Life Without Condition

One of the more striking features of the ascendance of biopolitics as an analytic resource has been the frequency with which “life” has been grafted to the pronoun “itself.” Whether posed as the essential target of power or, alternatively, as the primary terrain of resistance to that power, life has undeniably achieved a certain critical autonomy as a theoretical subject and a referential sign within contemporary cultural and political thought. Much has been made of this renewed interest in life itself. On some accounts, it marks a veritable break with those problematics of language and discursivity that, as the story goes, preoccupied cultural criticism throughout the twentieth century. For others it is the violent strictures of modern humanism that might finally be dislodged by this resurgence, which promises to release life from the grasp of all anthropologisms both dominant and residual. Approached in terms of the trope of the “itself,” however, the current fascination with life may appear as less a rupture than as the reprise of a metaphysics of the proper that has long accompanied the concept and the question of life.1 From this angle, what Sylvia Wynter (2006, 117) has consistently diagnosed as the “biocentric descriptive statement” governing our modernity would now also seem a particularly apt description for some of the most prominent critical protocols that govern the theoretical humanities as well. Given that this ubiquitous collocation “life itself” now routinely appears under the auspices of the discourse of biopolitics, it is perhaps