The end of biopolitics and the insurgency of flesh

life, death, and revolution

Abstract

The article examines the genealogy of biopolitics and its contemporary developments, articulating it with necropolitics, ecopolitics, and forms of resistance. The central problem is the capture of existence by capital, which transforms life and death into resources for management and value extraction, expanding biopolitics to planetary dimensions and normalizing the exception on a global scale. The objective is to understand how this expansion occurs and what forms of resistance emerge against it. The analysis, based on Foucault, Agamben, Mbembe, Tiqqun, and Povinelli, as well as situationist, anarchist, and Marxist contributions, mobilizes the “event of 1968” as a critical milestone in the relations between power, life, and death. The main hypothesis maintains that ecopolitics represents a way of overcoming biopolitics, intensifying the capture of life on a planetary scale. In contrast, anarchism is affirmed as an irreducible and ungovernable way of life, capable of resisting strategies of power and abandonment. Finally, the embodied human-body-existence is highlighted as the original locus of insurgent practices, constituting possibilities for other worlds through care, negativity, and composting. The results show that ecopolitics, far from being emancipatory, amplifies the logic of biopolitics; that anarchism resists as ungovernable life; and that the body-existence is the place where alternative worlds are created.