Abstract

The main purpose of this essay is to do a critical history, in the Foucauldian sense, of contemporary hegemony of resilience as a new risk management technology. My hypothesis is that resilience is a new way of articulating biopolitics with thanatopolitics or sovereign power. If for Roberto Esposito the paradigm of immunization explained this deadly linkage, resilience refers to a different biopolitical matrix, one that can no longer be understood in Esposito’s terms. What is at stake in the paradigm of immunization is the protection of bio-bodies, while resilience is a strategy for protecting and enhancing life itself. This displacement, from protecting bodies to protecting life, is related to resilience’s biopolitical matrix, which mediates between the molecular fiction of life, and an ecological eschatology. The essay concludes, in the fist place, that the biopolitical matrix of resilience implies a naturalization and a depoliticization of precarious forms of lives—which must learn not to resist but to adapt to precarity. And, secondly, this essay concludes that, in the context of resilience, the sovereign's old right to kill is no longer invoked in the name of epistemic uncertainty (fear of the unpredictability of the future) but of ontological uncertainty: fear to the annihilation of the conditions of possibility for the existence of certain life forms.