On Biopolitical Subjectivity

Critical political theorists such as Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière have reconceptualized the manner in which we should think about the subject of politics, not as the one who is governed, but as a collective subject that actively reconfigures social structure and, in Rancière's terms, the 'distribution of the sensible'. When viewed from the perspective of biopolitics, however, their understanding of political subjectivity remains rather classical in its distinction between the political and the social, the latter being that realm into which the government of life is relegated. In this sense, biopolitics is seen as a simple power over bodies and the management of necessities for survival. My proposal is to think if we could conceptualize a notion of biopolitical subjectivity, and to this without, however, falling back on some sort of immanent haecceity as theorized by both Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben. The immanence of life fails to offer us any meaningful relation to power and politics, and instead tends to understand political communication in terms of a non-communication of individual persons. What I would like to do instead, is to employ the (bio)semiotics as elaborated from Jakob von Uexküll's thought and combine it with Michel Foucault's understanding of technologies of the self. Thus combined, they will allow us to understand how the body is never simply an object of power, but instead constitutive of a political way of life.