On the notion of the political in postmarxist theory.

Seminars

04.03.2010
Nietzsche with Deleuze
The negative in the positive

04.02.2010
The notion of becoming in Deleuze and Guattari
Becoming

04.11.2009
On Esposito's concept of bio/politics
Biopotentiality

08.10.2009
Reading Althusser

07.10.2009
Rancière's farewell to Althusserian Marxism
La leçon d'Althusser

06.10.2009
Debating Althusser's philosophy of the encounter
What is aleatory materialism?

03.09.2009
Negri on materialism
Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudo

02.09.2009
Tronti and Cacciari's concept of the political
The autonomy of the political

17.06.2009
"From Capital-Labor to Capital-Life" by M. Lazzarato
Invention

20.05.2009
Reading Simondon
Individuation

09.04.2009
Nancy on the singularity of death
Excess

11.03.2009
Agamben and Deleuze on pure immanence
Immanence

11.03.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory meeting

11.03.2009
Workshop: becoming-major, becoming-minor
Preparatory meeting

07.02.2009
Foucault with Deleuze
The force of the outside II

06.02.2009
Superimposing diagrams: discipline and governmentality
The force of the outside

06.02.2009
Encountering Althusser
Preparatory Meeting

05.12.2008
Reading Jacques Rancière's "Dis-agreement"
Marx's Metapolitics

04.11.2008
Reading Balibar's "The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism"
The non-totalizable complexity of the historical process

05.10.2008
Reading Jacques Derrida's "Specters of Marx"
Deconstructing Value Theory

11.09.2008
Reading Moishe Postone's "Time, Labor and Social Domination"
Value and Capitalist Capacities

01.07.2008
Debating "The mirror of production" by Jean Baudrillard
Marx with Bataille

06.06.2008
The coming communities of commons

05.06.2008
Feminist comments on the relation between politics and labor
The arcane of reproduction

09.05.2008
Rancière on the inactuality of communism and the intelligence of the unqualified

07.05.2008
Virno on Marx's "Fragments on machines"
Notes on the general intellect

04.04.2008
Virno on the concept of bio-politics in Postoperaism
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy? II

03.04.2008
Jason Read on abstract and living labor
What is living and what is dead in Marx's philosophy?

07.03.2008
Reading Negri's "Twenty Theses on Marx"
The autonomy of living labor

08.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker II

07.02.2008
Class composition in Italian autonomist Marxism
The emergence of the socialised worker

07.12.2007
On Badiou's concept of truth procedure
Assigning a measure to the excessive power of the state

09.11.2007
Reading Jacques Ranciere's "Ten theses on politics"
The supplementary part that disconnects the people from itself

04.10.2007
Deleuze and Guattari on the concept of minoritarian struggle
Micropolitics

07.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class II

06.09.2007
On class composition and radical negativity
Domestic work and class struggle within the class

02.07.2007
From class to minority
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism III

01.07.2007
On the concept of the concrete universal
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism II

30.06.2007
On Marx and Foucault
The relationship of Marxism and Post-Structuralism

30.05.2007
Dictatorship of the proletariat and council movement
The Soviet experience II

29.05.2007
Rosa Luxemburg on the Russian Revolution
The Soviet experience

06.04.2007
Negri on Lenin
Democracy beyond law II

05.04.2007
Lenin's concept of the dictatorship of protetariat
Democracy beyond law

09.03.2007
Benjamin's concept of mysthic and divine violence
To bring about the real state of exception II

08.03.2007
Agamben's reading of Benjamin
To bring about the real state of exception

09.02.2007
Agamben's sovereign theoretical turn in thinking potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality II

08.02.2007
Agamben's theory of autonomous potentiality
Potentiality of impotentiality

On Esposito's concept of bio/politics
Biopotentiality

"This secret life itself told me: 'Behold,' it said, 'I am that which must always overcome itself.'" F. Nietzsche, Thus spoke Zarathustra. A Book for All and None, 87

At our last seminar meeting on biopolitics and the modalities of how to think life in political terms, we will discuss Esposito's problematisation of biopolitics which will bring us back to the point from which we have started --- Deleuze's Nietzschean reading of Foucault and his thesis that life can be conceived as an impersonal force of political resistance through its potential for infinite exteriorisation and alteration, an extroversion that carries it into contact with the outside.

Esposito starts from the diagnosis that biopolitics stands on an extreme threshold between negative politics of death and affirmative politics of life's intensification. He attempts at clarifying their intertwined relationship through the aporicity of Nietzsche's vitalism. On one hand, Nietzsche forcefully attacks the negative protection of life against its own potential executed through institutional measures of prevision and prevention, resulting in a separation of life from its active forces. On the other hand, Nietzsche himself rearticulates the negation of life through the eugenic idea of sacrificing average forms of lifes in favor of the strength and splendor of an aristocratic yes-saying race.

At the end of the chapter, Esposito draws our attention to the position of the negative in Nietzsche's thought and the self-deconstructive force Nietzsche excercises on his own thinking. Esposito hints at the very point where Nietzsche formulates the idea that the active forces will be freed by the self-suppression of the negative, and he coarticulates the ideas of immunitas and communitas, the latter displacing and subverting the former.

For our discussion. I would like to propose to confront Esposito's ontology of an impersonal life that is in excess of itself with the very idea Foucault took from Nietzsche that social relations of forces cannot be traced back to a first ontological principle but to a relational web of conflicting historical strategies. Hence, the question, Esposito is to be asked, is wether biopolitical strategies can be discussed beyond its co-existence with strategies of valorisation.

— Esposito: Biopower and Biopotentiality in: "Bios", Univ of Minnesota Press, 2008, pp. 78-109