notion of a ‘society of normalization’ to define the biopolitical practices of late modern societies. While Foucault’s analysis certainly worthy of the highest consideration it nonetheless needs to be expanded and updated. Tarizzo explores the emergence of a new biopolitical rationality which no longer answers to a logic of normalization but to a logic of optimization. This shift corresponds to the transition from a regime inspired by the logic of the Normal to one inspired by the logic of the Optimum, of efficiency. This new form of governmentality renders lives more effective and productive without adapting them to any predetermined imago of the human.
Such ideological order is built up around a ‘dogmatic naturalism’ which turns optimization into a necessary law of nature. The ‘societies of optimization’ find their justification in a pseudoscientific interpretation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection which makes the evolution of life into a struggle for the infinite enhancement of life itself.
