In this book, Miguel Vatter articulates a highly theoretical, postmodern argument of enormous depth and breadth. He deeply penetrates the original and evolving understandings of biopolitics to articulate an innovative extension of the possibilities built into that modern phenomenon. Vatter also composes his argument via the thought of an impressive, diverse array of Western political philosophers. In doing so, he both extends our current understanding of biopolitics and offers intriguing insights into the thought of Aristotle, Hegel, Marx, Hannah Arendt, and many, many more. Ultimately, he constructs a vision of biopolitics that is both enslaving and liberating, a biopolitics that controls and manages human life but also provides an avenue to freedom, which is both republican and cosmopolitan.

For the uninitiated, biopolitics refers to a phenomenon in modern society in which political power moves beyond the traditional juridical role of establishing limits and punishments to actively managing humanity—both the behavior of individuals and populations. This transformation and expansion of political power that Michel Foucault first identified and discerned as beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, represents, according to Vatter, a “shift from politics to police … marked by the invention of an entirely new set of ‘political sciences,’ which today form the core of our social sciences” (p. 2). In biopolitics, punishment becomes management and the statistician replaces the sword. In modernity, pervasive and compelling normativity supersedes the boundaries of the legal. Thus, Foucault points to the totalizing impact of biopolitics with ominous terms in which the juxtaposition of capitalist imperatives and rational liberal ideology combine to manage every aspect, political and civil, of human life. The possibility of freedom and spontaneity is subsumed by the diffuse but all-encompassing forces of biopolitics in which, as Foucault described in his 1978–79 lectures, The Birth of Biopolitics (2004): “An omnipresent government, a government which nothing escapes, a government which conforms to the rules of right, and a government which nonetheless respects the specificity of the economy, will be a government that manages civil society, the nation, society, the social” (p. 296). Power and knowledge come together in biopolitics to form a stifling network of normalizing techniques of human management.

Nevertheless, Vatter finds an affirmative edge in Foucault’s biopolitics. For Vatter, as for thinkers Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, and Roberto Esposito, biopolitical power not only totalizes coercion and squashes freedom; it also holds the potential for resistance, freedom, and spontaneity. But unlike other proponents of an affirmative biopolitics, Vatter denies that the relationship between life and law in an affirmative biopolitics is necessarily antinomical “as if the nondomination of life … must entail the exclusion of law” (p. 4). Tracing “scant” (p. 5) but significant evidence in Foucault’s writings, Vatter perceives revolutionary republicanism as a potentiality in biopolitics in which the normative power of biopolitics becomes the basis of the rule of law and is “reappropriated by peoples organized in the political form of communes” (p. 4).

So, Vatter’s affirmative biopolitics is “commune-ist,” historically grounded in material reality which, at least in potentiality, connects power to politics and law in a life-affirming power-knowledge dynamic. In this way, the author’s understanding of biopolitics is both negative and affirmative, and in my reading, appropriately echoes the other many paradoxes found in Foucault’s work, paradoxes which reverberate from one of Foucault’s central insights: Human beings are created through truth regimes (episteme), which they themselves create. In Foucault’s words (The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 63), “The new governmental reason needs freedom; therefore, the new art of government consumes freedom. It consumes freedom, which means it must produce it. It must produce it, it must organize it.” Vatter shifts our attention from the consumption of freedom in biopolitics to the possibilities borne in the production of freedom, especially when one examines biopolitics in light of the “surplus of life” revealed in a reading of Marx through a biopolitical lens.

This surplus of life, in Vatter’s view, explains how biological life can be both the target of control and the site of resistance (see p. 141). The central concept of natality, which he adopts from Arendt, brings together the biological, material, historical reality of human life with the potentiality of human life, the possibilities of subjectedness, of freedom. For Vatter, the act of being born, natality, is the defining moment, which confronts and integrates the material, historical power dominating life with the potentiality of individual life and the possibility of spontaneity. The fact of being born reveals our “creatureliness,” linking our lives as created and creators. Thus, natality lays the conceptual groundwork for an affirmative biopolitics that recognizes the omnipresent power of modern life and works within it to reach for collective, commune-ist freedom.

I wonder, however, why not consider this defining moment (i.e., natality) from another perspective? A consideration of the defining moment as the act of giving birth (as opposed to the act of being born) might reveal a dimension of biopolitics hitherto unexplored. After all, the act of giving birth is active in a way that being born is not, perhaps highlighting the creative, life-affirming potentiality in biopolitics. In addition, shifting to a conceptual foundation for affirmative biopolitics in the act of giving birth may offer insight into the varied permutations of power as realized by different people differently situated in terms of this omnipresent power. Biopolitical power is omnipresent; it is also diffuse, varied, and specific. The act of giving birth may better capture the different standpoints embedded in the power dynamics of biopolitics.

Vatter develops his thesis through an exegesis of the limits and possibilities of ideas elaborated by the greatest of Western political philosophers. In four substantial and dense parts, he organizes chapters focused on the relationship between biopolitics and the economy, the family, rights, and (a unique understanding of) eternal life. In each part, he offers extended analyses of numerous thinkers. These four parts culminate in Vatter’s articulation of a materialist notion of eternal life tied to human-species life, the life of the mind and the life of the body. This approach, whereby Vatter develops his thesis though extended examinations of other thinkers, is one of the book’s strengths and also a source of one of its challenges. By doing this, he sheds new light on the many thinkers examined, demonstrating their connections to a coherent vision of an affirmative biopolitics. This approach also detracts from his message. Vatter conveys a complicated, even paradoxical, vision that ties together many disparate ideas and vocabularies. This may prove challenging for any reader not already versed in the postmodern conception of biopolitics.

In sum, in The Republic of the Living, Vatter engages questions about biopolitics that are among the most perplexing and important facing persons and societies in the twenty-first century. He does so in an innovative, challenging manner that advances our current understanding of the possibilities inherent to biopolitics and that is sure to be of interest to scholars of biopolitics.