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Our contemporary mode of life is characterised by what Serene Richards in Biopolitics as a System of Thought calls: Smart Being. Smart Being believes in the solutions of techno-capital where living is always at stake and directed to survival. Armed with this concept, this book examines how we arrived at this mode of being and asks how it could be that, while the material conditions of our lives have increasingly worsened, our capacities for effective political action, understood as the capacity for transforming our existing social relations, appear to be diminishing.Drawing from jurists and philosophers such as Pierre Legendre, Yan Thomas, Giorgio Agamben, Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Richards argues that biopolitics intervenes at the most minute level of our everyday lives. She argues that there are conceptual truths presupposed in the mode of biopolitics'functioning, for instance that life can be assigned a value for the purpose of intervention, abandonment, or death, which have implications for our politics. In exciting engagements with political movements such as the post-May 1968 Mouvement des travailleurs Arabes (MTA), Richards shows how demands to transform our system of social relations are undermined by institutional models that proffer to offer rights protection while simultaneously annihilating the living altogether. Through a reappraisal of law, governance and capital, Richards seeks to reconceptualise our collectivity of thought, arguing for a politics of destitution that could form the basis of a communism to come.

A theory of biopolitical power that updates Foucault, illustrating the moral implications of modern evolutionary theory.In our day, the individual has become “a life,” the singular of the plural noun “population.” From this new understanding of what it means to be human comes a new form of biopolitical power with a new set of moral rules. In The Morals of Life, moral philosopher Davide Tarizzo presents a theoretical framework for understanding this transformation of the old-fashioned “government of living beings,” as Michel Foucault characterized biopolitics, into a new government of modular living beings, as well as a template for making sense of biopolitical power that operates on the scale of populations rather than individuals.Tarizzo traces population thinking, the notion of modular optimization, and other conceptual keystones of the current biopolitical regime (an “ethopolitical regime,” in the author's terms) to their origins in twentieth-century biological thought—more precisely, and critically, evolutionary theory. Neo-Darwinism, Tarizzo argues, should be seen not only as a scientific paradigm but also as a philosophy per se, because it is evolutionary theory that today provides an answer to the old philosophical question: What is man? This new kind of philosophy, his book suggests, largely determines the way in which people look at themselves and society. Not only does it contribute to designing new technologies of power, but it also fosters subjection to the new ethopolitical regime.

With The Open: Man and Animal, Giorgio Agamben introduced a new vocabulary and a new conceptuality in the lexicon of many different fields, from animal studies to biopolitics and political philosophy. However, he thereafter abandoned the whole question and left its rich potential largely unexplored. Agamben's oeuvre, in general, is a rich mine of unthematized issues concerning the animal question and provides important conceptual tools for others to call into question the anthropocentric context within which he himself remains a prisoner. Though never managing to escape the dualisms of the Western tradition, Agamben gestures or points towards their overcoming. This book argues that, though still firmly rooted in the anthropocentrism of the Western tradition, Agamben's work points beyond the limits that he himself is unable or unwilling to cross. Each chapter, consequently, retraces and highlights the anthropocentric limits that constrain Agamben in some relevant aspects of his philosophy, while simultaneously looking for the capacity for elaboration that lies within them.

Considering solidarity and mutual aid at the intersection of political philosophy and biology, made more urgent by the COVID-19 crisis, this book is grounded in the work of Catherine Malabou and takes her theories in creative new directions.

This book offers a provocative analysis of the neuroscience of morality. Written by three leading scholars of science, medicine, and bioethics, it critiques contemporary neuroscientific claims about individual morality and notions of good and evil. Winner of a 2021 prize from the Expanded Reason Institute, it connects moral philosophy to neoliberal economics and successfully challenges the idea that we can locate morality in the brain. Instead of discovering the source of morality in the brain as they claim to do, the popularizers of contemporary neuroscience are shown to participate in an understanding of human behavior that serves the vested interests of contemporary political economy. Providing evidence that the history of claims about morality and brain function reach back 400 years, the authors locate its genesis in the beginnings of modern philosophy, science, and economics. They further map this trajectory through the economic and moral theories of Francis Bacon, David Hume, Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and the Chicago School of Economics to uncover a pervasive colonial anthropology at play in the neuroscience of morality today.The book concludes with a call for a humbler and more constrained neuroscience, informed by a more robust human anthropology that embraces the nobility, beauty, frailties, and flaws in being human.