The problematization of Life in Michel Foucault, Roberto Esposito and Nikolas Rose

Abstract

Michel Foucault's investigations of the exercise of power over life have inspired, both in terms of objectives - a genealogy of modern man’s subjectivation processes - and in methodological terms - archeology of forms of resistance to subjection -, innumerable studies, polemics, criticisms and misunderstandings, with many of whom Foucault came to dialogue while still alive. Perhaps the most present concepts in these investigations are those of biopolitics and bio-power, formulated by Foucault in the bosom of the problematization that involves the relations between knowledge, power and subjectivity. The concept of biopolitics can be roughly understood as a "calculative management of life" for the promotion of life, with the least possible expenditure: economic, ideological, institutional, and so on. The present article aims to present, although summarily, the place occupied by the analysis of these concepts within Foucault's work, and then to point out two of these theoretical contributions that are underway at the beginning of the twenty-first century and that dialogue directly with the Foucauldian thinking: the concept of immunity paradigm, by Roberto Esposito, and the concept of somatic ethics, by Nikolas Rose