(In)Different Politics: resistance as event and trafficking in women.

Michel Foucault’s analysis of biopower and its new technologies centred on life and the living lack a clear definition of the concept of life. While Giorgio Agamben’s reformulation of biopower has differentiated between two concepts of life, zoe and bios, bare life and politically qualified life, Agamben’s notion of zoe has often been equated with the Foucauldian understanding of life. This paper will show that the conflation of life and bare life, the zone of indistinction they enter erases the space for political action, for processes of re-subjectivation. To this end it draws on a Deleuzian understanding of life and confronts it with Foucault’s and Agamben’s. Deleuze introduces a different notion from both Agamben’s zoe and Foucault’s life, that of a life or ‘impersonal life’, life which cannot be attributed to a subject, which only exists in a matrix of desubjectivation. The challenge of abject life is that of its status as excluded, downcast life and therefore cannot be based on a biopolitics of impersonal life. In this understanding of life, biopolitics needs to be exposed as desubjectivating, as erasing political differences and short-circuiting political claims on the status of the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]