Who Has a Right to Biopolis? Agamben, Negri and the Dispute on Metropolis.

Abstract

In a lecture dedicated to “the urban question”,
Giorgio Agamben characterized modern spatial transfor-
mations in terms of moving from the city, as a traditional
form of spatial organization, to the metropolis. =is process
coincides, according to the Italian philosopher, with the
birth of modern biopolitics, specialized in producing and
managing the bare life. Agamben’s metropolis is a space of
indistinction, another materialization (beside camp) of state
of exception, an area of delocalizing localization, associated
by representatives of the urban studies with a neoliberal
city of zero tolerance. Negative analysis of (urban) biopo-
litics by Agamben has its reverse side in form of metropo-
lis theory formulated by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt.
A similar starting point – a description of the metropolis
exposed to the mechanisms of biopower, an assumption of
its boundlessness and heterotopic character, an abolishment
of dixerence between private and public space - leads them
to the contrary, armative, due to the dixerent approach
of biopolitics, conclusions. According to Negri, the metro-
polis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial
working class. Multitude usually takes place in urban areas,
aiming at their democratic transformation. It $lls the empty
space after the working class - urban actor privileged by
Henri Lefebvre - and takes over the right to the city, carried
out in acts of its constant reproduction. =e article aims at
highlighting points of intersection and fundamental dixe-
rences presented in both visions of biopolis. It argues that
biopolitical resistance, linked to the cultural productivity
of urban subject, involves the creation of place in Agam-
benian non-place of sovereign power.