Biopolitics

Why do so many people, in an age of unprecedented freedom, fall ill from exhaustion, depression, and anxiety? The most influential answer in recent philosophy comes from Byung-Chul Han (b. 1959), a South Korean philosopher based in Germany, author of a series of short, aphoristic books that have become a worldwide publishing phenomenon. His central thesis is disconcerting: we fall ill not from an excess of repression but from an excess of positivity — from the compulsion to be able, to produce, and to perform that we turn against ourselves. This article reconstructs that diagnosis. ...

Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a quiet transformation reshaped the nature of political power in the West. The sovereign, once defined by the prerogative to kill — to take the lives of disobedient subjects — began exercising a radically new form of authority: administering, optimizing, and regulating the life of populations. Michel Foucault called this shift biopower, and in doing so inaugurated one of the most productive conceptual fields in contemporary political philosophy. ...

Few philosophical distinctions are as revealing as the one the Greeks drew between bíos (βίος) and zoé (ζωή). The first designates qualified life — the way someone chooses to live, the ethical and political profile of an existence; the second indicates the bare fact of being alive, the biological life shared by all animate beings. This seemingly terminological difference carries one of philosophy’s deepest questions: what does it mean to live well? ...

Achille Mbembe Joseph-Achille Mbembe was born in 1957 in Otélé, Cameroon. He trained in history and philosophy at the Sorbonne (Paris I) and received his doctorate from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). He is currently a senior professor at the Wits Institute for Social and Economic Research (WISER) at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. Mbembe is considered one of the most influential African intellectuals today, with work that articulates African history, postcolonial theory, political philosophy, and cultural criticism. He writes in French; his principal works have been translated into English, Portuguese, German, and other languages. ...

Byung-Chul Han Byung-Chul Han (한병철, b. 1959, Seoul) is a South Korean philosopher based in Germany. He studied metallurgy in Seoul before moving to Germany, where he completed his philosophy studies in Freiburg and Munich with a doctoral dissertation on Heidegger. He was professor at the University of the Arts in Berlin and has become one of the most widely translated voices of contemporary cultural criticism thanks to a series of short, aphoristic, densely phenomenological books. His central thesis is that contemporary society has moved from Foucault’s “disciplinary society” to a Leistungsgesellschaft — an achievement or performance society — in which the subject, dispensed from external coercion, exerts upon itself a violence all the more effective because voluntary. Han draws on Heidegger, Hegel, Hannah Arendt, and East Asian thought (especially Zen Buddhism) to diagnose our age. ...

Giorgio Agamben Giorgio Agamben is an Italian philosopher born in Rome in 1942, professor at the universities of Verona and Venice (IUAV), as well as at various European and American institutions. His work articulates historical-philological analysis, political philosophy, ontology, and theory of language around a genealogical project on the biopolitical paradigm of the West. He is one of the most translated and debated contemporary thinkers. Key Concepts Homo Sacer (Homo sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, 1995): Revisiting a figure from archaic Roman law, Agamben describes the homo sacer as one who can be killed by anyone without it constituting homicide (occidi), but who cannot be sacrificed (immolari). This figure articulates bare life (nuda vita / zōē) — the mere biological fact of living — excluded from politically qualified life (bíos). ...

Michel Foucault Michel Foucault was born in Poitiers in 1926 and trained at the École Normale Supérieure, where his teachers included Jean Hyppolite and Louis Althusser. A psychologist by training as well as a philosopher, from 1970 he held the chair of “History of Systems of Thought” at the Collège de France and was a politically engaged intellectual — above all in the struggle for prison reform. He became one of the most cited figures in the human sciences worldwide. He died in Paris in 1984 of an AIDS-related illness. ...