‘Survival’ as a Biopolitical Concept

The article presents an analysis of the concept of ‘survival’ through the work of Western European philosophers in the fi eld of biopolitics. The goal of the article is threefold: analyzing the idea of ‘survival’ as a concept rooted in the biopolitical fi eld of Western European philosophy of the second part of the 20th — beginning of the 21th century; presenting diff erent directions in the process of conceptualization of the notion; and analyzing the transformation of the concept over the mentioned period. Methodologically, the article combines the historical and the comparative approaches. The research relies as well on a conceptual analysis, helping to defi ne biopolitics as a fi eld of philosophical discourse and to clarify such interconnected notions as “survivor”, “regime of survival” and “global war”. The analysis demonstrates that ‘survival’ is an important notion for the 20th and the 21st centuries Western European philosophers. Moreover, the article shows how the concept of ‘survival’ was incorporated into the biopolitical fi eld mostly by Michel Foucault. The notion of ‘survival’, which characterizes the life within the state of exception in the work of Georgio Agamben, is then transformed into the idea of the ‘survivor’ (based on the example of Elias Canetti’s works) and consequently into the idea of ‘regime of survival’ in conditions of global war, in the works of some of the early 20th century thinkers.

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