On the Politics of the Living: Foucault and Canguilhem on Normativity and Biopolitical Resistance

Bringing the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem into dialogue, Federico Testa examines the notions of life and norms underlying our modern experience of politics.

Today’s global health crisis acts as a stark reminder that life is at the core of our political debates and dilemmas. We can no longer think of forms of political organization, citizenship and participation without considering the materiality and precarity of our own organic life. Ours is a politics of the living.

Within this context, this book examines Foucault’s work on the politicization of life and biopolitics through the lens of Canguilhem’s notion of norms. Testa extracts from Canguilhem’s philosophy the conceptual tools to re-interpret Foucault’s ideas on power, and reconceptualises normativity as a process of the creation of norms that provide tools for political and social analysis and for thinking resistance. In so doing, he uncovers new and important possibilities for biopolitical resistance.

Demonstrating not only Canguilhem’s underexplored social and political concerns but also the intellectual osmosis between the two thinkers, On the Politics of the Living is an urgent examination of the ever-increasing significance of the concepts of life, care and health in today’s political discourse.

Federico Testa is an Associate Fellow at the Institute of Advanced Study of the University of Warwick, UK. He is the translator and co-editor of The Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot (with M. Sharpe, Bloomsbury, 2020) and Jean-Marie Guyau’s The Ethics of Epicurus (with K. Ansell-Pearson, Bloomsbury, 2021).