One Life Only. Biological Resistance, Political Resistance

Abstract

This is a programmatic text aiming to explore an impossibility, an unthinkable concept. Contemporary philosophy is marked by the uncritical and undeconstructed preeminence of symbolic life over biological life. We propose a synthetic theory that transcends biopolitics and biopower, avoiding opposition between the biological and the symbolic. Instead, it seeks a concept of biological resistance intertwined with political resistance, emphasizing their complicity (in the form of alternation) with a clear purpose. A dialectical and complex conjunction aids in understanding the role of biology in political resistance and vice versa. This prompts the need to rethink biology's transgression of biopolitical normalization and instrumentalization. The issue is not merely the expansion of a problem related to disciplinary discourse or life sciences practices. The text proposes that the long-held distinction between symbolic and biological life in the human sciences is now untenable. It asserts a symbolic resistance inherent in biology, where life resists both its polymorphism and fixation. Recognizing that the symbolic represents the diverse games life plays with itself, without fragmentation, allows us to grasp the revolutionary potential of cloning, its techniques, and epigenetic mechanisms. Epigenetics, in particular, resists the political reduction of biology to a mere vehicle of power. Reducing these new spheres to biopolitical normalization overlooks a new perspective: an evolving exchange within life itself, exposing it to risks and new possibilities