Biopolitics In/of the Anthropocene: Expanding the Theoretical Canon

This paper examines how biopolitical rationalities are being reconfigured at planetary scales in response to the ecological crisis and the Anthropocene era. While Foucault's analytics of biopower illuminated how modern states govern through the optimisation and regulation of life, the Anthropocene demands we extend this framework beyond the human to encompass atmospheric, geological, and ecological processes that now fall under governmental management. As Sergei Prozorov has highlighted, “the future of politics, if politics is indeed to have a future, cannot but require a biopolitical dimension”; this appears never so true in the era of ecological collapse, which demonstrates once again the co-belonging of life and politics. In this landscape, the continuation of life on Earth becomes contingent on political decisions, which, in turn, affect forms of life both in their everyday rhythms (diet, consumption, habitation…) and at the macro-level of population displacements and eradication of the most vulnerable subjects and societies. Even more so, the mentalities of governing are reconfigured along the lines of what Elizabeth Povinelli has defined as “geontopower”, a mode of power that operates through the management of planetary systems and the differential distribution of environmental harm. Yet, this research area remains largely underdeveloped. The paper offers a summary of the state of the art of this still limited but growing area of study around the intersection between biopolitics and the ecological crisis by advancing a double direction of enquiry: on the one hand, it interrogates how the concepts and theoretical tools of biopolitics (governmentality, subjectification, differential vulnerability…) can help understand and explain modes of governance and forms of power in an era of ecological crisis. On the other hand, the paper argues for the need to stretch and further develop the original conceptual toolkit of biopolitics by showing how sovereignty and governmentality must be rethought when the very conditions of life—air, water, climate—become objects of political calculation and sites of lethal abandonment.