On the Status of Life in the Foucauldian Biopolitical Paradigm

This article analyzes the notion of life of the Foucauldian biopolitical paradigm from a fundamental bivalence of life, understood both as a correlate of a power that dominates and administers it, as the possibility of a power that resists and that always also escapes biopolitical technologies and confronts them. Now, where does Foucault extract those virtualities of life? With what materials does he build this concept? And above all, what scope and potentialities does it have? The analysis, which takes into account the Foucauldian production as a whole as well as the critical apparatus on this problem, highlights and focuses, in particular, on the Nietzschean ascendant, which will have important consequences for understanding subsequent developments on life in the thought of the French philosopher, such as the aesthetics of existence, resistance, critique and freedom. In order to carry out this work, the article is structured as follows: a brief review of the notion of life within Foucauldian production as a whole; the analysis of the notion of life that Foucault presented towards the mid-1970s in what could be called the ???biopolitical paradigm??? and, in particular, in its relationship with the notions of power and government; the examination of the genealogy between the notions of life and power of the Foucauldian biopolitical paradigm and the Nietzschean notion of "will to power"; and the proposal of a set of tentative conclusions about the notion of life in the Foucauldian biopolitical paradigm, highlighting a series of scopes and potentialities of the resistance component of that notion.