Alasania Kira Yurievna

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.

The article analyzes “discourse” as one of the key notions founding the formation of biopolitical concepts represented in M. Foucault’s and S. Žižek’s works. The main purposes of the article are determining the features of the discourse as a political and philosophical notion rooted as such because of Foucault’s research; grounding the point, according to which the conceptualization of the “biopolitics” notion is tightly linked to the development of the “discourse” notion; comparing the approaches to defining biopolitics represented in M. Foucault’s and S. Žižek’s works. The methods of the present research include historic and comparative approaches. A conceptual analysis plays an important role as well. This method helps not just in explaining the conceptions of the discourse and biopolitics, but demonstrate their natural connection in this research problematics. The article concludes that discursive nature of biopolitics as a concept developing from the second part of the XX century in the western political thought is absolutely evident. On the one hand, the discourse is a sphere of biopolitical practices, on the other hand, it is a source of their formations. This thesis is illustrated by comparing the biopolitical concepts of M. Foucault and S. Žižek. Nevertheless, being rather similar to each other, the approaches represented in the discussed authors’ works are different in terms of terminology used.