Federico Testa, On the Politics of the Living: Foucault and Canguilhem on Life and Norms – Bloomsbury, December 2024

Book launch, University of Bristol 22 October 2025

You are warmly invited to a book launch and roundtable discussion with Dr. Federico Testa, UEA, On the Politics of the Living: Foucault and Canguilhem on Life and Norms. This event is free and does not require booking.

The event will begin with the author giving a short introductory presentation on the book’s argument and this will be followed by a discussion with a number of panellists and questions from the audience.

Paul Earlie (Senior Lecturer in French Thought, University of Bristol); Kathryn Body (Phd candidate, Philosophy, University of Bristol), Francesco Tava (Associate Professor of Philosophy, UWE), and TzuChien Tho (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Bristol).

Bringing the philosophies of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem into dialogue, Federico Testa examines the notions of life and norms underlying our modern experience of politics. 

Today’s global health crisis acts as a stark reminder that life is at the core of our political debates and dilemmas. We can no longer think of forms of political organization, citizenship and participation without considering the materiality and precarity of our own organic life. Ours is a politics of the living.

Within this context, this book examines Foucault’s work on the politicization of life and biopolitics through the lens of Canguilhem’s notion of norms. Testa extracts from Canguilhem’s philosophy the conceptual tools to re-interpret Foucault’s ideas on power, and reconceptualises normativity as a process of the creation of norms that provide tools for political and social analysis and for thinking resistance. In so doing, he uncovers new and important possibilities for biopolitical resistance. 

Demonstrating not only Canguilhem’s underexplored social and political concerns but also the intellectual osmosis between the two thinkers, On the Politics of the Living is an urgent examination of the ever-increasing significance of the concepts of life, care and health in today’s political discourse.