Abstract

In this essay Laura Bazzicalupo surveys the contemporary biopolitical landscape from the war on terror to biotechnology to migration. Characterizing the biopolitical chiefly as a move from the juridical toward the normalizing, Bazzicalupo both critiques recent neomaterialist theorizations of biopower as vitalist and singles out some currents of feminist thought for their modern, anticommunitarian bias. A discussion of Arendt's analysis of depoliticization is then taken up from the perspective of immunity, one indebted to the thought of Roberto Esposito. She concludes with a spirited defense of aesthesis, which she defines as the creative assimilation of the other and an active reactivity, and an argument in favor of a non-normative ethics capable of resolving some of the most glaring ambivalences of biopolitics.

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