Life as a (bio)political input: critical genealogies of Michael Foucault and Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

The present work means to analyze the relation between politics and life throughout Michael Foucault’s and Agamben’s critical-conceptual articulations. That way, we try to explain the following question: to what extent and under which arguments is it possible to reflect upon the politics over the biological human life taking as reference Foucault’s and Agamben’s thesis and even finding a connection between both? We hypothesize that: (1) it is possible to acknowledge the discovery of politics over life back at the Greco-Roman world, linking the bio politics to the Western political structure; (2) while having its spectrum projected in the Age of Antiquity, bio-politics blossomed within the Modern history, since the appearance of medico-social categories and the realizations around the human life potentiality. To inspect the underlying theme of the question, our text is organized in three different moments: first, we go through Foucault’s perception of bio-politics and its connections to the human life; next, we observe how Agamben proposes his thesis and which arguments he makes use of to sustain his statements; and lastly, we present a liaison between both thesis, putting forward how they connected themselves within a research hypothesis.