Making Sense of Life Politically: Biopolitics, Vitalism and Life in Between

Many approaches in contemporary political theory have prioritised the question of life in understandings of the political. Among them, biopolitics and vitalism have acquired a preeminent intellectual standing in recent discussions: on the one hand, biopolitics highlights the centrality of biological life for the exercise of sovereign power and political control. On the other hand, new forms of neo-materialisms and vitalisms foreground ideas of creativity, vitality and self-organisation in the study of socio-political phenomena. The implications of an ontology of life for political theory, however, have hardly been subject to systematic investigation. The current article addresses this gap by offering a critique of the current debate of the ‘politics of life’ through the deployment of William Connolly’s method of ontopolitics. In 1990s, Connolly coins the term ontopolitics to capture the irreducible way in which ontological assumptions filter into one’s politics and understanding of actuality. The article maintains that, due to their strong ontological assumptions, both positions of biopolitics and vitalism remain theoretically unable to capture the constellation of the lived phenomena that populate the ontic encounter with forms of living. The article exemplifies this argument through a discussion of contemporary interventions in refugee studies. In the conclusion, the article returns to reflect on ontopolitics as a method of political analysis. By combining Oliver Marchart’s notion of the political difference with Lois McNay’s observations around the weightlessness of theory, it argues that the ontopolitical method inspires an attention to the practices that challenge abstract definitions of how life is understood – and encountered – politically.