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<p>This article explores issues of biopolitics, thanatopolitics and necropolitics in response to the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben by Roberto Esposito, and Achille Mbembe. It advances three claims: (i) that, <i>contra</i> Foucault, Agamben treats biopolitics as expressing a political imperative of unity and order in a politics of and over <i>death</i> that engages sovereign power <i>by definition</i>, in predetermined ways; (ii) that by contrast, Esposito’s genealogical understanding of biopolitics affirms, despite an othering embedded in the biopolitical defence of the human, especially in its “thanatopolitical turn,” that an “affirmative biopolitics” is possible; (iii) that Mbembe’s reassertion – <i>via</i> Agamben, Foucault and Bataille – of biopower as directly implicated in modern sovereignty, places the politics of life and death at the center of contemporary issues of human rights and the very definition of the human. Mbembe extends the concept of thanatopolitics through a necropolitical analysis to the “humanitarian” management of displaced peoples in an era marked by resurgent authoritarian nationalism and an expansion of the scope of warfare to include modes of securitization applied to control or eliminate populations treated as threat.</p>

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Humanitarianisms of Life and Death: The Arc of Biopolitics from Foucault and Agamben to Esposito and Mbembe

  • 期刊论文

  • 发表日期：

    2026年3月31日

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  • Rabindra Chaulagain

摘要

This article explores issues of biopolitics, thanatopolitics and necropolitics in response to the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben by Roberto Esposito, and Achille Mbembe. It advances three claims: (i) that, contra Foucault, Agamben treats biopolitics as expressing a political imperative of unity and order in a politics of and over death that engages sovereign power by definition, in predetermined ways; (ii) that by contrast, Esposito’s genealogical understanding of biopolitics affirms, despite an othering embedded in the biopolitical defence of the human, especially in its “thanatopolitical turn,” that an “affirmative biopolitics” is possible; (iii) that Mbembe’s reassertion – via Agamben, Foucault and Bataille – of biopower as directly implicated in modern sovereignty, places the politics of life and death at the center of contemporary issues of human rights and the very definition of the human. Mbembe extends the concept of thanatopolitics through a necropolitical analysis to the “humanitarian” management of displaced peoples in an era marked by resurgent authoritarian nationalism and an expansion of the scope of warfare to include modes of securitization applied to control or eliminate populations treated as threat.