ISBN : 9782296545458
POWER OVER LIFE/POWER OF LIFE: WHAT IS A NON-ORGANIZATIONAL POLITICS
Modernity is the era of bio-power, the age of the political control over life. The most provocative contribution of Foucault's and Deleuze's thought to political philosophy is the attempt to articulate a power of life that evades the power over life. Insofar as bio-power involves the political organization of life and, therefore, a conceptualization of life as a teleological or end-oriented process, i.e. as an organism, Foucault and Deleuze can be said to espouse a non-organismic vitalism: an understanding of life that is no longer centered on the organism or on organization as the source of life. But given that the living organism has provided the metaphorical template for almost all normative theories of the political in modernit...