Agamben's Biopolitics Of Life

Agamben starts with two distinctions : zoe versus bios and oikos versus polis. Zoe refers to the form of life common to all living things, whereas bios refers to a form of life specific to an individual or groups. Agamben's second distinction runs in parallel: oikos is concerned with managing a household and household economics, whereas the polis is concerned with developing the good life. Agamben tells us that, starting with Aristotle and the Greeks, the Western polis was founded by relegating zoe to the oikos. The oikos is concerned with the maintenance and reproduction of natural biological life, the polis is concerned with cultivating the bios of a community. This is why thinkers as varied as Foucault and Arendt have understood modernity …show more content…
He outlines three axes of, ‘immunitary dispositif’ of biopolitics. These include, the double enclosure of the body, the preemptive suppression of birth and the normativization of life. Among these, the last, normativization of life was seen as the possibility for an affirmative politics of life for Esposito. In Bios, Esposito concludes that Nazism created a norm of life not in the sense that it adapted its own norms to the demands of life, but in the sense that it “closed the entire extension of life within the borders of a norm that was destined to reverse it into its opposite, that is into death” (Esposito 184). He tried to show that in politics of life or in affirmative biopolitics life and norm are mutually presupposed. He refers to the radical vitalization of the norm that Canguilhem proposes on the concepts of normal and pathological in the history of medicine. According to Canguilhem life is internally and necessarily normative, since even at the simplest level, living means preference and exclusion (The Normal and the Pathological 136). Living involves polarities of preference and exclusion. Life is inherently normative means that it aims at restoring the normal relation between an individual organism and its environment. In this relation, it is also capable of preferring certain elements from its environment, which is beneficial for its survival and also exclude which may threaten its vitality. So Esposito emphasise that disease and health are both normative states in which both indicate new forms of life for the organism. They are necessary to reveal the normal functioning of the body. To be normal doesn’t mean a pre-established norm, but rather to be able to harness and maintain one’s own normative power. Thus to be normal is to be able to create new norms. Esposito