Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics

DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-05544-2_58-1
# Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015

Biopolitics
Márk Losoncza* and Ádám Takácsb
a
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade, Belgrade, Serbia
b
Atelier Department of European Social Sciences and Historiography, Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary

Abstract
The notion of biopolitics is being harnessed by many pioneering empirical and theoretical research today.
Apart from describing its basic characters and its relation to bioethics, this entry reviews the canonical
contexts and uses of this term which are rooted in the field of contemporary moral, political, and social
philosophy and theory.

Keywords
Biopolitics; Power; Life; Body; Population; Normativity; Bioethics

Introduction
The notion of biopolitics is a puzzling theoretical and discursive entity. The recent fortunes of this term
have revealed not only an extensive use that reaches beyond the sphere of academic scholarship,
resurfacing in media and public discourse, but also the presence of broad and competing interdisciplinary
connotations. As of late, philosophy, history, political science, gender, cultural and public policy studies,
sociology, and various bio- and life sciences have begun to make systematic use of this notion, adapting it
to the specificities of their own purposes. In this sense, the notion of biopolitics has become the object of a
growing field of discursive appropriation with far-reaching scientific, political, and social implications.
But, precisely for this reason, the term has been endowed with a complex conceptual profile that is far
from being governed by a singular definition and usage.
Although it has been widely used in many areas, the canonical contexts and uses of this term are rooted
in the field of contemporary moral, political, and social philosophy and theory. From this perspective,
biopolitics can be envisaged as a key notion encompassing a particular philosophical or theoretical
framework, regardless of the fact that, even in the field of philosophy and social theory, it can incorporate
various and sometimes competing approaches. In its most general understanding, the notion of biopolitics
refers to the relationship, inherent in the human condition, between aspects of life (Greek bı́os) and aspects
of politics. Accordingly, it has been used to capture and bring to light the various ways in which
phenomena of life and moral principles, life and social norms, and life and political strategies are
bound to one another and mutually shape one another socially and historically. Similarly, biopolitics
typically focuses on the social significance of birth and death, biologically driven behavior, health- and
sexuality-related issues, and the bodily presence of human existence. In this sense, the recourse to this
notion aims at not simply reframing, but explicitly challenging the strict demarcation between “nature”
and “culture” that has pervaded Western thinking since the ancient Greeks distinguished between physis
(nature) and nomos (law).

*Email: losonczmark@gmail.com

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Due to their essentially multifarious character, philosophical and social theoretical studies carried out
under the label of biopolitics have covered a wide range of topics and interest areas. In research focusing
on historical and social issues, biopolitics has typically included studies on the principles and various
forms of managing the human population via the discursive and legal regulations of hygiene, public
health, sexuality, and race. In philosophically driven approaches, biopolitics has opened up a space for
new discourses on the human condition, insofar as it addresses questions of morality, human agency, and
sociality in terms of the bodily constitution and physical vulnerability of man. Discourses on biopolitics
have also contributed essentially to the renewal of the toolbox of political analysis because they have
reconceptualized power as being the constitutive form of control over bodies in modern and contemporary
societies. Finally, the topic of biopolitics has provided a space in which the discourses of the bio- and life
sciences and those of the social and human sciences can mutually influence one another. Within this
context, biopolitics has often been considered a mode of analysis that can liberate bioethical discourse
from its abstract and decision-oriented nature and embed it within a larger historical and epistemological
context (Lemke 2011). However, bioethics also appears to represent a potential theoretical landmark in
proposing concrete applications of results generated by biopolitical approaches and in informing public
policy about them (Mills 2011).

The Concept of Biopolitics of Michel Foucault

Although the term “biopolitics” was invented in the 1920s (Esposito 2008), and employed discretely from
the 1970s onward in different traditions of political and social theory (Liesen and Walsh 2012), most of the
predominant theoretical discourses on biopolitics today have been influenced by the work of French
philosopher and historian Michel Foucault (1926–1984). The emergence of the topic of biopolitics in
Foucault’s work in the mid-1970s fits with his broader theoretical and historical analysis of social power
and power relations. It is important to note, however, that for Foucault the analysis of power was not so
much hinged on questions of political rule and domination enacted via instruments of coercion or
techniques of legislation. Rather, Foucault focused on issues through which phenomena of power are
manifested in terms of normalization, control, embodiment, subjectivation, and rationalization connected
to the social life of concrete individuals and communities. Consequently, in Foucault’s writings, one
cannot find the elaboration of a general theory of political power. Instead, he analyzed power as a way of
influencing, controlling, or disciplining human behavior that is immanent in the relations of production,
relations of management and administration, family relations, sexual relations, and, in fact, all sorts of
relations comprising the social context. The key point about Foucault’s approach to power is that it
transcended the traditional sphere of politics as such and conceived of power as a socialized, institution-
alized, and embodied phenomenon.
Within Foucault’s theoretical framework, the notion of “biopolitics” is related to the concept of
“biopower” (biopouvoir), which refers to a specific mode of power relations. In its first approximation,
Foucault described biopower as the historical emergence of a new form of control over human needs and
potentials in modern society. In this context, he defined biopower as a set of mechanisms through which,
beginning in the eighteenth century, the biological features of the human species became the targets of
new political and social strategies (Foucault 2007). Foucault also spoke about biopower as the merging of
political and biological knowledge in modern society, which constituted a precondition for capitalist
development. Nevertheless, this distinct period in the eighteenth century when society, according to
Foucault, reached the threshold of biological modernity (Foucault 1981) was not simply the outcome of a
spontaneous historical transformation. For Foucault, the emergence of biopower was not something that
happened to society, but something that was produced or invented by a society. In short, biopower was the

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result of the emergence of new social and political strategies (consisting of evaluations, calculations,
conceptualizations, and decisions) that sought to respond to a certain strategic need carved out of social
reality itself.
With this context in mind, Foucault detected three axes of problematizations foregrounding the
emergence of biopolitics as strategy, as social rationality, and as political practice. The first axis of
problematization was related to the invention of a new type of body. Foucault argued that, from the
premodern period, it was the political anatomy of the human body (Foucault 1981) that determined the
nature of the power over life in society. This latter was aimed at disciplining, optimizing, and training the
individual body in order to increase its efficacy and to integrate it into systems of social and economic
control. Yet, somewhat later, this form of power was complemented by another form of strategic power,
which Foucault called the biopolitics of the population (Foucault 1981). Unlike the previous form,
biopolitics was not so much focused on the individual human as a living being, but rather sought to
recapture the body as belonging to the human species as a whole. In this sense, the body became
politically interpreted as a collective entity subject to the biological and social conditions of existence,
such as propagation, birth and mortality, health, probabilities of life, and individual and collective
welfare – forces that could be modified and optimized. Historically speaking, it was the invention of
the human population as social body that marked the fundamental condition for the implementation of the
biopolitical strategy in modern society.
According to Foucault, the second axis of biopolitical problematization was related to the fact that the
invention of the population as the possible object of political strategies also resulted in the emergence of a
new way of exercising power. Whereas the mechanisms of power that targeted the individual human body
were enacted essentially through disciplinary means (such as subordination, discipline, training, etc.),
biopolitics was introduced and established in the form of mechanisms of control. Control in this case,
however, was far from indicating a repressive set of maneuvers. One of the most spectacular results of
Foucault’s historical analysis concerning the biopolitical invention of population lies in his demonstration
that the population as political entity proved to be essentially inappropriate for disciplinary treatment. In
fact, he noted that the life of a population is subject to processes that either depend on long-term social
developments (e.g., level of public hygiene, rate of birth and mortality, conditions of work and living, etc.)
or tend to unfold quite outside of human control (e.g., epidemic, diseases, famine, etc.). Consequently, the
realization of biopolitical control over the population required the implementation of measures of
classification, regulation, prevention, provision, and maintenance of security, instead of acting in a
coercive manner toward the population. For this reason, Foucault also argued that, as opposed to the
traditional concept of sovereign power, predominant up to the eighteenth century, it was the liberal form of
“governmentality” that constituted the most prominent form of political rationality, giving rise to the
biopolitical attitude in the formation of modern state (Foucault 2008).
Finally, Foucault’s third axis of problematization was centered on the question of knowledge, histor-
ically mobilized in the birth of biopolitics. Since, as he demonstrated, inventing the population was the
practical equivalent of learning how to measure and control it, biopolitics as a social strategy turned out to
be entirely dependent on techniques of social classification, calculation, and organization. In other words,
the question of population could only become a political issue or question of power once it had been
sufficiently elaborated as a scientific and technological one. In this sense, Foucault also argued that the
birth of biopolitics overlapped with the emergence of the need for a new type of political and social
knowledge about society. Statistics, demography, political economy, and other “state” sciences were
called upon to help in the state’s effort to measure, control, and treat the population. At the same time,
beginning in the early eighteenth century, medical knowledge was extensively mobilized to help
guarantee the life conditions of the population, fighting for better public hygiene and against epidemic
diseases and famine. However, Foucault pointed out that, in reality, the concept of biopolitical

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intervention as such was largely unthinkable in terms of the medical rationality of the epoch. At that point
in time, medicine dealt essentially with the individual and not the collective or social body. It is precisely
the biopolitical way of thinking about power and the population, along with its social scientific back-
ground, that allowed for the transformation of medicine into an effective modality of social intervention.
In this manner, the birth of biopolitics also marked the appearance of the concept and practice of social
medicine in modern European societies.

The Theory of Biopolitics of Giorgio Agamben

The biopolitical theory of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1942–) builds upon Foucault’s
theory of biopolitics in many ways. Similarly to Foucault, Agamben identifies the roots of the Western
politicization of life in premodern times, paying special attention to Greco-Roman antiquity and Chris-
tianity. Furthermore, Agamben’s theory also takes into consideration the different manifestations of
biopolitics in the fields of sovereignty, government, and discipline. Finally, Agamben’s theory of
biopolitics implies a concept of productive power comparable to that of Foucault.
Agamben aims to reconstruct the foundations of occidental juridico-political traditions. He identifies
one of the key aspects of Western biopolitics as the ancient Greek binarity of natural life (zoé) and
politically qualified life (bı́os) (Agamben 1998). He argues that the politico-legal community was
paradoxically founded upon that which it excluded. In effect, biopolitical power necessarily tended to
create marginalized forms of life, for instance, by forcing women and slaves to stay in the “more natural”
sphere of the household or by banning people from the city. Indeed, Agamben’s main focus is on bare life,
which was produced through this exclusion. While political life consisted of the activities of equal citizens
in the public sphere, bare life referred to forms of life that were underprivileged or banned, that existed
outside of the political community, or that were deprived of the protection of the law. According to
Agamben, the figure of homo sacer in Roman law was also a manifestation of life denied the protection of
the law. In fact, since such persons could be killed by anybody with impunity, they were entirely
unprotected by the law. Agamben analyzes these historical phenomena in order to develop a comprehen-
sive theory of biopolitics. His fundamental assertion can be summed up in a single formula: the
production of bare life is the original act of biopolitical power. In other words, bare life should be
understood in a constructivist manner – as the product of juridico-political exclusion and not as a
biological given. Agamben reformulates the theory of sovereignty according to these insights: the
sovereign is not the one who decides on the exception, but the one who decides who belongs to bare
life, that is to say, who can be eliminated. One might find many examples of the figure of bare life: Jews in
Nazi camps, brain-dead patients in hospitals, contemporary refugees, the dispossessed, and so on. What is
common to all of them is that they are produced through the mechanisms of biopolitics. Thus, Agamben
follows Foucault’s theory by conceptualizing biopolitical power as a productive force. However, he also
corrects Foucault by claiming that sovereignty itself is necessarily biopolitical.
By analyzing the binarity of natural life and political life, Agamben’s aim is to show that it is precisely
the contingent character of this distinction that determines the way that biopolitics functions. The
politicization of natural life on the one hand and the naturalization and animalization of politics on the
other are the two sides of biopolitical power. For Agamben, the continuous suspension of binary pairs is
what makes biopolitical power effective. Following the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, Agamben
calls these intertwined aspects zones of indistinction and interprets the binary pairs of occidental traditions
as zoé–bı́os, law–factum, nature–culture, oikos–polis, private–public, state of exception–norm, etc. For
instance, Agamben argues that concentration camps functioned by suspending the differences between
exception and norm, inside and outside, and exclusion and inclusion. What is more, in a strict sense,

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biopolitics itself is just one side of a binary pair. It is not only that, relative to sovereignty, all human life
can potentially be eliminated, but biopolitics can also be revealed as thanatopolitics – as a politics that
causes death. Sovereign power also produces the limit figures of the “living dead” or “walking corpses” in
concentration camps or in hospitals, that is to say, beings that occupy a space between life and death and
human and inhuman. Therefore, from the viewpoint of Agamben’s philosophy, biopolitics and
thanatopolitics should be considered mere aspects of the functioning of power. One might conclude
that the main challenge in this approach is whether these binary pairs, which are claimed to be occidental,
can be suspended, thereby neutralizing them and rendering them inoperative. The same goes for the
binarity of natural life and political life.
Agamben draws radical conclusions from these observations. He claims that we are witnessing an age
in which power tends to suspend differences, so much so that the exception has become the rule. As a
result, we can potentially all be eliminated. Moreover, Agamben asserts that the concentration camp is the
biopolitical paradigm of our age. To fully understand this, it is crucial to note that Agamben has developed
a very critical stance toward democracy, suggesting that, like their ancient antecedents, today’s politico-
legal communities are founded upon the exclusion of noncitizens and the limit figures of the underpriv-
ileged. In light of this, the concentration camp can be seen as an exemplary form because it most clearly
manifests the underlying structure of today’s society.
The question arises, then, as to whether Agamben’s philosophy offers any emancipatory solutions or at
least leaves some room for ethico-political possibilities. It is important to point out that there is an
Agambenian vision of community that offers an alternative look at today’s society (Agamben 1993).
Firstly, Agamben focuses on those forms of life that are able to escape the mechanisms of power. By
introducing the notion of whatever singularities, Agamben’s ambition is to draw up an emergent
community whose members cannot be subsumed under any general law, sovereign power, or preformed
ways of life. According to this vision, the members of this community would belong to each other through
communication itself. Agamben even introduces the term pure communicability in order to emphasize his
assertion that communication should be emancipated from every exterior criterion. In addition, Agamben
investigates whether a new, common use of the world is possible. His term “common use” refers to a
community beyond mere consumption and exhibition – a community that can destroy the society of the
spectacle that separates life from itself. It implies a commonly shared world in which life is grounded in
itself alone and not in instrumental aims. Although this vision is somewhat unclear, it is supposed to
address the question as to whether it is possible to render the occidental binary pairs inoperative, in this
case, as a new community consisting of singularities engaged in the common use of the world. As such,
the coming community should be able to emancipate itself from exterior, instrumental criteria, such as the
burden of Western juridico-political categories.

Biopolitics According to Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

The work of the Italian-American philosopher tandem Michael Hardt (1960–) and Antonio Negri (1933–)
on biopolitics also relies noticeably on Foucault’s approach. At the same time, Hardt and Negri seek to
channel Foucault’s ideas into a different and somewhat radicalized appropriation. The basic tendency in
Hardt and Negri’s work gives primary importance to what they perceive to be the ontological and political
consequences of the biopolitical design of modern and postmodern society. Taking up Foucault’s
conceptualization of the historically changing forms of biopower as power over life, Hardt and Negri
argue that, in the contemporary context, a new paradigm of power has emerged. Within this paradigm,
power tends to operate at the same level as, yet internal to, social life. Thus, according to Hardt and Negri,
the analysis of biopolitics should focus its attention on the biopolitical fabric of being, that is, the socio-

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ontological conditions that make it possible for embodied and social life in contemporary capitalist
society to no longer be constantly produced by and invested in the operations of sovereign power, but
through the dynamics of immanent power relations maintained by individuals and collectives (Hardt and
Negri 2000). On the other hand, and precisely for this reason, Hardt and Negri see the biopolitical
condition as the target of a new and strategically significant political reappropriation. They claim that
biopolitics as a mode of being has the potential to persistently modify the current forms of social control in
society by inventing new forms of resistance and producing hitherto unseen figures of subjectivity (Hardt
and Negri 2009).
Hardt and Negri’s analysis of biopolitics is embedded in a politico-philosophical diagnosis of the global
capitalist system they call “Empire” (and is sometimes indiscernible from this diagnosis). In its broadest
portrayal, they consider biopolitics to be equivalent to the sphere of the political, as well as to the
dominant, forms of production and communication that shape the modes of life of contemporary man
(Negri 2003). In this sense, they call biopolitics the nature and the mode of distribution of power,
information, and affectivity in contemporary societies. Nevertheless, Hardt and Negri’s approach to
biopolitics also maintains its specificity, as they interpret the biopolitical fabric of social being with
respect to some of its most salient concrete manifestations. These latter are considered to be the result of
various forms of social and economic production that have increasingly blurred the boundaries between
labor and life, material and immaterial, and natural and artificial.
In light of this, in their various cowritten works (Hardt and Negri 2000, 2004, 2009), Hardt and Negri
analyze specific forms and figures of biopolitical production and invention, which they claim to be
formative of the contemporary social and political situation: the management of life through labor, the
emergence of new constellations of affectivity and work, the hybridization of the natural and the artificial,
the growing concordance between human needs and machines, and the correlations and antagonisms
between the human reproductive desire and the dominant scene of the capitalist economic and social order
of biopower. From this perspective, recognizing the current capitalist system as a regime of social and
economic relations that places the phenomena of individual and collective life at the center of production,
exploitation, and liberation is the key to understanding Hardt and Negri’s approach to biopolitics.
Another decisive aspect of Hardt and Negri’s biopolitical theory is its emphasis on the fact that
biopolitical production is designed to be, and increasingly takes place as, a production of subjectivity
(Hardt and Negri 2009). This means that the production of ideas, codes, images, affects, values, and
material and immaterial relations in contemporary society is directly related to how the constitutive
elements of human life and the potential for self-realization are managed. Subjectivity thus appears as the
very locus that both is inherently regulated by the current biopolitical production and allows new forms of
such productivity to emerge. By consequence, Hardt and Negri’s theory of productive subjectivity not
only involves an ontological claim about the status of the body and life within the current biopolitical
juncture but also advocates for the implementation of a new and subversive political approach. According
to them, the production of social subjectivity through the orchestration of common networks of
biopolitical resistance and invention may prove to be central to subverting existing forms of control
and domination in capitalist society and to establishing alternative social institutions of liberation. These
networks are supposed to involve a multitude of social, informational, affective, and spatial components.
In this sense, in Hardt and Negri’s work, biopolitics represents a radical strategy for social and political
emancipation.

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The Theory of Biopolitics of Roberto Esposito

Another Italian philosopher, Roberto Esposito (1950–), has developed a theory of biopolitics in which the
problem of immunity plays a central role. Esposito analyzes the historical examples of the logic of
immunization in order to unveil its essentially paradoxical nature (Esposito 2008, 2011). Esposito argues
that, while the politico-legal practice of immunization serves to protect and promote life by maintaining
security, property, and freedom, the very same logic negates life by separating it from the community and
reducing it to mere biological self-preservation and bodily existence. Thus, immunization is a two-sided
mechanism that is both productive and destructive at the same time. Similarly to Agamben, Esposito
claims that biopolitics always involves a politics of death – a thanatopolitics – as its constitutive other. For
instance, the Nazi affirmation of life and racial supremacy launched the bureaucratic–medical–eugenic
war against those who were perceived to be a threat to German–Aryan immunity. In other words, the
Nazis aimed at securing life precisely through death camps. Indeed, there can be no biopolitics without
destruction, exclusion, or elimination. Yet, the paradoxical, self-destructive nature of immunization is not
only grounded in the fact that the very condition of self-preservation implies the negation of a constitutive
other; immunization as a negative, closed mechanism always requires a positive side – certain normal-
izing extrinsic mechanisms (i.e., mediating forces such as sovereignty and property law) that can ensure
the protection of life. From this perspective, it is clear that immunization necessarily fails to protect life
and, what is more, reduces its productivity by separating it from and subjugating it to external forces.
Esposito draws important biopolitical conclusions from the historical–etymological analysis of the
terms communitas, immunitas, and munus (which means both obligation and gift) (Esposito 2004). By
emphasizing the etymological link between these expressions and suggesting that communitas and
immunitas are being rooted in munus, he claims that every community is based on the excess of an
originary communal gift that is given to its members and requires something in exchange. In effect, an
“absent gift,” which cannot be expropriated by anybody, connects the members of a community to one
another. Within this context, immunization refers to the refusal of reciprocity and common obligations by
individuals, which breaks the connection between the community and its members. According to the
immunitary logic, these mechanisms are full of paradoxes. For one, immunity presupposes community,
but at the same time refuses to participate in communal activities and protects itself from the excess of
communal gifts. Esposito suggests that this contradictory logic prevails in contemporary societies.
As far as other biopolitical theories are concerned, even though Esposito criticizes Agamben for his
ahistorical method and for accentuating the modern roots of contemporary biopolitics, they have much in
common in terms of their analyses of the paradoxical nature of biopolitics. Esposito also criticizes Hardt
and Negri’s biopolitical theory for being one-sidedly optimistic and ignoring the thanatopolitical aspects
of life. Nevertheless, he shares with Hardt and Negri the quest for an affirmative form of biopolitics. For
Esposito, this affirmative approach involves the establishment of a radically communal biopolitical
paradigm that moves beyond the immunitary logic prevalent in the contemporary context. In this new
paradigm, individual openness to differences and singularities would serve to eliminate the threat of
identification and unification by taking into consideration the vulnerability and finitude of individuals.
Under such conditions, even immunity would gain a positive meaning as something integral to the
diversity of individuals. Esposito formulates affirmative biopolitics as a politics that is no longer over life,
but of life – as a paradigm reflecting the immanent normativity of life.

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Conclusion
Despite its conceptual plasticity, the notion of biopolitics is being harnessed by pioneering empirical and
theoretical research today. Biopolitical approaches offer innovative strategies for analyzing the ways in
which social and political considerations play an increasingly significant role in shaping what counts in
terms of the biological and bodily features of the human condition in a society. Thus, biopolitics
underlines the co-occurrence and synergy between the phenomena of life and social normativity and
promotes a rapprochement between the disciplines dealing with these issues. The advantage of this term,
along with its underlying principles, lies also in the fact that it is able to incorporate various research
perspectives and assumptions in a more or less transparent way. The field opened up by biopolitical
approaches can equally accommodate empirical, historical, philosophical, and political research methods
and theorizations. Moreover, biopolitics seems to provide a perspective that renders some of the doctrinal
and conceptual contents elaborated in the field of bio- and life sciences accessible to the human and social
sciences and vice versa. In particular, bioethics appears to be one of the major fields today that allows for
both the expansion and radicalization of biopolitical approaches by keeping the question of normativity
inherent in life constantly on the agenda.

Cross-References
▶ Bioethics: Global
▶ Bioethics: Medical
▶ Bioethics: Politics
▶ Biology: Ethics of
▶ Biosphere
▶ Communitarian Bioethics
▶ Death: Meaning of Death
▶ Epidemics
▶ Ethics
▶ Eugenics
▶ Health Policy
▶ Health: Social Determination of
▶ Human Body
▶ Human Nature
▶ Law and Bioethics
▶ Life Sciences, Philosophy of
▶ Life, Meaning of
▶ Life, Value of
▶ Public Health
▶ Quality of Life
▶ Responsibility: Social
▶ Social Ethics
▶ Transhumanism
▶ Values
▶ Vulnerability

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References
Agamben, G. (1993). The coming community (trans: Hardt, M.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press.
Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (trans: Heller-Roazen, D.). Stanford:
Stanford University Press.
Esposito, R. (2004). Communitas: The origin and destiny of community (trans: Campbell, T. C.).
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Esposito, R. (2008). Bı́os: Biopolitics and philosophy (trans: Campbell, T.). Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press.
Esposito, R. (2011). Immunitas: The protection and negation of life (trans: Hanafi, Z.). Cambridge, MA:
Polity Press.
Foucault, M. (1981). The history of sexuality: An introduction (trans: Hurley, R.). London/England:
Penguin.
Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978 (trans:
Bucknell, G.). London/England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979 (trans:
Bucknell, G.). London/England: Palgrave Macmillan.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2000). Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude: War and democracy in the age of empire. New York: Penguin.
Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2009). Commonwealth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Lemke, T. (2011). Biopolitics: An advanced introduction (trans: Trump, E. F.). New York: New York
University Press.
Liesen, L. T., & Walsh, M. B. (2012). The competing meanings of “biopolitics” in political science:
Biological and postmodern approaches to politics. Politics and the Life Sciences, 31(1–2), 2–15.
Mills, C. (2011). Futures of reproduction. Bioethics and biopolitics. Dordrecht/Heidelberg/London/New
York: Springer.
Negri, A. (2003). Time for revolution (trans: Mandarini, M.). London/England: Continuum.

Further Readings
Fehér, F., & Heller, Á. (1994). Biopolitics. Aldershot: Avebury Press.
Memmi, D. (2003). Faire vivre et laisser mourir: Le gouvernement contemporain de la naissance et de la
mort. Paris: La Découverte.
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