The Foucauldian concept of biopolitics has served as an influential means of analysing and diagnosing contemporary society, economy and politics, by inquiring into how the biological dimensions of life become the object of multiple modes of political control and regulation. The anthology Resisting Biopolitics asks what is to be done with this diagnosis: how can biopower be resisted, be it in the form of military–industrial regimes, the unquestioned demand for security, the emergence of zones of exclusion or regimes of surveillance? The central concern of the volume thus lies in identifying and reflecting on possible strategies of resistance in the form of ideas, policies, actions and articulations. This extremely diverse collection of essays attempts a conversation between the life sciences, biotechnology, political philosophy, digital culture, social–political analysis, and literary and cultural studies. From the perspective of scholars in the field of theatre and performance studies, the anthology is relevant for the way it undertakes a critical examination of the body as a political site, whereby the definition of the body is problematized and critically expanded, taking into account not only the individual human body but also the relationship between humans and non-humans, individuals and collectivities, citizens and non-citizens. Since the search for strategies of resistance is a guiding question throughout the book, the arts in general, and theatre and the performing arts in particular, assume a significant role in offering imaginative instances of a quest for resisting the biopolitical.

The volume includes essays by renowned scholars and scholar–artists. Giorgio Agamben's essay ‘From the State of Control to a Praxis of Destituent Power’ adds two critical insights to his well-known theorization of biopolitics in States of Exception (2005): an analysis of the ascendancy of the notion of ‘security’ in contemporary political life, and a shift towards what he suggests is ‘destituent power’ (p. 28), which cannot be subject to the regimes of security. Rosi Braidotti turns to feminist readings of biopolitics in search of a constructive and sustainable ‘posthuman affirmative politics’ (pp. 30–56). Saskia Sassen examines modes of expulsion and extraction in contemporary capitalism and analyses them in terms of their system-changing capacities. Thomas Lemke explores two new directions in research on biopolitics, namely work on new materialism and the bioeconomy. Performance studies are widely represented in the volume. This includes an essay by the book's co-editor Steve Wilmer on theatrical and filmic interpretations of baby homes in Ireland and the regimes of biopolitical control of the Roman Catholic Church, an analysis of dataveillance through the lens of an early play on the topic by James Harding, and a discussion of filmic representations of the bio-virtual by Matthew Causey. The contribution by Australian scholar–artists Oron Catts and Ionat Zurr charts new terrains and dilemmas in artistic explorations of biopolitics. The book covers a number of sites through case studies of Israel/Palestine, Ireland and international forced migration, thus placing the debates on big data and surveillance in Western countries in relation to questions of citizenship and exclusion, racism, transnational trade in organs, reproductive technology and the War on Terror.

The volume is a useful resource for scholars interested in contemporary theorizations of and debates related to biopolitics, such as posthumanism, new/vital materialism or biophilosophy. However, it is no easy task to navigate one's way through the multiple disciplinary positions and approaches collated in the book, as much preliminary knowledge of various domains is presumed of the reader. The idea of resisting biopolitics is exciting and promising, yet resistance remains the most elusive notion in the book. It is sometimes used in the sense of opposition, disobedience or activist protest; in other instances it becomes an ‘affirmative ethics’, or an ‘autonomous’ zone of experimentation, and in an immunological sense even stands for a certain impermeability to change. While this may have been a conscious choice of the editors to allow readers to decide what resistance ought to be, the central position of resistance in relation to biopolitics warrants a greater level of accountability and conceptual elaboration.