Posthuman Affirmative Politics

Abstract

Biopolitical thought is based on the notion of bodies and how they are negotiated within a political framework. Considering the body as a multispecies ecosystem, in the biopolitical sense, is inherently paradoxical and problematic; when the body is an ecology, it may lead to a leveling in which all living parts deserve equal consideration. As advocated by biopolitical scholar Roberto Esposito: The strength of the biopolitical perspective resides precisely in its capacity to exploit the reserve of sense withheld by mixing of the language of politics and biology, which originally tended to be kept apart in the tradition of political philosophy. Contemporary synthetic biology's claim for uniqueness is that engineering principles are being formally applied to the life sciences. Neolifists tend to view life as a raw material devoid of context and in the service of human control.