Biopolitics and Ancient Thought

The volume studies, from different perspectives, the relationship between ancient thought and biopolitics, that is, theories, discourses, and practices in which the biological life of human populations becomes the focal point of political government. It thus continues and deepens the critical examination, in recent literature, of Michel Foucault's claim concerning the essentially modern character of biopolitics. The nine contributions comprised in the volume explore and utilize the notions of biopolitics and biopower as conceptual tools for articulating the differences and continuities between antiquity and modernity and for narrating Western intellectual and political history in general. Without committing itself to any particular thesis or approach, the volume evaluates both the relevance of ancient thought for the concept and theory of biopolitics and the relevance of biopolitical theory and ideas for the study of ancient thought. The volume is divided into three main parts: part I studies instances of biopolitics in ancient thought; part II focuses on aspects of ancient thought that elude or transcend biopolitics; and part III discusses several modern interpretations of ancient thought in the context of biopolitical theory.

1 - Biopolitics and the "boundless people": An Iliadic model
2 - Plato and the biopolitical purge of the city-state
3 - Sovereign power and social justice: Plato and Aristotle on justice and its biopolitical basis in heterosexual copulation, procreation, and upbringing
4 - Otherwise than (bio)politics: Nature and the sacred in tragic life
5 - Beyond biopolitics and juridico-institutional politics: Aristotle on the nature of politics
6 - Bene vivere politice: On the (meta)biopolitics of "happiness"
7 - Hannah Arendt's genealogy of biopolitics: From Greek materialism to modern human superfluity
8 - From biopolitics to biopoetics and back again: On a counterintuitive continuity in Foucault's thought
9 - Agamben's Aristotelian biopolitics: Conceptual and methodological problems

Jussi Backman is an Academy of Finland research fellow in philosophy at the Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä (Finland). He completed a Diplôme d'études approfondies at the Université de Nice (France) in 2003 and a PhD in philosophy at the University of Helsinki (Finland) in 2010. His main fields of expertise are contemporary continental thought (phenomenology, hermeneutics, poststructuralism, recent French materialism), especially political theory and conceptual history, as well as ancient philosophy. Antonio Cimino is Assistant Professor in history of philosophy at the Center for the History of Philosophy and Science, Radboud University, Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He obtained a PhD in philosophy from the University of Pisa (Italy). His main fields of research are the history of contemporary European thought and the reception of ancient philosophy in modern and contemporary thought.