Between the Classical and the Biopolitical

: the Authority of Antiquity in the Articulation of a Modern Paradigm

Abstract

This thesis argues for a dual contestation present in key theorists of the biopolitical in the post-war period: an explicit negotiation between the powers of life and politics and an often implicit one regarding the relation between ancient and modern philosophical paradigms. By offering a genealogy of both these thinkers’ theorisations of the biopolitical and the ambiguous authority of antiquity within these, I provide a new consideration of the theoretical and methodological tensions inherent in contemporary philosophies of the biopolitical. Three philosophers of the biopolitical – Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben – have offered innovative and influential ways to understand how life in biological, ontological, and existential modes can be implicated in, shaped by, and excluded from political theories and practices. Each has uniquely re-articulated contemporary crises, which they variously position with or against their individual presentations of ancient Greek thought, with a particular emphasis on the philosophy of Aristotle. I argue that these thinkers inherit a specific Nietzschean tradition that at once reinvents and polemicises the ancient past through a philosophical reformulation of life and the modes of its possible expression.

These constructions of antiquity in the inauguration of philosophies of the biopolitical have yet to be fully interrogated. Since Giorgio Agamben's work reignited debates on how theories of the biopolitical can scrutinise ancient and modern political realities, scholars from numerous disciplines have responded, further expanding how the biopolitical is conceived. In this context, classical scholarship has also begun to explore biopolitical approaches in order to offer creative responses to ancient literary and philosophical texts. Recent studies on ancient thought and the biopolitical are reinvigorating ancient political discourses and opening new perspectives on nature, bodies, animality, and life in antiquity. As many continue to find new applications for biopolitical methodologies, this thesis specifies how the biopolitical was initially conceptualised in constant dialogue with classical antiquity.

In this thesis I show how novel biopolitical paradigms developed out of interrogations into the ancient philosophical foundations of Western political thought in three key figures of continental philosophy in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben. I begin with an analysis of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of life and his genealogical construction of an internally divided ancient Greece, both of which I argue are essential for the later theorisations of the biopolitical in the work of Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, and Giorgio Agamben. Across four detailed readings, I consider how each of the thinkers under discussion constructs genealogies of a biopolitical present that, in their confrontations with notions of origin, inheritance, difference, and discontinuity, already engage the question of antiquity's enduring authority and alterity. I deconstruct each thinkers’ representations of a chimerical Greek antiquity – part historical event, part mythical possibility – in which fictions and philosophers are positioned side-by-side (Achilles and Oedipus, Heraclitus and Aristotle). I show that these re-readings of ancient Greek texts are integral to understanding the recent emergence of biopolitical philosophies. I argue that, through this ongoing reflection on the relationship of modernity to a contested Greek antiquity, the biopolitical is already engaged in a theorisation of the inherent historicity of life and politics and the reflexive categories through which we come to think their inter-relation. In their confrontations with the novelty of modernity, philosophers of the biopolitical thus continue to ask an ancient question: what does it mean to live a good life?

Date of Award	1 Mar 2024
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	King's College London
Supervisor	Daniel Orrells (Supervisor) & affiliated academic (Supervisor)