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Ultimately, from Žižek’s Hegelo-Lacanian point of view, the space of the political is primarily the “zero-level of politics, a pre-political ‘transcendental’ condition of the possibility of politics, a gap which opens up the space for the [[political act]] to intervene in, a gap which is saturated by the political effort to impose a new order” (''LN'': 963). Th ere is no politics without the [[awareness]] that the political [[struggle]] takes [[place]] against the backdrop of its own [[self]]-relating negativity, which constitutes its pulsating heart. The substance of politics is a paradoxical “lack to itself”, the emptiness of the place where it erects its own [[meanings]].
Only after grasping Žižek’s radical take on politics can we evaluate his critical [[understanding]] of biopolitics. In a [[sense]], the task in hand involves answering a straightforward question: can biopolitics [[think]] ([[dialectically]]) the substantial void that qualifies Žižek’s [[notion]] of politics? Before tackling this question, let us say that Žižek agrees with Michel Foucault’s well-known definition of biopolitics as the modern exercise of [[power]] through the administration of [[human]] [[life]], which marked a major historical shift from the sovereign’s [[Absolute Power|absolute power ]] over the life and [[death]] of his subordinates. Indeed, Žižek often labels biopolitics “post-politics” in order to describe the anodyne vacuity of today’s [[liberal]]-democratic consensus. What “post-political biopolitics” is [[responsible]] for is precisely the bypassing of the political. If this is Žižek’s basic stance, there are further twists in his [[discussion]] of biopolitics. Th e best way to summarize [[them]] involves making a [[distinction]] between two contemporary approaches to biopolitics. If with [[Foucault]] there remained a fundamental ambiguity with [[regard]] to its use, in contemporary [[philosophy]] we can distinguish between a [[negative]] and a positive application of the term. Negative biopolitics emphasizes the deleterious effects of biopower and is best represented by the [[figure]] of Giorgio [[Agamben]]. Positive biopolitics embraces the politically progressive potential of our biopolitical horizon and is championed by thinkers like [[Michael Hardt]] and [[Antonio Negri]]. These different approaches embody, no [[doubt]], two extreme poles in the [[complex]] [[universe]] of biopolitical [[thought]]. Yet, precisely as ''[[theoretical]]'' positions, they are the most [[representative]] of the entire field, and as such are often referred to by Žižek.
Considering that, as we have seen, Žižek’s thought is sustained by the conviction that negativity, in its dialectical [[role]], retains ontological primacy over any affirmative order of [[being]], it follows that positive biopolitics is looked at rather unsympathetically by him, to the extent that he rejects the theoretical and political edifice on which Hardt and Negri articulate their [[postmodern]] [[Marxist]] critique of [[capitalism]] by singing the praises of immaterial or cognitive labour as, supposedly, already delivered from [[capitalist]] exploitative dynamics. Žižek discards the argument that, in today’s capitalism, the hegemonic role of ''immaterial'' over [[material]] labour produces new forms of life, a biopolitical [[multitude]] of [[intellectual]], [[affective]] and ultimately social relations that, in [[principle]], already constitute the basis for the exercise of an “absolute democracy” beyond [[capital]]. He argues that by celebrating the disruptive potential of [[global]] capitalism, Hardt and Negri [[repeat]] the error made by [[Marx]] (and many of his followers), who believed that the productive spiral of capitalism needed only to be corrected via the elimination of profit for free and [[full]] productivity ([[communism]]) to be unleashed (this is Žižek’s well-rehearsed theme of “communism as a capitalist fantasy”; see ''OWB'': 19). Interestingly, to this biopolitical [[faith]] in the intrinsically liberating quality of cognitive labour (adapted from Marx’s much-celebrated “general intellect” fragment in the Grundrisse), Žižek opposes today’s figure of the unemployed as “pure proletarian”: “the substantial determination of an unemployed person remains that of a worker, but he or she is prevented from either actualizing or renouncing it, so he or she remains suspended in the potentiality of a worker who cannot work” (''RG'': 291).
