Vol. 3 No. 2 (2024)
Biopolitics

Articles

The untamed ontology

Published 2024-12-27 — Updated on 2024-12-28

  • Davide Tarizzo
    • ,
  • Ul'yana Putilina

Davide Tarizzo
University of Salerno image/svg+xml

Ul'yana Putilina
Ca' Foscari University of Venice image/svg+xml

Abstract

According to Michel Foucault, the emergence of a new science of life, biology, was one of the axes of the scientific revolution. Before moving in the 1970s to analyse biopower and biopolitics as central categories of modernity, in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault wrote about life in terms of the «secret force» that underlies modern biology and can be seen as its epistemological a priori. The invention of modernity and the modern notion of life, Michel Foucault emphasises, occur simultaneously — within the same ontological framework, which he calls the «untamed ontology». What are the main features of this ontology? How does it affect our conception of «life»? How does it relate to the biopolitical turn? According to Davide Tarizzo, in order to answer these questions, we must first ask ourselves whether our conception of «life» does not contain metaphysical assumptions that are still partially hidden under our scientific and political claims. The author proposes to extend the scope of an untamed ontology and to connect the semantics of autonomous will and the semantics of autonomous life through the claim that it is autonomy that constitutes the metaphysical threshold of modernity.

The translation is based on the edition: Tarizzo D. La vita, un'invenzione recente / D. Tarizzo. – Bari: Editori Laterza, 2010. – 236 p. – ISBN 9788842092100. Edited by Pavel Odintsov. Published with the kind permission of the author.

Keywords

modernity, life, Foucault, untamed ontology, biopolitics

PDF (Russian)

Author Biography

Davide Tarizzo

Associate Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Salerno; Fisciano (SA), Italy.

Ul'yana Putilina

Master's student at the University of Ca' Foscari; Venice, Italy.

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