Introduction: “Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life” by Miguel Vatter
“Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life” by Miguel Vatter first appeared in Theory & Event, Volume 12, Issue 2 (2009), published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This review essay is a critical examination of three major contemporary works on biopolitics: Thomas Lemke’s Biopolitik zur Einführung, Melinda Cooper’s Life as Surplus, and Roberto Esposito’s Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Vatter’s central claim is that despite differing theoretical orientations—Foucauldian (Lemke), post-Marxist (Cooper), and deconstructive (Esposito)—all three texts converge around a common insight: that biopolitics must be understood in terms of “surplus life,” a concept that parallels Marx’s surplus value but relocates it in the biological rather than economic realm (Vatter, 2009, p. 2). Vatter shows how Lemke presents biopolitics as a new episteme, a field of normalization and governmental calculation rooted in the inseparability of life and politics, while simultaneously remaining skeptical of constructing a biopolitical philosophy, especially one grounded in juridical norms or sovereign logics (p. 3–5). Cooper, by contrast, traces the transformation of capitalism under neoliberalism into a “bioeconomy,” where life itself—not labor—is the source of speculative surplus value, linking the biotech industry to financial capital and evangelical theology (p. 6–9). Esposito provides a philosophical genealogy of immunization, positing that the core of modern biopolitics lies in its immunitary logic, which paradoxically seeks to preserve life through mechanisms that also produce death. His affirmative biopolitics aims to rethink community and politics from within the framework of natality and biological openness (p. 10–12). Vatter’s review is significant in literary and cultural theory for establishing biopolitics as not merely a political or philosophical concern but as a vital analytical framework for understanding literature’s role in representing, negotiating, and resisting the regulation of life. By synthesizing these theories, Vatter positions biopolitics as a productive theoretical lens that bridges critical theory, political economy, bioethics, and literary studies, especially in an era where life itself becomes the terrain of political and economic control (Vatter, 2009, p. 1).
Summary of “Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life” by Miguel Vatter
⚙️ Biopolitics and Surplus: Shifting from Economy to Life
- Vatter reframes biopolitics through the lens of “surplus life”, extending Marx’s concept of “surplus value” from economic production to biological existence.
- “What is at stake in biopolitics is no longer the value-producing power of labor, but the life-producing power of populations.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 1)
- Capitalism is no longer centered only on extracting surplus labor, but now thrives on modulating and investing in life itself.
🧬 Thomas Lemke: The Foucaultian Frame
- Lemke interprets Foucault’s biopolitics as a new form of rationality centered on “governing life” rather than territory or laws.
- Biopolitics operates via “normalization”, not sovereignty, focusing on managing populations through statistical and medical norms.
- “Lemke cautions against the attempt to develop a biopolitical ethics… precisely because life cannot serve as a normative foundation for politics.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 4)
💰 Melinda Cooper: Neoliberalism and the Bioeconomy
- Cooper analyzes biocapitalism, showing how biotechnology and speculative finance merge in a “surplus of life” that is economically exploitable.
- Genetic information, embryos, and stem cells become forms of “futurity” that attract speculative investment.
- “The surplus of life is both a financial and a theological economy… infused with eschatological expectations of resurrection.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 8)
🛡️ Roberto Esposito: Immunity, Community, and Thanatopolitics
- Esposito develops the “immunitary paradigm”—the idea that modern societies protect life through mechanisms that exclude, suppress, or kill.
- Biopolitics is structured by a paradox: it aims to preserve life, yet does so by exposing others to death (e.g., refugees, the poor).
- “Immunity is a negation that affirms: to preserve life, it must produce death.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 11)
🔁 From Negative Critique to Affirmative Biopolitics
- Vatter concludes by suggesting a move from critical deconstruction to a positive biopolitics, emphasizing natality, community, and co-belonging.
- Biopolitics should not only uncover domination but also propose new ways of living together.
- “The political task today is to make affirmative biopolitics thinkable… to affirm life without immunization.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 12)
Theoretical Terms/Concepts in “Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life” by Miguel Vatter
| 🧠 Theoretical Term | 📖 Explanation | 💬 Quotation (Vatter, 2009) |
| ⚙️ Surplus Life | Vatter’s central concept, reworking Marx’s surplus value: life itself becomes the source of political and economic productivity beyond labor. | “Biopolitics becomes the field in which surplus life, and not surplus value, is produced and managed.” (p. 2) |
| 🧬 Biopolitics | Based on Foucault: modern power focuses not on laws or sovereignty, but on regulating and managing biological life and populations. | “Biopolitics is concerned with the power to make live and let die.” (p. 3) |
| 🧪 Bioeconomy | Cooper’s concept describing how biotechnology and finance converge to invest in the speculative potential of life (e.g., embryos, genes). | “Capital no longer exploits labor, but speculates on life.” (p. 7) |
| 🛡️ Immunitary Paradigm | From Esposito: a system in which society defends life through exclusion and death—e.g., through racism, war, or quarantine. | “Immunity is the mechanism by which the preservation of life entails the production of death.” (p. 11) |
| 🌀 Normalization | Foucauldian notion (via Lemke): the use of norms, statistics, and medical discourse to regulate behavior and define “normal” life. | “Modern power is not exercised through repression but through normalization.” (p. 4) |
| 🕊️ Affirmative Biopolitics | Vatter’s proposal for rethinking biopolitics positively: emphasizing community, natality, and openness rather than control. | “The political task today is to make affirmative biopolitics thinkable.” (p. 12) |
| ⚖️ Thanatopolitics | The “death-function” of biopolitics—regimes of power that determine who should die so others can live. Often linked to racism and exclusion. | “A politics that chooses who must die in order for others to live.” (p. 11) |
| 🔁 Futurity | Cooper’s idea that life is economically valuable not for its present form, but for its potential—what it could become (e.g., in biotech). | “Life is invested in not for what it is, but for what it may become.” (p. 8) |
| 🏛️ Governmentality | A form of power concerned with governing populations through decentralized means like institutions, policies, and self-regulation. | “Biopolitics is a dimension of governmentality where populations become governable.” (p. 3) |
Contribution of “Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life” by Miguel Vatter to Literary Theory/Theories
🧬 Biopolitics and Biopower in Literary Theory
- Vatter’s essay foregrounds biopolitics as a foundational lens for interpreting life, power, and subjectivity in literature, particularly in post-structuralist and Foucauldian literary frameworks.
- It expands the analytical terrain of literature from ideology and discourse to the biological substratum of subjectivity—how characters and populations are managed, regulated, or abandoned.
- “Biopolitics is concerned with the power to make live and let die.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 3)
- 🔗 Theoretical Link: Michel Foucault’s concept of biopower, crucial to postmodern literary theory, trauma studies, and necropolitics in literature.
⚙️ From Marxist Literary Theory to Post-Marxist Bioeconomy
- Vatter shows how Melinda Cooper’s argument repositions surplus value from labor to life itself, marking a shift in capitalist logic that affects the representation of bodies, work, and reproduction in literary texts.
- This is critical for analyzing neoliberal themes in fiction: the commodification of life, speculative futures, and the devaluation of labor.
- “Capital no longer exploits labor, but speculates on life.” (p. 7)
- 🔗 Theoretical Link: Evolves classical Marxist literary theory into a post-Marxist biopolitical critique, especially in science fiction, dystopian, and speculative fiction.
🛡️ Immunitary Logic and Thanatopolitics in Critical Theory
- Drawing from Roberto Esposito, Vatter introduces the “immunitary paradigm”—the idea that societies protect themselves by excluding or killing others—deeply relevant to literary themes of exclusion, abjection, and genocide.
- This logic enables critical literary readings of racialized and colonized subjects, as well as the production of “bare life” in literature.
- “Immunity is the mechanism by which the preservation of life entails the production of death.” (p. 11)
- 🔗 Theoretical Link: Thanatopolitics and Agamben’s “bare life”—central to postcolonial and trauma theory.
🕊️ Affirmative Biopolitics and Literary Ethics
- Vatter concludes by advocating for a positive biopolitics, which aligns with literary ethics and affect theory—seeking new ways of imagining life, natality, and community outside sovereignty or immunization.
- This is particularly useful for reading literary texts that imagine alternative communities, radical care, or relational ontologies.
- “The political task today is to make affirmative biopolitics thinkable.” (p. 12)
- 🔗 Theoretical Link: Posthumanism, care ethics, and new materialist literary theory.
🌀 Normalization and the Literary Construction of “the Normal”
- Through Lemke, Vatter traces how biopolitical normalization operates not through repression but through shaping what counts as “normal” in bodies and behavior.
- This contributes to disability studies, queer theory, and critical race theory in literature, which interrogate how norms are written into characters and plots.
- “Modern power is not exercised through repression but through normalization.” (p. 4)
- 🔗 Theoretical Link: Queer Theory, Critical Disability Studies, Affect Theory.
🔁 Futurity and Temporal Politics in Literature
- Cooper’s concept of futurity—life valued not for what it is but what it might become—opens new pathways for examining temporality in literature, particularly in biopolitical speculative fiction.
- It contributes to theories of utopia/dystopia, climate fiction, and reproductive futurism.
- “Life is invested in not for what it is, but for what it may become.” (p. 8)
- 🔗 Theoretical Link: Queer Temporality, Feminist Science Studies, Afrofuturism.
🏛️ Governmentality and Narrative Structures of Power
- Vatter reinforces Foucault’s notion of governmentality, expanding literary analysis beyond state and ideology to the micro-techniques of governing bodies and populations through norms, medicalization, or education.
- Literary narratives can thus be analyzed for their forms of soft power, data logic, or bureaucratic language.
- “Biopolitics is a dimension of governmentality where populations become governable.” (p. 3)
- 🔗 Theoretical Link: Foucauldian literary studies, Narrative theory, Institutional critique.
Examples of Critiques Through “Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life” by Miguel Vatter
| 📖 Novel / Study | 🧬 Biopolitical Focus | ⚙️ Applied Concept (from Vatter) | 💬 Critical Commentary |
| 🏙️ Unfolding the Globalized City (C. Degli Esposti, 2024) 🔗 | Explores Italian novels & urban space; shows how characters’ lives are shaped by urban biopolitical design & migration control. | 🛡️ Immunitary Paradigm: Cities function as gated biopolitical mechanisms that regulate mobility and exposure. | “Urban space becomes a medium for biopolitical governance, where zones of exclusion and inclusion materialize.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 11) |
| ⚰️ Kashmir’s Necropolis (Ghosh, reviewed in Najar & Yousuf, 2024) 🔗 | Literary texts on Kashmir under occupation and trauma; emphasizes thanatopolitics and military necropower. | ⚖️ Thanatopolitics: Political power operates through exposing populations to death. | “A politics that chooses who must die in order for others to live.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 11) |
| 🌆 Reproducing the Frontier (Wilson, 2024) 🔗 | Examines the wilderness in fiction as a biopolitical construction that regulates national identity and environmental narratives. | 🧬 Biopolitics and 🌀 Normalization: Nature itself becomes regulated through visual and narrative technologies. | “Modern power is not exercised through repression but through normalization.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 4) |
| 🚺 Visions of Dystopia (Rinaldi, 2024) 🔗 | Analysis of recent sci-fi depicting reproductive control in dystopian societies; focused on biocapital and compulsory fertility. | 🧪 Bioeconomy and 🔁 Futurity: Women’s bodies become sites for speculative value and population management. | “Life is invested in not for what it is, but for what it may become.” (Vatter, 2009, p. 8) |
Criticism Against “Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life” by Miguel Vatter
⚖️ Overgeneralization of Biopolitical Convergence
- Vatter’s claim that Lemke, Cooper, and Esposito all converge on the concept of “surplus life” may oversimplify or flatten key theoretical distinctions.
- While conceptually useful, this synthesis may blur significant differences between Foucauldian analytics, post-Marxist economics, and Esposito’s ontological critique.
🧭 Lack of Engagement with Necropolitics
- The essay minimally engages with Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics, which by 2009 had become central to discussions of life, death, and state power.
- Critics may argue Vatter’s focus on “surplus life” sidelines more urgent questions of who is allowed to die, especially along racial and colonial lines.
🧬 Abstract Use of “Life”
- The term “life” in “surplus life” remains undertheorized and abstract; it is unclear whether it refers to biological vitality, potentiality, social reproduction, or metaphysical being.
- This ambiguity could weaken the conceptual precision required for practical political application or literary analysis.
🧰 Philosophical Heaviness vs. Material Grounding
- Vatter’s review is philosophically rich but lacks empirical or historical specificity; there is little grounding in actual policies, medical systems, or case studies that exemplify the biopolitical shift.
- As a result, the piece may not satisfy scholars seeking applied or grounded biopolitical critique.
📚 Minimal Attention to Literature and Cultural Texts
- Although the article is highly relevant for literary theory, it does not explicitly engage with literature, art, or cultural forms, which could limit its uptake in those fields unless readers do the interpretive work themselves.
🔁 Too Dependent on Secondary Sources
- The essay is a meta-review of other theorists rather than an original intervention into biopolitical thought.
- Critics may argue it lacks a distinctive theoretical position of its own beyond the synthesis of existing literature.
🔬 Neglect of Feminist and Queer Biopolitical Theories
- Vatter does not incorporate feminist biopolitics (e.g., Haraway, Puar, Preciado) or queer critiques of normativity, which are essential to current debates around biopower, reproduction, and embodiment.
Representative Quotations from “Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life” by Miguel Vatter with Explanation
| Quotation | Explanation |
| “That power over the biological lives of individuals and peoples has become the greater part of political power, and, conversely, that control over one’s biology is becoming a central focus for political action, can no longer be seriously questioned: biopolitics has become what Foucault once termed an ‘order of things,’ an episteme, a source of paradigms.” | This quotation establishes the centrality of biopolitics as a dominant framework in modern political thought, as introduced by Foucault. It highlights that biopolitics is a pervasive reality shaping how power operates over biological life and how individuals engage with their biology politically, setting the stage for the review by emphasizing biopolitics as an undeniable “order of things” that structures contemporary governance and subjectivity. |
| “The three books under review… exemplify distinct standpoints. Thomas Lemke offers a systematic overview of biopolitics as a discipline… Melinda Cooper’s is a path-breaking study of the relation between biopolitics and neoliberal form of capitalism… Roberto Esposito attempts to understand the emergence of biopolitics as an epochal turning point for philosophical reflection about politics.” | This outlines the distinct approaches of the three authors reviewed, providing a framework for understanding their contributions. Lemke’s empirical and Foucaultian approach, Cooper’s focus on neoliberal bioeconomy, and Esposito’s philosophical reimagining of biopolitics as a shift in political philosophy illustrate the multifaceted nature of biopolitical inquiry, each addressing different dimensions of how life and power intersect. |
| “In Foucault’s corpus the idea of a ‘surplus of life’ surfaces occasionally, for instance when he warns… that ‘it is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques that govern and administer it; it constantly escapes them’ (Foucault 1990, 143).” | This introduces the concept of “surplus life,” a key theme in the analysis. Foucault’s idea that life exceeds the control of biopolitical technologies suggests both a negative (life as a resource to be managed) and affirmative (life’s resistance to control) dimension, framing the three authors’ explorations of how biopolitics generates and contends with this excess of life. |
| “Lemke shows why neither [pre-Foucaultian meanings of biopolitics] captures the new reality that Foucault calls biopower… biopolitics designates the inseparability of biological life and political life in late modernity.” | This explains Lemke’s contribution to redefining biopolitics in Foucault’s terms, moving away from earlier notions of life as a natural or political object to a condition where biological and political life are intertwined, underscoring biopolitics as a modern phenomenon where governance directly targets biological processes, fundamentally altering traditional political categories. |
| “For Lemke, biopolitics must contain within itself a necessary reference to the creation of a surplus of life, making it irreducible to thanatopolitics.” | Lemke’s rejection of reducing biopolitics to thanatopolitics (a politics of death, as in Agamben’s framework) emphasizes its productive aspect, highlighting that biopolitics involves generating a “surplus of life,” aligning it with a political economy that fosters life’s potential rather than merely managing death, distinguishing it from Agamben’s focus on bare life and extermination. |
| “The main thesis of Life as Surplus is that ‘neoliberalism and the biotech industry share a common ambition to overcome the ecological and economical limits to growth associated with the end of industrial production, through a speculative reinvention of the future’ (Cooper, 11).” | This encapsulates Cooper’s argument that neoliberal capitalism and biotechnology converge to exploit biological life as a new source of surplus value, linking biopolitics to a bioeconomy that seeks limitless growth by manipulating life itself, highlighting the speculative nature of this economic and biological reinvention. |
| “Cooper’s thesis is that all this creation of biological life in excess of its limits is paid at the price of a deepening devaluation of human lives: the second main sense in which life functions as surplus.” | This explains Cooper’s second sense of “life as surplus,” where the production of excess biological life (e.g., through biotech innovations) leads to the devaluation of human lives, particularly marginalized ones, revealing the contradictions of biocapitalism where the promise of surplus life paradoxically undermines human value under capitalist imperatives. |
| “Esposito’s paradigm of ‘immunization’ accounts for the logic and function of dispositifs of biopower that work by ‘flattening the political into the purely biological’ and that politicize the biological as much as biologize the political (146-7).” | This introduces Esposito’s immunization paradigm, which explains how biopolitical power reduces politics to biology while simultaneously making biology a political concern, addressing the mutual entanglement of life and politics and offering a philosophical lens to understand biopolitics as both controlling and productive of life. |
| “Esposito employs the concept of ‘flesh’ to argue for the irreducibility of bios-logical life to biology… the flesh is what always already opens the self onto others, and thus corresponds to the munus, to the expenditure of self that establishes community with an other.” | This discusses Esposito’s use of “flesh” to propose an affirmative biopolitics that resists reducing life to mere biology. By conceptualizing flesh as inherently relational and open to others, Esposito counters the immunitary closure of modern politics, suggesting a communal and non-immunitary basis for biopolitics rooted in the gift (munus) of self to others. |
| “The only way for life to defer death isn’t to preserve it as such… but rather to be reborn continually in different guises” (Esposito, 181).” | This reflects Esposito’s vision of an affirmative biopolitics centered on natality and continual rebirth, emphasizing life’s surplus as its capacity to perpetually reinvent itself, challenging the immunitary logic of self-preservation and offering a philosophical alternative to thanatopolitics through a dynamic, ever-renewing concept of life. |
Suggested Readings: “Biopolitics: From Surplus Value to Surplus Life” by Miguel Vatter
- Vatter, Miguel. “Eternal Life and Biopower.” CR: The New Centennial Review, vol. 10, no. 3, 2010, pp. 217–49. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41949718. Accessed 22 July 2025.
- Hanafin, Patrick. “Becoming Normative: Law, Life, and the Possibility of an Affirmative Biopolitics.” Roberto Esposito: Biopolitics and Philosophy, edited by Inna Viriasova and Antonio Calcagno, State University of New York Press, 2018, pp. 241–58. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.18254226.16. Accessed 22 July 2025.
- Somit, Albert. “Biopolitics.” British Journal of Political Science, vol. 2, no. 2, 1972, pp. 209–38. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/193357. Accessed 22 July 2025.
