Book Review: T. Lemke, Biopolitics, transl. by T. Dominiak, Warsaw: Editions Sic!, 2010, pp. 152

A modern development of biological sciences, used by biomedicine with the help of biotechnology, has contributed largely to an artificial interference in natural life processes. Biotechnologies allow people a bigger and bigger control of their own nature, population and biosphere. Due to this fact, the character of traditional authority changes radically. In this context a notion of biopolitics has a growing popularity. The history and also the diversity of problems discussed in this field is approached by the synthetic work of Thomas Lemke entitled Biopolitics. The author does a historical reconstruction of this concept, used for the first time by Rudolf Kjellén in 1920. He dedicates a lot of time to the theme of antinaturalistic and antipolicistic interpretation of biopolitics, started in the seventies of the 20th century by Michel Foucault, and continued in the works of Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.