Modernity is the era of bio-power, the age of the political control over
life. The most provocative contribution of Foucault's and Deleuze's
thought to political philosophy is the attempt to articulate a power of life
that evades the power over life. Insofar as bio-power involves the
political organization of life and, therefore, a conceptualization of life as
a teleological or end-oriented process, i.e. as an organism, Foucault and
Deleuze can be said to espouse a non-organismic vitalism: an
understanding of life that is no longer centered on the organism or on
organization as the source of life. But given that the living organism has
provided the metaphorical template for almost all normative theories of
the political in modernit
