Abstract

In this paper I argue that Vatter’s proposed solution to the problem of thanatopolitics in the development of a concept of eternal life is inadequate. In the first section I situate Vatter’s project, sketching out Foucault’s concept of biopolitics and marking Vatter’s specific difference from others working to articulate an affirmative biopolitics in contemporary discussions. In the second section I argue, following Foucault and Mbembe, that the possibility of a thanatopolitics or necropolitics that institutes regimes of mass death by racist fragmentations of the population is a possibility intrinsic to biopolitics as such. In the third section I reconstruct Vatter’s proposal, according to which the thanatopolitical inversion can be blocked by developing an atheistic and philosophical concept of eternal life. I argue that this is inadequate for three reasons: first, the specifically contemplative character of the life Vatter proposes as eternal seems to valorize only a particular form of life; second, the transfinite character of living as such which is valorized in this conception seems to repeat, rather than repudiate, the logic of thanatopolitics; third, this concept of life as eternal seems not to be able to account for the reality of extinction.