Biopolityka: żądanie Antygony

ENFor millenia man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence. Michel Foucault adds to this definition a new dimension: according to him modem man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question. Biological life occurs in the centre of political manipulations and calculations. and for this reason politics turns into biopolitics: the realm of bare life - which is originally situated at the margins of the political order - gradually begins to coincide with the political realm. This shift in defining the political is. according to Giorgio Agamben, the fundamental event of modernisation: contrary to our modenr habit of representing the political realm in terms of human rights, free will, and social contracts, from the point of view of biopolitics only bare life is authentically political. Why it is wotrh of interpreting the figure og Antogone in the context of biopolitics? Judith Butler interprets Antigone’s claim as the trace of an alternate legality that haunts the conscious, public sphere as its scandalous future. Antigone formulates her claim on behalf of all those who are without a full and definite socio- ontological status. Antigone represents the position, which is caught up in the slide of social, gender, and political indentifications. This slide of indentifications turns our attension to recent political context: Agamben makes a statement thai if today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, it is perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri. Keywords: biopolitics, sovereign power, bare life, homo sacer, indentification.