From the Classical to the Biopolitical: Tracing the Ancient Roots of Contemporary Political Discourse

我的论文探讨了20世纪的大陆哲学如何对西方政治思想的经典基础进行了根本性的质疑。它将证明，通过对古代雅典民主和罗马法的新解释，与“起源”概念的对抗导致了对政治及其边界的重新考虑。这将进一步表明，这些20世纪经典文本的重读对于理解20世纪末和21世纪初欧洲生物政治学的出现至关重要。生物政治学关注生活主体和政治主体之间的交叉，并提供了新的理论框架，通过这些框架可以解构主权和主体性的概念。因此，米歇尔·福柯、乔治·阿甘本、罗伯托·埃斯波西托等生物政治哲学家产生了应对当代危机的新的批判性方法；他们对福柯开创的对当代主权的分析表明，政府权力越来越依赖于控制和排斥的逻辑，这使其主体的生物本质政治化。通过重新考虑个人的地位和政治空间的限制，生物政治学已经并将继续允许人们对权力如何在当代社会表现出新的理解。随着许多人继续在生物政治领域取得进展，我的项目打算在与古典古代及其一些学生的对话中剖析这些方法论的出现。

My thesis explores how continental philosophy in the 20th century saw a fundamental interrogation of the classical foundations of Western political thought. It will demonstrate that confrontations with the idea of 'origin', through new interpretations of ancient Athenian democracy and Roman law, have led to a reconsideration of politics and its boundaries. It will further suggest that these 20th century re-readings of classical texts are vital to understanding the emergence of biopolitics in Europe in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Biopolitics is concerned with the intersections between the lived and political body, and has made available new theoretical frameworks through which to deconstruct notions of sovereignty and subjectivity. Biopolitical philosophers - Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito - have thus generated new critical approaches to contemporary crises; their analyses of contemporary sovereignty, initiated by Foucault, have shown how government power increasingly rests on a logic of control and exclusion, which politicises the very biological nature of its subjects. Biopolitics has, and continues to, allow new understandings of how authority manifest in contemporary society by reconsidering the position of the individual and the limits of political space. As many continue to progress the field of biopolitics, my projects intends to dissect the emergence of these methodologies in dialogue with classical antiquity and some of its students.