Agamben, Badiou and Affirmative Biopolitics

This Chapter argues that the thought of Badiou and Agamben is much closer than most people, including themselves, recognise. Prozorov shows that there is a striking similarity between Badiou’s concept of the body of truth and Agamben’s notion of the form-of-life and that, despite their manifold differences, the two thinkers are united by the attempt to rethink politics on the basis of the brute facticity of being. The chapter concludes by arguing that, while Badiou has shown little interest in the problematic of biopolitics, his militant ‘politics of truth’ is nonetheless a version of the ‘affirmative biopolitics’ that Agamben has painstakingly developed.