Rethinking the biopolitical turn: from the thanatopolitical to the geneapolitical paradigm.

Rethinking the Biopolitical TurnFrom the Thanatopolitical to the

Geneapolitical Paradigm

Chiara Bottici

1. Introduction

Let me begin with Mephistopheles. In a scene from Goethe’s Faust,Mephistopheles observes, “for just where meaning fails, you see, a newword will come in—good at need!”1 New words come in where meaningfails. We create new words or start using them in a different way whenthe vocabulary available no longer suffices. The task of the genealogistis thus very similar to that of a philologist: to look for ruptures ofmeaning and for the interests and material processes that sustainthem.2 If it is true that a new series of words constructed with the suf-fix “bio-” has recently entered our vocabulary, what is the failure ofmeaning they are responding to? What was politics before and whathas it become after the so-called biopolitical turn?

These are the questions that I would like to address in this article.In order to do so, I will first situate the emergence of the notion ofbiopolitics within a more general genealogy of “politics” itself. I willbegin by briefly recalling two major breaks in the genealogy of politicsas it emerges from our western canon and then try to illuminate themeaning of the appearance of the word “biopolitics” in this light.Specifically, I will argue that biopolitics has mainly been conceivedwithin a thanatopolitical paradigm—that is, one where death is consis-tently privileged as the defining feature of our existential horizon. Butwhat if birth had both an ontological and a political priority over death?Ontological because we die only as a consequence of having been bornand political because, while we may die alone, we are always born inthe company of somebody else. If human beings are conceived of as beings-after-birth, rather than beings-toward-death, as in the thanatopolitical

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paradigm, a different perspective emerges—one that I would like to callgeneapolitical (from the Greek γενεά, or “birth”).

2. The Genealogy of Politics: Two Major Breaks

It is well known that the meaning of the term “politics” has changedsignificantly from one epoch to another. What is less known, at leastoutside the circle of historians and philologists, is that “politics” hasnot always been there.3 If one looks at the history of the term, one can-not but be struck by the fact that it is a modern invention. Despite itsGreek derivation from the adjective πολιτικός (generally indicatingwhatever concerns the πόλις), the use of the substantive “politics” is atypically modern phenomenon.4

This striking rupture most clearly emerges if we consider that theancient Greeks did not even have a word that corresponds to our “poli-tics.” For them, there existed the πόλις, the concrete city-state theylived in, and τὰ πολιτικά, the substantivized version of the adjectiveπολιτικός, denoting all the things pertaining to the affairs of the city-state. In other words, the realm of the πόλις was conceived to be coex-tensive with the entirety of public life in general and not as indicating aspecific kind of activity within the public sphere.

Furthermore, τὰ πολιτικά, like πολιτικὴ τέχνη, denotes at the sametime a knowledge. The two abstract terms used by the Greeks to indi-cate what we would call “politics” refer therefore both to the affairs ofthe πόλις—understood broadly as the site of public life in contrast toprivate life, and not to a specific kind of activity within it5—and to theknowledge about such affairs. This usage of the term is so far awayfrom the meaning currently associated with the word “politics” that it isnot an exaggeration to say that the Greeks, to which so many philoso-phers attributed the invention of politics itself, did not have a word todesignate it.

This of course does not mean that one cannot use their experience asa model for what politics is or should be; you can have the thing andnot name it or have it and name it differently. However, we should beaware that when we speak about the ancient Greek understanding ofpolitics, we do so with a word that was invented at a much later stage.Strictly speaking, it is an anachronism. And this invention signals thatsomething new had in the meanwhile happened that the availablevocabulary was insufficient to designate. By contrast, in their own dailyusage, ancient Greeks felt that the πόλις, the concrete space where theyengaged in public life, was sufficient to designate the activities wewould normally term politics.

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When the ancient Greeks wanted to speak about it in the mostabstract terms, they did not feel the need for “politics” but most oftenused two expressions (τὰ πολιτικά and πολιτικὴ τέχνη) that denote boththe “things relative to the πόλις” and “the knowledge about thosethings.”6 This is a point worth emphasizing before we move on. In par-ticular, we should recall that τὰ πολιτικά was the title given toAristotle’s books on what we would call “politics” and, as we will see, itis to a great extent thanks to the influence of such a book that the term“politics” has entered our vocabulary.7

The lack of a word for “politics” in ancient Greek is something thatcannot but strike the genealogist-philologist. Even more puzzling is thecomplete absence of such a word from classical Latin. The ancientRomans, who were, according to some, the most “political” of all ancientpeoples,8 did not even feel the need for the word “politics.”9 Even moreso, in classical Latin there is not even the adjective politicus, the termthat corresponds to the Greek πολιτικός. Indeed, politicus appears onlyonce in classical Latin, as an unusual Græcism, whereas the substan-tive politica enters into common usage only in the Middle Ages, afterthe translation of Aristotle’s book on politics (τὰ πολιτικά).10

This is perhaps the most puzzling twist in our story thus far: theRomans, this eminently political people, who imported so many thingsfrom the Greeks, did not feel the need to import πολιτικός. Like theGreeks, they did not have a substantive that corresponds to our “poli-tics”; however, neither did they have an adjective corresponding to our“political,” for which the Greeks used their native πολιτικός. TheRomans had their own words and perhaps also their own things: theadjectives civilis (civil), publicus (public), and socialis (social), and thesubstantives res publica (literally, the “public thing”), publica negotia(the “public affairs”) and res civilis (the “civil thing”). Such words wereenough for them to designate what they wanted to say about politics.11

I cannot enter here into the details of the birth of “politics.”12 What isimportant to emphasize is the fact that it is a decisively modern inven-tion. In this respect, the rupture from previous usages could not begreater. For some, this path-breaking innovation is the result of thecurious fact that when Wilhelm von Moerbeke translated Aristotle’sbook on politics (τὰ πολιτικά) into Latin around 1260, he did not use thestandard words that Latin used for centuries (socialis, civilis, publicus),but directly imported from Greek the terms politicus, politica, andpoliticum.13 Among the terms imported by von Moerbeke, there is thusnot just the adjective politicus, but also the substantive politica—a veryeccentric translation for that time, yet one that was full of conse-quences.

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BOTTICI/RETHINKING THE BIOPOLITICAL TURN

This eccentric choice is perhaps due to the fact that von Moerbekewas not so sure about the precise meaning of these terms and decidedto leave them in the original, with a slightly Latinized version (politicusinstead of πολιτικός, politica instead of τὰ πολιτικά).14 Thus the questionemerges: is the birth of “politics” just the result of an inaccuracy? Evenif this interpretation is correct, and the birth of “politics” ultimatelyderives from a bad translation, this still does not explain why the termsuccessfully eclipsed the more illustrious Latin words that writers hadused for more than a millennium. Furthermore, the very fact that vonMoerbeke was uncertain about their usage is already a sign that some-thing in the meanwhile had changed: the political world of thirteenth-century Europe in which he wrote could not be rendered through thewords that the Romans and Latin Christianity had used for the previ-ous centuries.

On the other hand, the fact that the word politica comes into modernLatin through the translation of Aristotle’s Politics will not come as asurprise. The translation and circulation of Aristotle’s political master-piece proved to be a particularly powerful weapon to support the auton-omy of worldly authority, in a context where the central political battlewas still the confrontation with the supporters of the church. If theπόλις derives from the fact that, as Aristotle puts it, man is a ζῷον πολι-τικόν, then it is rooted in human nature and possesses, therefore, itsown autonomy from the church. By the fourteenth century, this argu-ment had become crucial for the opponents of Augustinism. The pointat issue was that, as Augustine put it, without divine justice humanpolitical associations (regna) can only be magna latrocinia (gangs ofcriminals),15 thus necessitating that the temporal power be subordi-nated to the spiritual one, and thus, to the church itself.

Nonetheless, despite this late medieval appearance of the term polit-ica, we should not forget that for centuries it continued to be used inthe ancient meaning of the art or science of government. Like the corre-sponding terms “physics” and “economics,” “politics” has been used for along time to denote the works devoted to the study of those thingsrelated to the πόλις and not the thing itself.16 The decisive moment forthe birth of “politics” thus understood was the revolution initiated atthe dawn of modernity by the theorists of the “reason of state.”17 Withthis expression, Giovanni Botero referred to “the knowledge of theappropriate means to establish, maintain and enlarge a state, definedas a ‘firm empire [dominio] over a people.’”18 It is only with this revolu-tion that the term “politics” ceases to have its ancient meaning of civilphilosophy—the knowledge about the affairs of the πόλις—and insteadassumes the specifically modern meaning of the art of preserving the


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state, thus preparing the passage from an emphasis on the knowledgeto the thing itself.

Behind the fortune of a translator’s seemingly chance introduction ofpolitica into Latin, there is therefore a failure of meaning perceived vis-à-vis the emergence of a radical political novelty: that of the sovereignstate, understood as a firm domain over a people within a territory.The modern state, which appeared in Europe between the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries,19 was indeed an unprecedented form ofpolitical community, whose novelty is more strongly apparent if oneconsiders that medieval Europe had been characterized for centuriesby a chaotic and overlapping system of authorities, where no politicalpower could claim sovereign authority over a defined territory. In otherwords, it is only in order to designate and emphasize the importantnovelty of this emerging institution that the passage from a knowledgeof the thing (“politics” as civil philosophy) to the thing itself (“politics”as the activity concerning the affairs of the state, that is, of one part ofour social life) took place.20

Importantly, despite what is usually assumed, it took a long timebefore the term “politics” became part of our daily political vocabulary.In the sixteenth century, Machiavelli, one of the great theorists of thereason of state and a decisive contributor to the emergence of the mod-ern concept of politics in its autonomy from ethics and religion, did notyet use the word “politics” (politica).21 He only makes recourse to theexpression vivere politico, or “political living,” a handful of times.22

However, Machiavelli, as we will see later on, is a crucial turning point:despite the fact that he did not have the word “politics” in his vocabulary,he set up the whole apparatus for the concept to emerge, that is, for“politics” to be perceived as an autonomous domain. Yet this should notcome as a surprise if one considers that even Thomas Hobbes, almost acentury later, when referring to what we would call “politics,” mainlyfollows the traditional Latin usage and speaks about the common-wealth, a literal translation of res publica, which he opposes to the nat-ural condition of mankind.23 So, if it is true that Hobbes has, to a greatextent, invented English philosophical language (since before him Latinwas the official language of philosophy), then we have to conclude that“politics” was not yet an integral part of it.

Wherever one locates the birth of the term “politics,” it is clear thatthe term implied a significant shrinkage of the semantic field. There isneither the space nor the need for discussing the details of the vicissi-tudes of the modern term “politics.” Let us simply point out that by thetime Max Weber takes up the term at the beginning of the twentiethcentury, it is reduced to its minimal semantic core: it no longer standsfor a knowledge about the whole of social life, but rather a small part of

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the thing itself—that peculiar kind of power characterized by thepotential recourse to the use of legitimate physical coercion.24 Weberwas obsessed with definitions, so much so that his Economy andSociety can be described as an attempt to provide definitions for almostevery aspect of our social life. This perhaps explains why his defini-tions have been so prominent in the literature. For our genealogy, how-ever, it is important to note that the success of a definition that reducespolitics to the state is inseparable from the fact that it clearly reflecteda crucial change occurring in political life: it is because of the emer-gence of the modern state—a form of political community characterizedby the sovereign monopoly over legitimate coercion within territorialboundaries—that people felt the need for a new word.25 When con-fronted with what public life had become within modern nation states,people felt a sense of novelty, and “politics” was the term they chose toconvey it.

In relation to such a restricted view of “politics” many politicalthinkers felt constrained. This resistance heralds the second greatbreak within the genealogy of the concept with which we are concernedhere. Different authors, in the belief that something had been lost inthis restriction of the semantic ambit of the term politics, looked toclassical antiquity to expand the concept again, while others coinednew terms, adding further connotations. Among the former is HannahArendt, who saw in the Athenian model of democracy the epitome ofwhat real politics is about: she attributes to the Greeks the invention ofpolitics, whereas she sees in modernity the moment of the rise of thesocial, illustrated in exemplary fashion by the emergence of the socialquestion during the French Revolution.26 It should be evident by nowthat, from a philological point of view, this is properly speaking ananachronism, because the Greeks did not even have the word “politics.”Modernity could give birth to the social, as she says, only because ithad also given birth to “politics” itself, in its separation from both thepublic and the social. We will come back to Arendt later on, but what ismost important to emphasize here is that she, like other authors, per-ceived the identification of politics with the activity taking place withinmodern nation states as too narrow. Their response was to attempt toexpand the language in use by imposing new and alternative meaningson the term “politics.” In most cases, the result has been an enlarge-ment of the semantic core of the term and not an impossible return tothe ancients.

But such an attempt to widen the semantic core of “politics” is alsosignalled, as is often the case, by the creation of new words: both thefortunes of the expression “the political” and of the term “biopolitics”must be understood as part of such an attempt. I cannot enter into the


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details of the vicissitudes of the term “the political,” but let me mentionthe fact that it gestures at a return to the adjective that, as we haveseen, extends back a long way from modernity. However, the emphasisis interestingly shifted to the substantivized form: “the political.”Reflecting on the meaning of this shift from “politics” to “the political,”Pierre Rosanvallon pointed out the kind of change of perspective that isat stake: from politics as the Weberian struggle for the monopoly oflegitimate coercion within modern states to an examination of the back-ground, of the very ontological conditions for the existence of politics assuch.27

Whether one agrees with Rosanvallon or not, it is significant for usthat the emergence of the term signals again the perceived need for asemantic enlargement, thus reinforcing the idea of a second majorbreak in our genealogy. With these two breaks in mind—first, the mod-ern invention of politics itself, and second, the various attempts tobroaden its semantic fields—we can now turn to biopolitics.

3. The Emergence of “Biopolitics”

The term “biopolitics,” most notably used by Michel Foucault in the1970s,28 has gained prominence much later in public and academicdebates, along with all the corresponding terms constructed with thesuffix “bio”: bioethics, biolaw, biomedicine, biotechnology, biowar,bioterrorism, bioweapon, bioeconomy, etc., are all new words that pointto a different or at least a more significant role of the notion of life(βίος) itself. We will come back to this timing later on, but for themoment notice that the concept of biopolitics maintains the typicallymodern attention to the institutional mechanisms of power, while atthe same time enlarging it to include a kind of knowledge, as was thecase for the ancient meaning of the term politics. To put it bluntly, poli-tics is, for both Weber and Foucault, something that has to do withpower, but with this fundamental difference: for Foucault power is perva-sive because it is inseparable from knowledge.29 As a consequence, like“the political,” the term “biopolitics” also signals a decisive semanticenlargement. Let us now see what kind of enlargement is at stake andwhy this was necessary.

For Foucault such an enlargement, and thus such a term, wasneeded to denote what he perceived as a deep change in the nature ofmodern political power. In his view, while classical sovereignty was apower aimed at controlling life by threatening it with the possibility ofdeath, the new form of power that emerges in the mid-nineteenth cen-tury is that of a power aimed at inciting and preserving life.30 As he putit, while the sovereign power—crucially symbolized by the sword—was

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essentially a power to kill, a power to take life or let it die, the newbiopower manifests itself as “a power to make live and let die.”31 Hencethe increased significance of biological life, as the medium where politi-cal power displays itself.

In Foucault’s analysis, it is indeed in the nineteenth century that“power’s hold over life” emerges; this is the moment when the biologicalcame under state control, or at least the moment when the tendencytoward state control of the biological becomes particularly significant(SMD 239–40). In this reconstruction, the rise of biopolitics is thusmanifested in the systematic inclusion of disciplines such as demogra-phy, public hygiene, birth control, etc., in the practice of governmentitself. This change attests to an attempt by political power to directlycontrol life, no longer by simply threatening to inflict death (the powerof the sword), but also by inciting, promoting and, in a word, disciplin-ing life.

While in Foucault’s view there is therefore a big difference betweenclassical forms of sovereignty and biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben hasemphasized how biopolitics is inscribed in the bones of modernity fromits inception. In his view, the paradox of modern sovereignty is pre-cisely that it has always been at the same time within and outside ofthe juridical order, because its power derives from its capacity to decideon the state of exception and thus to inflict death to its very subjects.32

While the modern paradigm, at least since Hobbes, has justified theexistence of the sovereign power in terms of its capacity to guaranteethe security of its citizens, Agamben reveals the striking paradox at itscore: the sovereign is the sovereign because it can guarantee our secu-rity by potentially killing us with impunity. In that respect, as the titleof his work reminds us, we are all homines sacri (sacred men), sacrifi-cial human beings, who, like the corresponding figure in Roman law,can be killed with impunity (SP 79–83).

Agamben can thus claim that the authentically political is bare lifeitself, since the sovereign, who retains the right to kill with impunity, isat the same time inside and outside the juridical order. This is evidentin its capacity to decide on the state of exception, which makes the Naziconcentration camps not a deviation from modernity but rather theepitome of its very biopolitical paradigm (SP 129–31). Thus, whereasthe ancient Greeks could still distinguish between ζωή (bare life) andβίος (the qualified life, as in expressions such as βίος πολιτικός or βίοςθεωρητικός), and therefore also between the sphere of the household(οἶκος) and that of the πόλις, this possibility would be lost for us,because life itself becomes the political question par excellence (SP 13).

Despite the fact that Agamben locates the birth of biopolitics at thevery beginning of modernity, he thus agrees with Foucault’s fundamental


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insight: whereas for millennia man remained what he was for Aristotle,a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence, thespecifically modern man is an animal whose politics places his existenceas a living being in question. Not by chance, then, the racist politics ofNazism is for both authors the culminating point of the biopoliticalturn (SP 129–60; SMD 259): Nazism took the interplay between thesovereign right to kill and the mechanism of biopower that is inscribedin the working of every state to the paroxysmal point of the extermina-tion camp (SP 129; SMD 260). As a consequence, for both authorsbiopolitics culminates into a form of thanatopolitics.

It is not surprising that Achille Mbembe has summarized Foucault’sand Agamben’s understandings of modern sovereignty by speakingabout “necropolitics.”33 As he observes, sovereignty resides in

the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who mustdie. Hence to kill or to allow to live constitute the limits ofsovereignty, its fundamental attributes. To exercise sovereignty isto exercise control over mortality and to define life as the deploy-ment and manifestation of power.34

Precisely because the biopolitical nature of modern sovereigntyexpresses itself in such a right to dictate “who can live and who mustdie,” racism has to be a crucial ingredient of modern politics from itsvery inception: far from being an aberration within the western road tofreedom and rationality, the Nazi concentration camp would thereforebe simply an extension within the European territory of the biopoliticaltechniques of terror that the west had been practicing in its colonies fora long time—whether through the extermination of entire native peo-ples or through the total domination of slaves’ bodies in the plantationsystem.

Although Mbembe’s postcolonial reading of Foucault and Agambenwould deserve more space than is possible to devote to it here, it is rele-vant for us to notice how easily Foucault’s and Agamben’s approachescan lead to a “necropolitical” interpretation. The central question forus, however, is whether this is the only way to think about biopolitics.Does biopolitics always negate life while sustaining it? RobertoEsposito has tried to reverse the thanatopolitical paradigm of Nazisminto its opposite and thus elaborate an affirmative model of biopoliticsthat configures itself not as a politics over life (sulla vita), but as a poli-tics of life (della vita).35

In order to do so, he recasts the three sites where Nazism displayedits biopower—the body, the birth, and the norm—in affirmative terms,which potentially divest the biopolitical turn we are living through ofits lethal outcome.36 Although Esposito points thus toward the need to

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overcome the thanatopolitical model, he does not fully succeed in thistask. This is evident in the fact that death keeps recurring in thesepages, and most significantly even when he talks about birth: it is as ifeven when he looks at birth, he still does so from the point of view ofdeath, understood as the event that provides meaning and determinesour existential horizon. Indeed, in his attempt to turn the thanatopoli-tics of the immunitary paradigm that he considers epitomized inNazism into the affirmative biopolitics of what he calls communitas(community), he more or less explicitly assumes the modern paradigmthat links the existence of the political community to the possibility ofdeath. Since his earlier work on the notion of community, he has indeedconsistently thought of the notion of communitas in conjunction withour own fragility with respect to the possibility of death, without there-fore ultimately managing to elaborate a form of thinking about politicsin disjunction from death.37

This emphasis on death is, however, an attitude that goes wellbeyond Foucault and Agamben. As Adriana Cavarero noticed, followingArendt, philosophers, at least since Plato, tended to look at humanbeings as beings-toward-death. Very rarely did they take the oppositeperspective of looking at them as beings-after-birth,38 a puzzling fact onits own, given the ontological priority of birth over death. For, while itis true that we are beings-toward-death, it is equally true that we areso because we are in the first place beings-after-birth. Philosophers liketo remind us of the first truth (that we will die), but tend to forget thesecond one (that we are born).

This has a crucial consequence for the way in which politics isframed, because looking at human beings from the perspective of deathmeans looking at them in a specific way. In the first place, it leads to aneglect of the difference between bodies that can bear life and thosethat cannot do so (and the consistent way in which the above-men-tioned theorists of biopolitics have neglected the gendered nature of thebody is indeed quite striking in itself).39 Looking at human beings asprimarily beings-after-birth not only brings to the fore the fact thatbodies are never gender neutral, but also points to the fact that thisleads to a peculiar view of human beings. Death is indeed one of thefew events in our life when we are alone, whereas birth is always, andnecessarily, in company. This is because whereas I can give death tomyself—that is, I can anticipate it and commit suicide—I literally can-not give birth to myself. This peculiarity of birth has a twofold signifi-cance. First, it points to the fact that in order to give birth one needssomeone other than oneself: at least, in the current condition, a donorfor the sperm or another human being for a womb. Things may changein the future, if promises about artificial wombs will be fulfilled, but it


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is a change still yet to happen. Second, whereas death is somethingthat I can give to myself, birth is something that I can only give tosomebody else. Again, things may change in the future, if promisesabout human cloning will be fulfilled, but even that could never affectthe fundamental fact that giving birth always involves an other: thismay even be an other who is exactly like us, a perfect duplicate, but itwill still be an other, distinguished from us in space and time.

In sum, whereas death is something that we can give to ourselves byanticipating it, birth is always something that we receive from an other.The body that can die alone is always born by somebody else. Surprisinglyenough, despite the peculiarity of death, it is the moment on whichmost philosophers have concentrated their attention.40 Not by chance,beginning with Greek philosophy, the term “mortals” (βροτοί) became asynonym for human beings.41 According to Cavarero, philosophers privi-leged death over life because they conceive of philosophy as an activitythat unties the soul from the bodily imprisonment deriving from birthitself. While women are confined in the space of the body, philosophybecomes the activity that prepares men for the liberation of the soulfrom such an imprisonment and thus, ultimately, for death.42 In sum, itis because of a deeply entrenched body-soul dualism, which all too oftenhelped to relegate women to the sphere of the bodily needs, that (west-ern) philosophers have so consistently privileged death over birth.

However, if we take the opposite road and look at human beings asbeings-after-birth, a completely different perspective emerges.43 On amore general philosophical level, it becomes evident that life hasalways been at the center of politics, not only because life and its needsare crucial political issues, but also because birth, as Arendt puts it, isthe political moment par excellence.44 If it is true that death is themoment where we are necessarily alone, whereas birth is always incommon, then we have to conclude that birth, rather than death,should be at the center of our thinking about politics. We can die moreor less surrounded by other people and we may even commit collectivesuicide, but it is a fact that our body dies alone, whereas at birth it isalways accompanied: there is no birth that is not in common. To put itin Arendt’s terms, natality, in which the capacity for action is ontologi-cally rooted, is “the miracle that saves the world, the realm of humanaffairs, from its normal, natural ruin.”45 The fact that newborns constantlycome to the world does not only explain how the new is possible, but alsowhy and how plurality, without which there cannot be any politics, comesabout.46

If politics presupposes plurality, we must then conclude that birthcomes well before death as the crucial political moment. The fact thatthis basic truth has so often been neglected does not only have to do

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with the circumstance that most philosophers, historically speaking,are male. Having gone through the experience of birth only at a begin-ning, it is all too easy to understand why they tend to forget about it. Avery different genealogy of politics would probably have been written ifwomen had played a larger role in it. But we must also remember thatmost societies have tried to regulate and discipline this “miracle” thatis birth in a number of ways.47

This, in turn, points to the fact that the power exercised overwomen’s bodies, as the only ones that were capable of bearing life, hasnever been the pure power of the sword (admitting that any such thingwould ever be possible in the first place). It has always been biopower,because it has always been a power essentially aimed at inciting, sus-taining and disciplining life—and notice that I am not only thinking ofindividual life but also the life of the population, of the body politic. Byemphasizing the juridical mechanism of modern sovereignty, biopoliti-cal thinkers have all too often implicitly assumed the typically modernjuridical fiction of a gender-neutral bearer of rights. But there is a hugedifference between being a homo sacer and a femina sacra. In CarolPateman’s words, behind the social contract there has always been a“sexual contract” whereby the bodies of women were disciplined, con-trolled, in a word, made live and even made to bear life.48 So Agambenis right in saying that what is authentically political is life itself, butthis is not because it is killable, as he believes: rather, it is politicalbecause it is born. To sum up on this point, if we look at it from thepoint of view of women, we cannot but conclude that (modern) politicsis biopolitical because it is geneapolitical well before being thanatopolit-ical—where geneapolitical is a term that I construct by puttingtogether the Greek term for birth (γενεά) with politics.49

4. Machiavellian Geneapolitics

Instead of going through an impossible list of all the disciplinary prac-tices through which menstruating women, pregnant women, and pro-ducing women went in patriarchal societies,50 I would like here to showthe entanglement between modern politics and the biopolitics ofwomen’s bodies by focusing on a philosopher who, at the very beginningof modernity, showed such an entanglement: Niccolò Machiavelli. Suchan entanglement particularly emerges if one looks at both his politicaland his literary writings at the same time. There is indeed a significantdisciplinary division here: women scarcely appear in Machiavelli’s polit-ical writings, and they are mostly confined to Machiavelli’s plays andpoetry, with the result that while political theorists tend to focus onthe former, the latter are often left to literary theorists.51


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As a consequence, political theorists tend to overlook what I wouldlike to call Machiavelli’s great geneapolitical insights: a great supporterof the importance of force for politics, Machiavelli is also very clearlyaware of the fact that it was not through the power of the sword thatpolitics was primarily exercised over female bodies. Whereas the politi-cal writings state that since the prince cannot be sure to be loved by hissubject, it is safer to be feared,52 The Mandrake, his literary master-piece, significantly qualifies that statement by adding: “le donne sisogliono con le buone parole condurre dove altri vuole [you always haveto use sweet talk with women to get your way].”53

The fact that The Mandrake, probably the first book written byMachiavelli after The Prince, must be read in continuity with that text,has often been neglected.54 While The Prince theorizes the autonomy ofpolitics by pointing to the crucial role of political virtues (those of thefox and of the lion), which are independent from both morals and reli-gion, the unfolding of the argument is threatened by the appearance ofthe unknown and unpredictable: fortuna. As we read in the puzzlingchapter 25 of The Prince, fortuna is what can potentially ruin even themost prudent and virtuous prince: it is like “one of those dangerousrivers that, when they become enraged, flood the plains, destroy treesand buildings, move earth from one place and deposit in another” (P 85).In the face of that power, the prince can only try to contain and con-strain it “by taking precautions, by means of dykes and dams” (ibid.).

After providing some provisional but also ultimately ineffectiveadvice, by observing that in order to contain fortune one would have tobe able to adapt to constantly changing circumstances (P 86),Machiavelli moves from the fortune-river metaphor to another that isquite recurrent in his writings: “fortune is a woman, and if you want tocontrol her, it is necessary to treat her roughly” (P 87).55 I am quotinghere from the English edition of The Prince edited by Quentin Skinnerand Russell Price, but I would like to emphasize that there is a wholeerotic dimension of the passage that gets lost in this translation. TheItalian original sounds quite different: “la fortuna è donna; et è neces-sario, volendola tenere sotto, batterla et urtarla.”56 Besides the invita-tion to activity, which is typical of Machiavelli’s temperament, weshould note that the Italian terms have a clear sexual connotation: ten-erla sotto refers to the canonical sexual position of women, batterlaevokes the rhythm of sexual intercourse, and urtarla (to hit) adds aclearly sexist, and possibly even sadistic flavor to the whole scene.

This puzzling concluding metaphor that closes the masterpiece that,according to many, inaugurates political modernity, has been subject toendless interpretations. What does it mean that fortuna is a woman?What does it mean that in order to constrain her, you have to build

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dykes and dams? Many contrasting answers have been given,57 but ithas often been neglected that, to a great extent, The Mandrake, writtenprobably only a couple of years after The Prince, may contain a directanswer to those questions. Let me briefly recall the plot.

Lucrezia, the heroine of the play, is known for her beauty, which hasled the astute Callimaco to leave Paris to come back to Florence toseduce her. Unfortunately (or fortunately, as we will see), she is alsoknown for her chastity: she is married to the elderly and rich Nicia, towhom she is said to be strictly faithful. But besides being stupid, Niciais also very eager to receive a son and Lucrezia has not been able togive him one. To realize his dream, Callimaco, who embodies all thevirtues of the Machiavellian prince, enlists the aid of Ligurio, a para-site, Timoteo, a friar, and Lucrezia’s mother. By persuading Nicia thathis wife’s sterility can be cured by a special mandrake-based potion,but that the first man who sleeps with her will die, Callimaco managesto be put in the bed of the beautiful Lucrezia by the very hands of herhusband. Persuading Lucrezia, however, proves to be much more diffi-cult; she is presented throughout the play as not only beautiful, butalso so virtuous that she is “fit to rule a kingdom” (M 175). It is only infront of the erudite arguments of the doctor, who has studied scienceand solved the fertility problems of the sovereigns of France, andthrough the pastoral power of her confessor, that she finally consents towhat she perceives as a vituperio, an abuse of her body. As we learnfrom Machiavelli’s next play, Clizia, the union will be blessed and Niciawill have the joy of a son who guarantees the continuity of the family(but also of the republic). As for Lucrezia, she also seems to have gainedsomething. As she says to Callimaco at the end of the play:

Since your cleverness, my husband’s stupidity, my mother’s silli-ness, and my confessor’s guile have led me to do what I neverwould have done by myself, I have to judge that this comes from adivine providence that willed so. I am not capable of refusing whatheaven itself wants me to accept. I therefore take you for my lord,my master, and my guide. You shall act as father and protector tome, and I will be yours completely. What my husband has willedfor this one night, he shall have for good and ever. (M 269)

Lucrezia thus may have gained something (a son and a lover), but shehas also lost something else: she, who was capable of governing a king-dom at the beginning of the play, has now joyfully submitted to thedelights of being governed.58 Callimaco, on the other hand, has provedto be the perfect incarnation of what Machiavelli describes in ThePrince, whose puzzling concluding metaphor is worth quoting in itsentirety to show the continuity with The Mandrake:


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I certainly think that it is better to be impetuous than cautious,because fortune is a woman, and if you want to control her, it isnecessary to treat her roughly. And it is clear that she is moreinclined to yield to men who are impetuous than to those who arecalculating. Since fortune is a woman, she is always well disposedtowards young men, because they are less cautious and moreaggressive, and treat her more boldly. (P 87)

Constrained like a river within the dykes of the household, Lucrezia,like all the other women of the time, experiences power primarily in theform of biopower, as a power that takes hold over life: her own life, butalso the life she has the capacity to bear. And this is because it is ulti-mately on women’s bodies that the continuity of Nicia’s family as wellas of that of the republic depends.

5. Conclusions

We can now say, by inverting the Foucauldean rephrasing of Aristotle,that women have always been animals whose existence as living beingspolitics places in question. Politics, thus, has always been biopoliticalbecause, in whatever way we want to conceive of it, it is our existenceas living beings who have been born that is in question there.Otherwise stated, politics is biopolitical because it is geneapolitical wellbefore being thanatopolitical.

At this point in the argument, one may rightly ask: Why, if politicshas always been biopolitics, did this term emerge only now? One reasonis capitalism’s tendency to intensify the link between politics and life.Through the technological developments of the past half-century andthe incorporation of life in the mechanisms of production itself, humanbeings have become able to penetrate the inner mechanisms of life in away that has never been the case before. The term “biopolitics” emergesthus to signify the increased capacity of the state to appropriate thepower over biological life. Just as the birth of modern states gave to pol-itics an autonomy that it had never possessed to such an extentbefore—thereby justifying the birth of a new term, “politics”—soequally the capitalist transformations that have made life into a crucialpolitical problem have determined a biopolitical turn that calls for anew term to render it, namely “biopolitics.”

This is something with which Foucault would probably have agreed,by stating that the need for the concept and the word “biopolitics”results from an intensification of the power’s hold over life. But it stillremains the case that Foucault tends to neglect how differently biopo-litical techniques impact differently gendered bodies, so much so that itdoes not make any sense, when one brings such differences to the fore,

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to speak about a classic age of sovereignty when power was supposed tobe a mere power of the sword. The power exercised over women’s bodiesin patriarchal societies has always been biopolitical. And it is only if welook at human beings as mainly beings-toward-death, as opposed tobeings-after-birth, that we can ignore the difference between bodiesthat can bear life and bodies that cannot do so. What has changed withthe biopolitical turn that Foucault described is the all gender-inclusivenature of such biopolitical techniques.

It may be worth observing here that despite the fact that Foucaultstarted to use the term biopolitics in the 1970s, it was only much laterthat the term became so prominent in public debates. Graph 1 illus-trates the frequency of the word in academic journals publishedbetween 1940 and 2009 and collected in JSTOR, a large digital libraryincluding over 2000 journals. By looking at the number of articles,books, pamphlets, etc. including the word “biopolitics” in titles,abstracts, or core texts, across all disciplines (history, philosophy, politics,sciences, etc.) and subfields (area studies, etc.), it clearly emerges thatthe first peak was in the 1980s.59

Notice that the 1980s were the years when western societies started toprocess the critique of second-wave feminism, with its vigorous ques-tioning of the “dykes and dams” that had constrained women in theprivate sphere for centuries. But the most striking result is that thegreat peak in the usage of the term happened only much more recently,around 2006—that is, in the years of the proliferation of gender clinicsand debates about transsexual identities and their regulations.


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Even such a brief analysis of the usage of the terms in academicdebate confirms that, if it is true that life has always been crucial topolitics, it has never been to the degree and in the “all gendersincluded” way that it is today. A famous aphorism on the limits thatnature itself sets to political power, which A.V. Dicey borrowed from aneighteenth-century writer and made famous, reads as follows: “It is afundamental principle with English lawyers, that a Parliament can doeverything but make a woman a man, and a man a woman.”60 We livein an epoch when, on the contrary, parliaments can and indeed do leg-islate about sex-change. New technological and political possibilitieshave rendered such an aphorism obsolete. It is to signal such a novelty,as well as the failure of the available vocabulary to designate it, that anew term has emerged and blossomed. As Mephistopheles would haveit, “good at need!”

NOTES

1. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust: A Tragedy, trans. John Hills(London: Whittaker and Company, 1840), p. 120.

2. For a similar interpretation of this passage, see Dolf Sternberger, “DasWort ‘Politik’ und der Begriff des Politischen,” PolitischeVierteljahresschrift 24:1 (1983), pp. 6–14.

3. See, for instance, Volker Sellin, Mi–Pre, ed. Werner Conze and ChristianMeier, vol. 4 of Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zurpolitisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Bruner, WernerConze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), s.v.“Politik,” pp. 789–874; Nicolai Rubinstein, “The History of the WordPoliticus in Early-Modern Europe,” chap. 2 of The Languages of PoliticalTheory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 41–56; Maurizio Viroli, “TheRevolution in the Concept of Politics,” Political Theory 20:3 (1992), pp.473–95. Even historically informed political theorists such as NorbertoBobbio and Dolf Sternberger cannot fail to notice the curious fact thatdespite its Greek origins, the word “politics” is a modern invention; seeNorberto Bobbio, Dizionario di Politica, ed. Norberto Bobbio, NicolaMatteucci, and Gianfranco Pasquino (Turin: Unione Tipografico-EditriceTorinese, 1990), s.v. “Diritto,” pp. 312–6; s.v. “Politica,” pp. 800–9; andDolf Sternberger, “Das Wort ‘Politik’ und der Begriff des Politischen.”

4. I have dealt more extensively with this genealogy elsewhere, so I will limitmyself here to recalling just its major breaks. For a more detailed recon-struction, see Chiara Bottici, Imaginal Politics: Images BeyondImagination and the Imaginary (New York: Columbia University Press,2014), pp. 75–90.

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5. The opposition between the πόλις and the οἶκος is almost a commonplace(to begin with, see Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition [Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1958], pp. 28–38). It should, however, benoted that the idea of a stark opposition between the οἶκος and the πόλιςmay also be a later interpretation. For instance, according to both Platoand Aristotle, the πόλις derives from the division of labor and thus fromthe satisfaction of the basic needs of life—a remark that seems to suggesta more fluid relationship between the οἶκος as the primary site for thesatisfaction of bodily needs and a superior form of community such as theπόλις. See in particular Plato, Republic 368B, and Aristotle, Politics I.2,1252b30.

6. Note also that the term τέχνη in ancient Greek does not only mean a neu-tral technique, but also implies a specific knowledge.

7. As is well known, Aristotle never wrote a book entitled Τὰ Πολιτικά. Hispublished works include only dialogues that have all been lost, as weknow from testimonies. The texts that currently compose the CorpusAristotelicum were the notes that he used for teaching. In fact, we cannoteven say that we possess the texts of his esoteric lessons: the actual shapeof the Corpus Aristotelicum derives from the edition of these notes madeby Andronicus Rhodius, a later disciple of the peripatetic who perhapsgave to the Corpus a division that reflects more the cultural view of thefirst century BCE than Aristotle’s intentions (see Francesco Adorno, LaFormazione del Pensiero Filosofico dale Origine a Platone VI–VII Secolo,vol. 2 of La Filosofia Antica [Milan: Feltrinelli, 1961], p. 287).

8. See, for instance, Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 7–8.

9. This may be due to the fact that the Romans were so political that, fortheir linguistic universe, politics occupied the entirety of public life andthus they did not feel the need to distinguish between politics and otherspheres of public life in general. This seems to indicate that, for both theGreeks and the Romans, the semantic field corresponding to what wewould today call politics was so broad that they could not even distinguishit from other public activities.

10. See Rubinstein, “The History of the Word Politicus,” p. 41; Viroli, “TheRevolution in the Concept of Politics.”

11. The substantive πόλις was indeed rendered by the Romans with both civi-tas or societas, a usage that is still attested to in early modern sources.The fact that the space of the political was thought of in terms of publicus,civilis, and socialis is significant in itself. Together with civitas—literally,“city”—the Romans translated the Greek πόλις with the term societas,which, like the corresponding adjective socialis, comes from socius, mean-ing “ally,” “associate,” or “partner.” This is an important innovation,because it is the first step toward the birth of the social and thus of thedistinction between society and politics. Yet, as both are still thought of interms of publicus, we can conclude that the Romans did not conceive of“politics” as a separate field within the more general realm of the publicand the social—or at least that they did not perceive such a distinction tobe so crucial as to feel the need to name it.


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12. The matter has already been thoroughly treated by Sellin, Viroli, andRubinstein. See note 3, above.

13. See Sternberger’s treatment in “Das Wort ‘Politik’ und der Begriff desPolitischen.”

14. See ibid.

15. Augustine, De civ. Dei 4.4.

16. See Bobbio, Dizionario di Politica, s.v. “Politica,” p. 800.

17. See Viroli, “The Revolution in the Concept of Politics.”

18. Giovanni Botero, Della Ragion di Stato, ed. Luigi Firpo (Turin: UnioneTipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1948), p. 55; quoted in Viroli, “TheRevolution in the Concept of Politics,” p. 490n. 2.

19. The timing of the birth of modern sovereign states is still controversialamong interpreters, but most of them agree in seeing the seventeenth cen-tury as a turning point. On the nature and history of modern sovereignstates, see Gianfranco Poggi, The State: Its Nature, Development, andProspects (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and ChristopherPierson, The Modern State (New York: Routledge, 1996).

20. There is vast agreement among historians of political thought about thelink between the birth of the term “politics” and the emergence of themodern state. Besides Viroli, see for instance Bobbio, Dizionario diPolitica, s.v. “Politica”; Sellin, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, s.v. “Politik”;and Rubinstein, “The History of the Word Politicus.”

21. If we consider that other theorists of the reason of states, such as Botero,already systematically used the word politica, it is impossible not to agreewith Viroli’s interpretation, which argues that Machiavelli is an ambiva-lent figure of passage. See Viroli, “The Revolution in the Concept ofPolitics,” pp. 487–90.

22. See Niccolò Machiavelli, Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, in Ilprincipe e Discorsi sopra la prima deca di Tito Livio, ed. Sergio Bertelli,vol. 1 of Opere, ed. Sergio Bertelli and Franco Gaeta (Milan: Feltrinelli,1960), esp. I.6, I.18, I.25, I.55; Discourses on Livy, trans. Harvey Mansfieldand Nathan Tarcov (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp.20–3, 49–52, 60–1, 109–13. With this expression, though, he primarilymeans living according to certain laws. On this point, I am indebted toJeremie Barthas.

23. See Thomas Hobbes, introduction to Leviathan (London: Penguin Books,1968), pp. 81–3.

24. For this definition, see Max Weber, Economy and Society, trans. EphraimFischoff et al., ed. Guenther Roth and Claus Wittich (Berkeley: Universityof California Press, 1978), pp. 54–6.

25. On the novelties brought about by the modern state, see Poggi, The State;and Norberto Bobbio, Stato, governo, società: per una teoria generale dellapolitica (Turin: Einaudi, 1985).

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26. See Arendt, The Human Condition, pp. 38–49.

27. See Pierre Rosanvallon, Pour une histoire conceptuelle du politique (Paris:Seuil, 2003). The notion of the political that was very influentially used byCarl Schmitt (see Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. GeorgeSchwab [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996]), has recently beendeveloped by Chantal Mouffe in her agonistic model of democracy (seeChantal Mouffe, On the Political [London: Routledge, 2005]). On thebroader notion of “the political” as le politique in the French context, seePierre Rosanvallon, “Towards a Philosophical History of the Political,”chap. 10 of The History of Political Thought in a National Context, ed.Dario Castiglione, Iain Hampsher-Monk (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2001). See also Claude Lefort, Essais sur le politique(Paris: Seuil, 1986); and Marcel Gauchet, La condition politique (Paris:Gallimard, 2005), pp. 504–57.

28. There are indeed earlier usages of the word, going as far back as thebeginning of the twentieth century. For a careful reconstruction of the his-tory of the term, see Antonella Cutro, Biopolitica: Storia e attualità di unconcetto (Verona: Ombra Corte, 2005).

29. This also explains why, in my view, Foucault is not so consistent in hisusage of the terms “biopower” and “biopolitics,” which at times appear tobe used by him almost interchangeably. On this point, see Michael Hardtand Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge: Harvard UniversityPress, 2009), p. 57.

30. Note, however, that this chronology is uncertain and changes from onetext to another. For instance, he seems to place the beginning of this pro-cess much earlier in Michel Foucault, An Introduction, vol. 1 of TheHistory of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York, Vintage Books,1990); hereafter HS, followed by page number.

31. HS 136; see also Michel Foucault, “Society Must be Defended”: Lectures atthe Collège de France, 1975–1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador,2003), p. 241; hereafter SMD, followed by page number.

32. See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans.Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp.15–70; hereafter SP, followed by page number.

33. See Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15:1 (2003), pp.11–40.

34. Ibid., pp. 11–2.

35. See Roberto Esposito, Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, trans. TimothyCampbell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008).

36. See ibid., pp. 146–90.

37. See Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny ofCommunity, trans. Timothy Campbell (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 2009).


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38. Among the exceptions, notable is that of Hannah Arendt (see for instanceHannah Arendt, Love and Saint Augustine [Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1996], pp. 54–5, 146–8; and Hannah Arendt, The Promiseof Politics [New York: Schocken Books, 2005], pp. 126–7). See alsoAdriana Cavarero, Nonostante Platone: Figure femminili nella filosofiaantica (Verona: Ombre Corte, 2009), who draws extensively from Arendt;and Anne O’Byrne, Natality and Finitude (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2010), who focuses instead on the link between natalityand finitude, thereby bringing death back into the picture. Among themore recent feminist scholarship, moving in the same direction, see RobinMay Schott, ed., Birth, Death, and Femininity: Philosophies of Embodiment(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010); whereas Rosalyn Diproseand Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, “Time for Beginners: Natality, Biopolitics,and Political Theology,” philoSOPHIA 3:2 (2013), focus more specificallyon biopolitics, but in the context of the 2005 debate in Australia over thelicensing of the drug RU486.

39. On the gendered nature of biopolitical operations, see Diprose and Ziarek,“Time for Beginners.”

40. On the reasons why philosophers tend to privilege death, see HannahArendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, ed. Ronald Beiner(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); and Simon Critchley, TheBook of Dead Philosophers (New York: Vintage Books, 2008).

41. The fact that “mortals” is still often used as a synonym for “human being”is a signal of how entrenched this prejudice is in our culture. SeeCavarero, Nonostante Platone, pp. 55, 75.

42. See ibid., pp. 21–39.

43. Besides the works of Arendt and Cavarero, see also O’Byrne, Natality andFinitude, where she builds on the work of Arendt, Dilthey, Heidegger, andNancy.

44. As already mentioned, this is the point developed by Arendt in her read-ing of Augustine (see for instance Arendt, Love and St. Augustine, pp.54–5, 146–8; and Arendt, The Promise of Politics, pp. 126–7), and morerecently developed by Cavarero in Nonostante Platone.

45. Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 247.

46. We should however note that Arendt is not very consistent in her treat-ment of natality, which at times seems to coincide with biological birthitself, whereas in other cases it seems to come to full fruition in what shecalls the “second birth”: that is, the moment when new beginners are wit-nessed in words and deeds (see Arendt, The Human Condition, p. 176). Inmy view, this is the consequence of her overall conceptual apparatus andvery specific conception of politics, which does not allow her to fully takeinto account the political role of the gendered body. On the “second birth,”see for instance Peg Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights:The Predicament of Common Responsibility (Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press, 2006), who emphasized that to be born is always to be

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welcomed, and thus to be given a name, so that the second birth is neversimply laid over the first, but both happen at once.

47. A good starting point to investigate them remains Simone de Beauvoir’smasterpiece, which describes at length how the capacity to bear life hasbeen a crucial site for the exercise of patriarchy. See Simone de Beauvoir,Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949); The Second Sex, trans.Constance Borde and Sheila Chevallier (New York: Knopf, 2010).

48. See Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford UniversityPress, 1989).

49. Geneapolitics thus combines γενεά with “politics,” which, as we have seen,did not exist in ancient Greek. As a consequence, it is properly speakingan anachronism, but one that I am consciously deploying in order to showthe limits of the notion of thanatopolitics.

50. For those who want to pursue this road, which goes well beyond the scopeof this article, de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex remains an inescapable start-ing point, both for her analysis of the myths of femininity as well as of thelived experience of women, from their formative years to their situation.

51. One notable exception is Hanna Fenichel Pitkin’s seminal Fortune Is aWoman: Gender and Politics in the Thought of Niccolò Machiavelli(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); and more recently, LisabethDuring and Ross Poole, “Rape and the Republic” (paper presented at theconference “Philosophy and Social Science,” Prague, May 2012), fromwhich I will draw in my reading of Machiavelli’s The Mandrake. On a pos-sible feminist reading of Machiavelli, see the essays collected in Maria J.Falco, ed., Feminist Interpretations of Niccolò Machiavelli (UniversityPark, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

52. See Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Russell Price, ed. QuentinSkinner and Russell Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1988), p. 59; hereafter P, followed by page number.

53. Niccolò Machiavelli, The Mandrake, trans. David Sices, in The Comediesof Niccolò Machiavelli, ed. David Sices and James B. Atkinson(Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2007), pp. 192–3; hereafter M, followedby page number.

54. Periodization of Machiavelli’s writing is still under discussion among thespecialists of the field. As for The Mandrake, see James B. Atkinson,introduction to The Comedies of Niccolò Machiavelli, pp. 1–30.

55. Pitkin analyzed the whole tradition of such metaphors, dating as far backas the Roman goddess Fortuna and through its medieval reinterpretation.Although Machiavelli distances himself from the latter, where fortune ismainly the agent of divine prudence, one cannot say that he retrieves theancient tradition either, because for Machiavelli fortuna does not havemuch of god-like features. See Pitkin, Fortune is a Woman, p. 144.

56. Niccolò Machiavelli, Il principe, in Il principe e Discorsi sopra la primadeca di Tito Livio, p. 101.


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57. Just to give some examples, for Cassirer fortuna is the mythical residuumof Machiavelli’s political philosophy, embodying in all other respects theattempt of western scientific rationality to tame it (see Ernst Cassirer,The Myth of the State [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1946], p. 194),whereas for Leo Strauss there is nothing mythical in this notion, whichdenotes simply any “extrinsic accident” that can happen to a man withoutany fault of his own, so that the personification of it would be a mererhetorical device (see Leo Strauss, Thoughts on Machiavelli [Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1978], p. 216).

58. On this point, as well as on the link between rape and the republic, I amindebted to During and Poole, “Rape and the Republic.”

59. This graph reflects the data accessible as of August 2013. Note, however,that most journals on JSTOR have a three- to five-year delay for inclusionin the database. Hence the graph does not extend beyond 2009.

60. Albert Venn Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of theConstitution (New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1959), p. 43.

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Rethinking the biopolitical turn: from the thanatopolitical to the geneapolitical paradigm.

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