"LIFE ETHICS" AS A TERM OF THE "METADISCOURSE" OF PHILOSOPHY (M. FOUCAULT – G. AGAMBEN)
Abstract
The title theme of this text is philosophy. Accordingly, the following serves as his leitmotif and working perspective – to talk not about bioethics, but about philosophy. You can try to see this text as a fragment of some "meta-theory of philosophy". In the spirit in which M. Mamardashvili and А. Pyatigorsky talk about the "meta-theory of consciousness": to take certain creations within working philosophy ("philosophies") and see them as some immanent "surrounding" statement of philosophy. Not about the problems that appear in it, but about the status and sanction of the (after) action in which it occurs. More concretely and precisely, the plan is to (re)deduce from "bioethics" as a point of thinking some (in addition to others) potentiated perspective of understanding certain unique, non-overlapping and defining in relation to current thinking (but, at the same time - to current thinking) concepts implemented in modern philosophy. Moreover, the concepts and authors thematized here seem to encourage similar motivation and similar discourse.
In fact, these thinkers are not aimed at formulating a (bio)ethical – normative and imperative – discourse in the classical sense. For each of them, "bioethics" does not possess autonomy, does not produce autonomous products, does not have its own foundations. Instead, "bioethics" for them is a certain derivative and effect of the action of a singular conceptual philosophical vision and its cardinal assumptions. Finally, these thinkers conceptually closely perceive the sphere of the political. At the same time, politics - in different ways, but in each of the two - functions not as an objectively articulated sphere of "political things", but as a sphere of ontological symptomatology and ontological simulation of the entry - inside the world - of the order of grounds.
Accordingly, an important caveat is that we are not trying to give a retelling or interpretation of the concepts of the two selected authors (which, like all concepts of this level, have an open horizon of what can be seen (thought) against the background of the existing (presented) seen). This is obviously impossible in such a review. This is also impossible given the insufficient potential and internal resources of the author himself. But this is not very appropriate. We are trying to "feel" the framework in which the "metalanguage" of philosophy (in the sense of the word) is pronounced more or less disjointedly...
Downloads
References
Agamben, G. (1995). Homo sacer: Il potere sovrano e la nuda vita. Torino, Italy: Giulio Einaudi Editore.
Agamben, G. (1998). Quel che resta di Auschwitz: L’archivio e il testimone (Homo sacer III). Torino, Italy: Bollati Boringhieri.
Agamben, G. (2011). Altissima povertà: Regole monastiche e forma di vita (Homo sacer IV, 1). Vicenza, Italy: Neri Pozza.
Agamben, G. (2016). The use of bodies: Homo sacer IV, 2 (A. Kotsko, Trans.). Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
Bettelheim, B. (1960). The informed heart: Autonomy in a mass age. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Borges, J. L. (1944). Ficciones. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Sur.
Celan, P. (1986). Gesammelte Werke: Gedichte (Vol. 1). Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris, France: Gallimard.
Foucault, M. (1976). Histoire de la sexualité I: La volonté de savoir. Paris, France: Gallimard.
Foucault, M. (2004). Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France (1978–1979). Paris, France: Seuil; Gallimard.
Foucault, M. (2004). Sécurité, territoire, population: Cours au Collège de France (1977–1978). Paris, France: Seuil; Gallimard.
Habermas, J. (1985). Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Hu, J. (2025). The digitization of life: The biopolitics in the era of digital capitalism. The Journal of New Paradigm Research, 81(7), 508–526. https://doi.org/10.1080/02604027.2025.2563492
Lazzarato, M. (2021). Capital hates everyone: Fascism or revolution. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e).
Lazzarato, M. (2023). Guerra e moneta: Imperialismo del dollaro, neoliberalismo, rotture rivoluzionarie. Roma, Italy: DeriveApprodi.
Lazzarato, M. (2025). War and money: The imperialism of the dollar. London, United Kingdom: Verso.
Madarasz, N. (2013). Foucault and the question of life. Parrhesia, 18, 72–90.
Madarasz, N. (2014). Life, politics, and epistemology after Foucault. Angelaki, 19(3), 101–118.
Madarasz, N. (2015). Biopolitics as a problem of modernity. Continental Philosophy Review, 48(2), 215–232.
Madarasz, N. (2017). Biopolitics and medical epistemology. History of the Human Sciences, 30(4), 89–107.
Madarasz, N. (2019). Biopolitics between science and power. Foucault Studies, 26, 120–138.
Sloterdijk, P. (1999). Regeln für den Menschenpark: Ein Antwortschreiben zu Heideggers Brief über den Humanismus. Frankfurt am Main, Germany: Suhrkamp.
Zubarieva, O. (2020). Biovlada v prostori suchasnoho mista: Modusi reprezentatsii. Hrani, 23(10), 16–23.
Stehnii, O. (2021). Biopolitics during the COVID-19 pandemic: dilemmas of public safety and freedom. Sociology: theory, methods, marketing, 2, 181–196., 2, 181–196. https://doi.org/10.15407/sociology2021.02.181 (In Ukrainian).
Tymofieiev, O. V. (2020). An attempt to read Giorgio Agamben: aesthetics, politics, theology. Raleigh, NC: Lulu Press, Inc. (In Ukrainian).
Copyright (c) 2026 Ігор Мінаков

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:
- Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication of this work under the terms of a license Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
- Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.
- Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work.


3.gif)



