Rousseau and the Critique of Biopolitics

Contemporary studies of biopolitics tend to assume that the rise of biopolitical governance entails the eclipse of democracy. The abstract egalitarianism of democratic government is held to be incompatible with the concrete, particularistic and individualizing operations of biopower. The revival of democracy is then only conceivable as the overcoming of biopolitics. In the paper we begin to confront this reading by recovering its genealogy. We shall identify the sources of the impasse of the current critique of biopolitics in its broadly Rousseauan orientation that conceives of democratic subject as subtracted from all particular identities, interests or forms of life. We shall revisit Rousseau’s account of the inherently problematic relation between sovereignty and government and then address the interpretations of this account in contemporary critiques of biopolitics in the work of Badiou, Agamben and Esposito. We shall demonstrate that the dualism established by Rousseau between universalist popular sovereignty and particularist acts of government remains at work in contemporary critical literature on biopolitics. As an inherently particularistic mode of government, biopolitics is held to be necessarily opposed to popular sovereignty expressed in general will and can therefore only contaminate or pervert democracy.