Biopoder, biopolitica y politica

In this paper, I analyze and compare the theses of Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri and Roberto Esposito on biopolitics with those of Michel Foucault. In this regard, I sustain that: Agamben, identifying biopower substantially with sovereign power, runs the risk of underestimating above all the specificity of modern biopolitical power-knowledge; Negri theorizes the concept of biopolitics as political liberation in a questionable way and connects the “ethical practices of subjectivation” with the productive power of work too strictly; Esposito, emphasizing the immunizing and negative features of modern biopolitics, underestimates the predominance of the active manipulation of life in the contemporary forms of biopower. Finally, I underline the need to place more importance on the ethical practices of freedom than on the search for affirmative biopolitics, to avoid the risk that ‘politics of life’ become ‘power over life.’