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This essay responds to German theorist Thomas Lemke's call for a conversation between two distinct lines of reception of Foucault's concept of biopolitics. The first line is comprised of sweeping historical perspectives on biopolitics, such as those of Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri, and the second is comprised of the more temporally focused perspectives of theorists such as Paul Rabinow, Nikolas Rose, and Catherine Waldby, whose biopolitical analyses concentrate on recent biotechnologies such as genetic techniques and the biobanking of human tissues. This essay develops this conversation by bringing the two lines to bear on the neoliberal "bioeconomy" that has developed over the past three decades and uses the perspective of Italian theorist Roberto Esposito to represent the first line. Esposito's unique combination of Foucauldian biopolitics and the Maussean gift tradition provides a critical perspective that engages and challenges the neoliberal inclination of many theorists from the second line.

This article develops the affirmative biopolitics that Roberto Esposito intimates in his trilogy – Communitas, Immunitas and Bíos. The key to this affirmative biopolitics lies in the relationship between the munus, a form of gift that is the root of communitas and immunitas, and the gift discourse that developed throughout the 20th century. The article expands upon Esposito's interpretation of four theoretical sources that are crucial to his biopolitical perspective: Mauss and the gift-exchange tradition; Hobbes's social contract theory, which Esposito presents as the anti-gift that founded modernity's thanatopolitical 'immunization paradigm'; Bataille's dangerous concept of sacrifice, which gestures toward an affirmative biopolitical community; and, finally, Jean-Luc Nancy's essay, L'Intrus, which reflects on the near-decade Nancy lived as the recipient of the gift of a transplanted heart. This discussion of Mauss, Hobbes and Bataille is used to further develop Esposito's interpretation of L'Intrus in a manner that supports his conception of an affirmative biopolitics 'of, not over, life'.

This essay develops a remark Foucault made in passing at the end of the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1976), linking the emergence of bio-power and the nineteenth-century sociological fascination with suicide. Foucault traced the origins of bio-power in his Collège de France courses of 1977—1978 and 1978—1979, but never returned to the relationship between the sociological appropriation of suicide and this uniquely modern form of power. Using the recently published lectures from these courses, this essay interprets two nineteenth-century sociological treatises on suicide as historical examples of the development of 'governmentality.' The first text is a commentary on suicide from the Mémoires (1838) of Parisian police administrator Jacques Peuchet, which the young Marx translated and published in 1846. This proto-sociological text is interpreted as an early manifestation of governmentality, while the second text, Durkheim's Le Suicide (1897), is presented as a classic of sociology and governmental rationality. Aside from the light it sheds on the historical relationship between sociology, governmentality, and suicide, this essay also illuminates some often-overlooked implications of the current 'right to die' movement.