Abstract

Let me assert the following, in order to explore a question that, if the assertion is correct, will center the political theory of late liberalism in the coming decades: for a long time, and perhaps still now, many have believed that Western Europe spawned and then spread globally a regime of power best described as biopolitics—we all know what that entails, governance through life rather than over death. But is this the formation of power that we face today? Does the concept of biopower give us the most productive analytical/political concepts to make sense of what is now all around us but outside our field of vision? The meteorological age of climate change, the geological age of the Anthropocene: have we been..