Cartografias da vida: poder, resistência e biopolítica: (Foucault na toca dos ratos)

Abstract

Life has become commonplace in nowadays political language. Life is reclaimed by science, religions, and even by those who are engaged in global wars to defend it. There is an important contemporary flow of researches and debates on life matters. We engaged on investigating this flow by focusing on Michel Foucault’s researches regarding biopower and biopolitics, that is, the devices that currently permeate and make life. This endeavor brought us to other investigations that have advanced the understanding of the power relations investments in life, as well as the resistance mechanisms built on this context. We have tried to answer the question “how does life escape?” by observing the tensions among the power and resistance to the biopower concepts. It is a life cartography which delineates entrances and exits, potencies and limits to the current debate on the resistances to the biopower. We question how these powers that ravage life are exercised, how they positively act as life forms producers and, ultimately, how life itself has escaped its strategies and made new fight machines.