“Postdemocracy And Biopolitics” By Roberto Esposito: Summary and Critique

🧭 1. Postdemocracy: Not the Decline but the Fulfillment of Democracy’s Opposite

• Esposito challenges the notion that postdemocracy is a decline of democracy. Instead, it is “its completion in the figure of its opposite” (Esposito, 2019, p. 1).
• He critiques Colin Crouch (2000) and Ralf Dahrendorf (2001) for framing the crisis too narrowly in terms of representation and sovereignty:

“It simplifies and smooths over a much longer and more complex story into a period of 20 years” (p. 2).

• The crisis is ontological, not procedural—it reflects a shift in the very horizon of political thought.

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🧬 2. Biopolitics as the True Horizon of Governance

• Esposito aligns with Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, arguing that life itself has become the main object of political control.
• The shift began in the 18th century with the transition from sovereign to governmental power, where population health and productivity became central:

“The life of the population ceased to be considered a resource for the sovereign to consume… and became a precious resource to be protected and developed” (p. 2).

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🧠 3. Biology and Desubjectification

• The rise of biology as a science in the 19th century redefined humans as species beings, shifting power from law to life.
• This led to desubjectification:

“The individual… began to be perceived as a living being divided… by instincts and other irrational forces” (p. 2).

• The classical juridical person was destabilized; reason and will no longer define the political subject.

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⚛️ 4. Bios Replaces Demos: The Shift to Ghenos

• Esposito shows that political subjectivity is now biological rather than rational or civic:
  • Kratos (power) no longer belongs to the demos (people), but to bios (life) or ghenos (race/gender/generation) (p. 3).
  • Events such as the rise of gender politics, genetics (e.g., Dolly the sheep), and ecology (1972 Stockholm conference) mark this shift.

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📉 5. Collapse of Political Categories

• Traditional binaries like public/private, law/nature, and sovereignty/government are no longer meaningful:

“The entire modern lexicon that had framed politics… lost its significance” (p. 3).

• These changes deeply affect democratic representation, which is now performance rather than political agency (p. 5).

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💹 6. Neoliberalism as Biopolitical Paradigm

• Neoliberal regimes, especially ordoliberalism, exemplify a government of life:
  • “Freedom is produced by way of its own limitation” (p. 4).
• Thinkers like Hayek, von Mises, Röpke, and Rüstow proposed a system where:

“The market itself is presumed to be the generator of social order… not as a sovereign state, but as a government” (p. 4).

• Neoliberalism governs through anthropological measures, seeking to optimize human life rather than simply regulate it.

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🌍 7. From Sovereignty to Governmentality

• Sovereignty is replaced by governmentality (Foucault):

“Representation mutates into performance… the public is represented by the media” (p. 5).

• In postdemocracy, politics is increasingly media-driven, driven by spectacle, not deliberation.

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❓ 8. The Crisis of Democratic Function

• With power shifting to non-elected financial institutions, democracy is hollowed out:
  • “The democratic lexicon… is no longer capable of representation” (p. 3).
  • Expert governance (e.g., over climate, genetic tech) undermines the feasibility of democratic consensus (p. 5).

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🌱 9. Toward a New Political Subjectivity

• Esposito argues we must not mourn democracy’s end but build new forms of political identity:

“Our political lexicon must be changed and adjusted to the transformations we are witnessing” (p. 6).

• He calls for a politics that recognizes difference and identity in relational terms—not in opposition but as co-constitutive.

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🌍 10. Europe’s Political Responsibility

• Europe, burdened with its colonial past, must become a political subject again:
  • Support Global South through resource redistribution (p. 6).
  • Only a politically self-aware Europe can ethically engage in global justice:

“To set Europe back in motion… we must treat its crisis as an exceptional opportunity” (p. 6).

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📌 Conclusion

• The article presents a genealogical and biopolitical critique of contemporary democracy.
• Esposito insists that postdemocracy is not an aberration, but the culmination of modern political evolution.
• His vision is radical yet constructive: the challenge is not to revive old categories, but to forge new ones rooted in the biopolitical reality of life today.

📚 1. Contribution to Biopolitical Literary Criticism

• Esposito extends biopolitics—originating in Foucault—to the cultural sphere, offering literary theorists a framework to analyze how life, body, and species identity become sites of political meaning.
• ✳️ Literary application: Enables analysis of biofiction, speculative fiction, and genetic narratives as spaces where the political and biological interweave.
• 📌 Quote: “Questions of life and death, of sexuality and public health, of migration and security… have become fundamental to all political agendas” (Esposito, 2019, p. 3).
• 📘 Literary critics can explore how narrative forms mirror the collapse of the public/private binary, a key concern in feminist and posthumanist criticism.

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🎭 2. Influence on Performance Theory and Spectacle

• Esposito redefines representation as performance, echoing Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle and influencing performance theory in literary studies.
• ✳️ Performance replaces deliberation; democracy becomes theater:
  • “Representation mutates into performance… the public is represented by the media… not only a given, but also manufactured” (p. 5).
• 📚 Literary Impact: Enhances understanding of mediated subjectivity, post-truth narration, and spectacularized leadership in political fiction and drama (e.g., populist narratives, dystopian media in literature).

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⚖️ 3. Deconstruction of the Juridical Subject

• Esposito joins poststructuralists (e.g., Derrida, Butler) in questioning the rational, autonomous subject of modern liberalism.
• ✳️ The juridical person is “annulled,” displaced by a subject governed by “instincts and irrational forces” (p. 2).
• 📘 Literary Relevance: Encourages analysis of fragmented, non-sovereign subjects in postmodern and contemporary fiction, poetry, and life-writing.
• Connects to posthumanism and new materialism, which decenter the human as a stable, rational agent.

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🧬 4. Intersection with Feminist and Gender Theory

• The rise of ghenos (gender, generation, genetics) over demos (political people) opens rich terrain for feminist and queer literary theory.
• 📌 Quote: “By the end of the 1960s, the question of gender, generation, and genetics became prominent… the democratic nomos was supplanted by the biopolitical semantics of the ghenos” (p. 3).
• ✳️ Literature dealing with embodiment, reproductive rights, and technoscience (e.g., The Handmaid’s Tale) finds theoretical support in Esposito’s framework.

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🌍 5. Critique of Universalism – Toward Multipolar Identity

• Esposito rejects Enlightenment universalism, aligning with postcolonial theory and decolonial literary criticism.
• 📌 Quote: “These people have a vital need to constitute their own identity… multiplicity must be defended from a multipolar perspective” (p. 6).
• ✳️ Literary Application: Supports analysis of texts from the Global South, Indigenous literatures, and diasporic narratives that challenge Eurocentric identity models.

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📖 6. Language, Lexicon, and Literary Transformation

• Esposito calls for a new political language, echoing literary theorists who see language as central to ideology (e.g., Bakhtin, Barthes).
• 📌 Quote: “Our political lexicon must be changed and adjusted… the hegemonic language of the modern tradition… is left in complete tatters” (p. 6).
• ✳️ Relevance: Justifies stylistic experimentation, linguistic rupture, and form disintegration in literature as responses to collapsing political categories.

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🧠 7. Genealogical Method as Hermeneutic Tool

• Esposito’s genealogical approach (inspired by Nietzsche and Foucault) blends historical and philosophical reading—valuable for critical theory and hermeneutics in literary studies.
• ✳️ Methodology: “Those of us who work on contemporary events in genealogical terms… criss-cross the synchronic and diachronic” (p. 2).
• 📘 Literary Application: Encourages tracing the historical sedimentation of literary motifs (e.g., the sovereign body, the animal-human boundary, the contract) over time.

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🕊️ 8. Post-Leviathan and Political Theology

• Drawing from Hobbes, Esposito enters the realm of political theology, resonating with theorists like Carl Schmitt and Agamben.
• 📌 Quote: “Rather than abandoning [nature] in favour of the political state, as the Hobbesian paradigm dictates… we have entered the post-Leviathan horizon” (p. 4).
• ✳️ Literary Relevance: Illuminates sacrifice, sovereignty, and divine authority in literary narratives — especially in tragedy, dystopian fiction, and biblical reworkings.

🧩 1. Overgeneralization of Biopolitical Paradigm

• Critics may argue Esposito universalizes biopolitics as the defining horizon of all governance, which risks flattening distinctions across contexts and cultures.
• ✳️ Not all political phenomena (e.g. populism, nationalism) can be reduced to biopolitical governance.
• 📌 As Achille Mbembe and other theorists argue, racialized necropolitics or the politics of death deserve distinct treatment from generalized biopolitical models.

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🕳️ 2. Vagueness of “Completion of Democracy in Its Opposite”

• The claim that democracy is “completed in the figure of its opposite” (Esposito, 2019, p. 1) is provocative but conceptually ambiguous.
• ✳️ Critics might ask: what is this opposite? Is it technocracy, totalitarianism, or an evolved liberalism?
• The argument risks sounding deterministic without clearly naming the regime democracy has “matured into.”

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📚 3. Minimal Engagement with Empirical Political Structures

• While Esposito offers a powerful philosophical genealogy, he provides limited empirical or institutional analysis.
• ✳️ Scholars in political science or comparative politics may critique the text for insufficient attention to concrete state mechanisms, elections, or global economic institutions that shape postdemocracy.

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🧠 4. Underdeveloped Concept of Agency or Resistance

• Esposito eloquently diagnoses the crisis of subjectivity, but gives little space to political resistance, protest movements, or forms of grassroots democratic renewal.
• ✳️ Where is the agency of citizens, artists, or activists within postdemocracy? How might affirmative biopolitics be realized?
• Critics may view this as a bleak fatalism, with no clear path toward alternative futures.

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🧭 5. Eurocentrism and Limited Global Scope

• The article focuses heavily on European and Western trajectories, referencing Hayek, Mises, Röpke, and the European Left, while underrepresenting voices from the Global South.
• ✳️ Though Esposito briefly acknowledges Latin America and North Africa (p. 6), his analysis largely centers Western liberalism and crisis.
• This may be viewed as geopolitically narrow, especially given the global stakes of biopolitical governance (e.g. pandemics, migration).

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🧬 6. Ambiguity in the Use of Terms like “Life,” “Bios,” and “Ghenos”

• Esposito’s theoretical vocabulary (bios, ghenos, demos) is philosophically rich but semantically slippery.
• ✳️ Terms like bios and ghenos are used metaphorically and politically, but without consistent operational definitions.
• This risks conceptual imprecision, making the article difficult to apply in analytical contexts beyond philosophical discourse.

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🌀 7. Reliance on Foucault with Limited Interdisciplinary Expansion

• The text remains deeply embedded in Foucauldian genealogy, but might have benefited from cross-theoretical dialogue:
  • ✳️ e.g., insights from postcolonial theory (Mbembe), disability studies (Mitchell & Snyder), or Indigenous theory.
• This may limit its interdisciplinary resonance, especially in literary, environmental, or technological studies of power.