Republic of the Living

This book takes up Foucault's hypothesis that liberal "civil society," far from being a sphere of natural freedoms, designates the social spaces where our biological lives come under new forms of control, and are invested with new forms of biopower. In order to test this hypothesis, the chapters look back at the critical theory of civil society starting with Hegel and Marx through Lukacs, Adorno, Benjamin and Arendt from the new horizon opened up by Foucault's turn to biopolitics and its reception in recent Italian theory. Negri, Agamben, and Esposito have argued that biopolitics denotes not only new forms of domination over life, but harbors within it an affirmative relation between biological life and politics that carries an emancipatory potential. The chapters of this book take up this suggestion by locating this emancipatory potential in the biopolitical feature of the human condition that Arendt called "natality" and proceed to illustrate how natality is the basis for a republican articulation of an affirmative biopolitics. This book aims to renew the critical theory of civil society by pursuing the traces of natality as a "surplus of life" that resists the oppressive government of life found in the capitalist political economy, in the liberal system of rights, in the bourgeois family and offers the normative foundation for a new "republic of the living." Finally, natality permits to establish a relation between biological life and contemplative life that reverses the long held belief in a privileged relationship of thinking to the possibility of our death in order to propose a materialist, atheological conception of contemplative life as eternal life.