Biopower and the politics of contingency

Abstract

Chapter 3 offers a biopolitical translation of Claude Lefort’s idea of the democratic regime as characterized by ontological contingency and epistemic indeterminacy. Lefort’s powerful image of the void at the heart of democracy is in the context of biopolitics specified in terms of the absence of any proper form of life and the affirmation of radical pluralism of contingent ways of living. This contingency is, moreover, not itself contingent but is a necessary consequence of the disarticulation of truth, power and ethics in the democratic regime. From this necessary contingency Prozorov infers the principles of freedom, equality and community that are universal conditions of legitimacy for all forms of life in a democracy.