Public and Private in Biopolitical Times. Toward a Radically Immanent Perspective

Today, almost everything public has become of less value, meaning, and importance than what is private. This tendency, which finds its roots in political and economical neo-liberalism, draws its inspiration in a far earlier dualistic and reductionist orientation of political thought, and engenders as its extreme and probably undesired consequence a general tendency towards disregarding the very idea of the common. Accordingly, notions such as the common good, common sense, and common world hardly emerge from both the agendas (and rhetoric) of politicians and media, as well as from people’s everyday concerns. The private is invading the realm of what was once public, as scholars like Zygmunt Bauman have pointed out. This have consequences not only on public institutions, but more essentially on individual freedom and possibilities. How to face this challenge? In order to properly deal with such a question, juridico-institutional approaches appear inadequate, especially after what Foucault depicted as the modern biopolitical turn. Only from a radically immanent perspective, can contemporary thought be able to face the double challenge of life and of the technological “material revolution”, which traditional humanism is almost unable even to define. Michel Foucault, Roberto Esposito as well as Michael Hardt-Antonio Negri on one hand and some Confucian texts and philosophers, mainly from China’s Song period (960-1279), on the other may help to broaden our perspective, avoiding exclusionism, and exploring the possibilities of inclusive paradigms of coexistence.