Affirming the Human? The Question of Biopolitics

Abstract

This article stages a rhetorical encounter between Heidegger and Foucault, positing the topos of care to critique the recent turn to “affirmative” biopolitics. For both thinkers, “the question of the human” redounds upon a subject whose being is constituted tropologically, yet “affirmative” biopoliticians misunderstand the rhetoricity of the human question and are caught within a neoliberal ethic. Reading Heidegger’s use of a first-century CE fable in Being of Time alongside Foucault’s final lectures on the fabled death of Socrates and the care of the self, this article explores their rhetorical strategies of self-constitution as a relation of chresis and care.