Underwriting Security

Abstract This article enframes 'risk' as a biopolitical security technology. It explains how biopolitics of security take life as their referent object of security; how the grid of intelligibility for biopolitics is economic; and how, in the second half of the 20th century, life also came to be understood as emergent being. Contingency is constitutive especially of the life of emergent being, and so the article argues that a biopolitics of security that seeks 'to make life live' cannot secure life against contingency but must secure life through governmental technologies of contingency. Risk is one of these technologies. The article also explains how risk has come to pervade the biopolitics of security of the 21st century, and how, through the way in which it is traded on the capital markets, it has begun to acquire the properties of money. The article closes by describing how the biopolitics of security differ from traditional prophylactic accounts of security, and how these biopolitics of security exceed the liberal political thinking that rationalizes and legitimates them.