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It is important to consider how, for Žižek, we enter the [[domain ]] of [[politics ]] only by acknowledging that – to use Jacques Lacan’s well-known [[formula ]] – “the big [[Other ]] does not exist”. Th e [[space ]] of politics, in other [[words]], is grounded in a substantial gap whose ''[[political]]'' function is to disrupt, indeed tear apart, the [[illusory ]] positivity of any [[social ]] [[order]]. One does not [[understand ]] Žižek’s politics if one misses the [[dialectical ]] [[paradox ]] at its heart, whereby politics itself is conceived as [[split ]] between its [[ontic ]] domain, constitutive of the social, and the [[ontological ]] [[lack ]] that sustains it. Crucial for Žižek’s [[leftist ]] engagement is to hold on to this ''[[externality ]] of politics to itself'', which he derives from both [[Hegelian ]] dialectics and [[Lacanian ]] [[psychoanalysis]]. The [[structure ]] of the Žižekian [[concept ]] of politics is therefore that of a [[parallax]]: if from one angle it appears concerned with the conflicts and compromises that make up our social arena, a small perspectival shift reveals it as an abyssal gap undermining the very framework of the social. More specifically, a political [[event ]] “emerges ''ex nihilo'' … it attaches itself precisely to the [[Void ]] of every [[situation]], to its inherent [[inconsistency ]] and/or excess” (''TS'': 130). The ground suddenly opens up under our feet, and only then do we truly [[experience ]] what politics is.

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 liberaltoday’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).

What is striking [[about ]] Žižek’s point is its unmistakable Agambenian flavour. Arguably, the biopolitical figure that is closer to Žižek’s [[theory ]] is Agamben’s homo sacer – the [[individual ]] stripped of their rights and reduced to “bare life” – in so far as it embodies Žižek’s central theme of “substanceless subjectivity” (or, what is the same [[thing]], Lacan’s notion of the [[barred ]] [[subject]], emptied of all pathological [[content]]). The radicality of Agamben’s notion of ''[[homo sacer]]'', Žižek contends, [[needs ]] to be defended from “liberal gentrifications”, since one should draw the conclusion that, ultimately, we are all ''homines sacri'' (DR: 100–102). In political [[terms]], Žižek can only agree with Agamben that the law by definition implies [[exclusion]]: ''bìos'' (political life) produces ''zoé'' ([[bare life]]). This [[dialectic ]] of exclusion is wholly subscribed to by Žižek. In fact, it is embedded in his understanding of the Hegelian dialectic [[understood ]] as secreting, and hinging on, a “non-digestible” (excluded) [[remainder]], as well as in the Lacanian dichotomy between the [[Symbolic ]] and the [[Real]].

More generally, Žižek endorses Agamben’s insight into the [[necessity ]] of a disjunctive gesture rather than a synthetic one (''PV'': 299). In fact, whenever Agamben attempts to move beyond the primacy of the negative by embracing a Benjaminian-type messianism, Žižek raises questions. When Agamben adumbrates the possibility of untying the [[knot ]] of Law and [[violence ]] (or Law and exclusion) Žižek comments that this [[utopian ]] messianic scenario has already been co-opted by capitalist [[ideology]], in the [[form ]] of either a globalized reflexivity unable to generate [[change]], or explosions of [[psychotic ]] violence at the level of everyday [[reality ]] (''PV'': 303). More generally, and also in relation to Hardt and Negri’s politics, Žižek is critical of biopolitics’ attempts to posit the sustainability of the modality of “subtracted subjectivity” vis-à-vis the various forms of biopower. Žižek finds this [[belief ]] in the [[autonomy ]] of subtraction both politically naive and theoretically unsound. What biopolitical thought tends to miss is that the subtractive contraction from the One of Law and its exceptions cannot seamlessly engender a new singularized “we”, a new disalienated communitarian [[identity ]] not sustained by a [[master-signifier]]. Žižek therefore holds on to the proper paradox of [[Lacanian psychoanalysis]], which can be summarized as follows: although the [[big Other ]] does not [[exist]], it needs to be presupposed if there is to be a minimum of social interaction, of [[community]]. The attempts to think biopolitics beyond the gesture of negative contraction tend to ignore the necessity of [[alienation ]] in [[the big Other]]. This scepticism prefigures Žižek’s deeper concern with biopolitics’ inability to place capitalist exploitation at the heart of its theoretical paradigm.

Despite his [[endorsement ]] of Agamben’s focus on exclusion, Žižek is adamant that biopolitics as such, including Foucault’s and Agamben’s versions, remains unsatisfactory as a [[critical theory ]] of [[society]], for it misses the crucial Marxist accent on [[economic ]] exploitation. He makes this point explicitly in ''[[Less Than Nothing]]'', when he states (quoting also from Fredric [[Jameson]]):<blockquote>The theories of Foucault and Agamben are insufficient: all their detailed elaborations of the regulatory power mechanisms of domination, all the wealth of notions such as the excluded, bare life, ''[[homo sacer]]'', etc., must be grounded in (or mediated by) the centrality of exploitation; without this reference to the economic, the fight against domination remains “an essentially [[moral ]] and [[ethical ]] one, which leads to punctual revolts and [[acts ]] of [[resistance ]] rather than to the transformation of the [[mode of production ]] as such” – the positive program of such “ideologies “[[ideologies]] of power” is generally one of some type of “direct” [[democracy]]. The outcome of the emphasis on domination is a democratic program, while the outcome of the emphasis on exploitation is a [[communist ]] program … What this [biopolitical] notion of domination fails to [[register ]] is that only in capitalism is exploitation naturalized, inscribed into the functioning of the [[economy]]. (PV: 1003–1004)</blockquote>Žižek therefore laments the politically insipid and defeatist attitude of biopolitical thought, inasmuch as it is concerned with the generic notion of “sovereign power” rather than “capitalist power”.

As anticipated, Žižek agrees with the basic coordinates of the biopolitical [[discourse ]] and its critique of the [[logic ]] of domination. Today’s [[ideological ]] constellation, for him, is definitely biopolitical. We are told that the [[goal ]] of our lives must be wellbeing, with as few shocks as possible, to the extent that we treat ourselves as [[objects ]] of biopolitical regulation, as the [[affirmation ]] of the new [[narcissistic ]] subject bent on self-realization confirms. Crucially, however, Žižek claims that “this Janus-faced biopolitical logic of domination is itself only one of the two aspects of the [[University ]] discourse as the hegemonic discourse of modernity”. If, as Žižek suggests, biopolitics coincides with what [[Lacan ]] named the [[discourse of the University]], namely “the direct rule of experts legitimized by their knowledge”, which undermines the [[discourse of the Master]], at the same [[time ]] Lacan’s formula captures the rule of capital. One needs therefore to distinguish between the logic of domination exposed by biopolitics as “bureaucratic “totalitarianism”, as the rule of [[technology]], of instrumental [[reason]], of biopolitics, as the “administered world”, and the capitalist [[matrix ]] characterized by the incessant production and re-appropriation of that [[excess ]] called [[surplus ]] [[value]]. These two aspects are “ultimately incompatible”, for our biopolitical horizon cannot encompass the capitalist matrix: “We should not succumb to the temptation of reducing capitalism to a mere form of [[appearance ]] of the more fundamental ontological attitude of technological domination” (''PV'': 297–8). Th is caution is, indeed, the key to grasping Žižek’s critique of the [[limit ]] of the biopolitical discourse.

From a purely political perspective, this limit can be described, Žižek tells us, as the inability to politicize the growing masses of excluded [[subjects ]] as the locus of [[universality]]. Th is is a theme he often presents through the old Leninist topos of the “[[dictatorship of the proletariat]]” (where “proletariat” is used as a generic [[name ]] for the “out-of-joint” [[class]], which today is actually embodied by the [[Lumpenproletariat|''lumpenproletariat'']]) as the only way to break with the [[hegemony ]] of the biopolitical (''LC'': 413–19), in so far as the latter coincides with the political horizon ''tout court'', whether as a critical or affirmative paradigm:<blockquote>Bio-politics includes the brutal forms of regimentation that exist in our [[world ]] as well as the [[desire ]] to prevent human [[suffering]]. The old leftist paradigms of the communist and social democratic [[welfare ]] states are lost … A more radical emancipatory leftist way of [[thinking ]] and acting needs to be reinvented. And this is what one should struggle for today. (Eikmeyer 2007)</blockquote>As we have seen, this stance is consistent with Žižek’s theory (derived both from [[Hegel ]] and Lacan), in so far as it posits the “ontological primacy of the remainder” (substanceless [[subjectivity]], [[self-relating ]] negativity, etc.) ''qua'' empty place of the inscription of a given [[symbolic order ]] of [[meaning]].