Rousseau’s aporia

Chapter 1 revisits Rousseau’s account of the inherently problematic relation between sovereignty and government and addresses the interpretations of this account in contemporary critiques of biopolitics in the work of Badiou, Agamben and Esposito. Prozorov demonstrates that the dualism established by Rousseau between universalist popular sovereignty and particularist acts of government remains at work in contemporary critical literature on biopolitics. As an inherently particularistic mode of government, biopolitics is held to be necessarily opposed to popular sovereignty expressed in general will and can therefore only contaminate or pervert democracy.