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A study of the critical theory of "civil society" from the perspective of post-Foucaultian biopolitics. This book pursues the possibility of an affirmative politics of life based on what Arendt called natality, a "surplus of life" that resists the oppressive government of life found in the capitalist political economy, in the liberal system of rights, and in the bourgeois family, and that offers a normative groundwork for a new "republic of the living."
List of contents
Acknowledgments Introduction Part I. Biopolitics of the Economy 1. The Tragedy of Civil Society and Republican Politics in Hegel 2. Living Labor and Self-Generative Value in Marx Part II. Biopolitics of the Family 3. Reification and the Redemption of Bare Life in Adorno and Agamben 4. Natality, Fertility, Mimesis in Arendt's Theory of Freedom 5. The Heroism of Sexuality in Benjamin and Foucault Part III. Biopolitics of Rights 6. Free Markets and Republican Constitutions in Hayek and Foucault 7. Biopolitical Cosmopolitanism: The Right to Have Rights in Arendt and Agamben Part IV. Biopolitics of Eternal Life 8. The Unity of Biological Life and a Philosophical Life in Aristotle, Spinoza, and Heidegger 9. Eternal Recurrence and the Now of Revolution: Nietzsche and Messianic Marxism Notes Bibliography Index
About the author
Miguel Vatter
Summary
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.
