Zoe and Bios: The Appropriation of Two Classical Terms in Contemporary Approaches of Bipolitics and Biopower

PAMELA VERÓNICA MORALES; GABRIELA RODRIGUEZ

Santiago de Chile, República de Chile

Congreso; XXI IPSA World Congress of Political Science. Global Discontent? Dilemmas of Change?; 2009

International Political Science Association

This paper aims to go over the problems faced in the application of bipopolitics and biopower in global society. To this end, our main focus will be on the dispute about the specific difference between these two concepts in the approaches of both Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. This will lead us to the sources these authors refer to when they define the categories of ?zoe? and ?bios? and to the way Foucault and Agamben understand them. To answer this latter question, we will revisit ancient and middle-age authors (mainly Aristotle, Saint Paul, and Saint Augustine in their original texts) that inspire both Foucault and Agamben´s positions. Drawing on elements of textual critical analysis, philology, and conceptual history, an attempt will be made to deconstruct the image created by these two philosophers that has been so influential in the way we see the classical word at the beginning of the twenty-first century and in the way we see ourselves reflected in this tradition.This conceptual history of the ?nude life? will let us ask ourselves if this is the way sovereign power functions in our modern age or, quite the reverse, its behavior responds to a transhistorical political mode. In this view our present times could be considered as a historical moment when this kind of power is being put into question while at the same time it is reaffirmed. Hence our look back on these issues should not be ascribed to a certain archeological taste but to an interest in approaching the process that formed such political subjects as the refugee, the Muslim, or the pariah, all of which constitute the extreme pole of exclusion from political otherness as a limit that shows the performative and proactive force of political power and its internal contradictions. La ponencia está en español, porque en esa lengua fue presentada y publicado, pero el título y el resumen en inglés porque así fueron pedidos y publicados en los programas y actas del Congreso. Las lenguas oficiales del evento fueron inglés, español, francés y portugués, en cualquiera de las cuales se podía intervenir.