Badiou's Biopolitics: The Human Animal and the Body of Truth

Abstract

The paper addresses Alain Badiou's attempts to overcome the biopolitical tendency in contemporary Western societies by redefining politics as a ‘truth procedure’, transcending the mere existence of human beings and exposing them to the dimension of eternal truths. I argue that Badiou's account of the formation of the ‘body of truth’ fails to break with the biopolitical logic and instead corresponds to Agamben's definition of biopolitics in terms of the inclusive exclusion of bare life from the political order of ‘good life’. While Badiou's claims to overcome biopolitics are problematic, his politics of truth nonetheless exemplifies a genuine alternative to the ‘democratic-materialist’ biopolitics that he criticizes. Through a reading of Badiou's account of the generation of truths I demonstrate that the content of truths is neither arbitrary nor transcendent in relation to the bodies of human beings but rather affirms their ontological equality against every form of hierarchy or exclusion. Badiou's ‘body of truth’ is thus nothing other than the living bodies themselves, plus the truth of their equality. Insofar as in this figure ‘good life’ and ‘mere life’ become indistinct, Badiou's politics of truth accords with Agamben's idea of affirmative biopolitics of a life inseparable from its form.