@article{1477618,
      recid = {1477618},
      author = {Vatter, Miguel, },
      title = {The Republic of the Living : Biopolitics and the Critique  of Civil Society /},
      pages = {1 online resource (416 p.)},
      abstract = {This book takes up Foucault's hypothesis that liberal  "civil society," far from being a sphere of natural  freedoms, designates the social spaces where our biological  lives come under new forms of control and are invested with  new forms of biopower. In order to test this hypothesis,  its chapters examine the critical theory of civil  society-from Hegel and Marx through Lukacs, Adorno,  Benjamin, and Arendt-from the new horizon opened up by  Foucault's turn to biopolitics and its reception in recent  Italian theory.Negri, Agamben, and Esposito have argued  that biopolitics not only denotes new forms of domination  over life but harbors within it an affirmative relation  between biological life and politics that carries an  emancipatory potential. The chapters of this book take up  this suggestion by locating this emancipatory potential in  thebiopolitical feature of the human condition that Arendt  called "natality." The book proceeds to illustrate how  natality is the basis for a republican articulation of an  affirmative biopolitics. It aims to renew the critical  theory of civil society by pursuing the traces of natality  as a "surplus of life" that resists the oppressive  government oflife found in the capitalist political  economy, in the liberal system of rights, and in the  bourgeois family.By contrast, natality offers the normative  foundation for a new "republic of the living." Finally,  natality permits us to establish a relation between  biological life and contemplative life that reverses the  long-held belief in a privileged relationship of thinking  to the possibility of our death. The result is a  materialist, atheologicalconception of contemplative life  as eternal life.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1477618},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823256051},
}