According to Michel Foucault, the emergence of a new science of life, biology, was one of the axes of the scientific revolution. Before moving in the 1970s to analyse biopower and biopolitics as central categories of modernity, in The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Foucault wrote about life in terms of the «secret force» that underlies modern biology and can be seen as its epistemological a priori. The invention of modernity and the modern notion of life, Michel Foucault emphasises, occur simultaneously — within the same ontological framework, which he calls the «untamed ontology». What are the main features of this ontology? How does it affect our conception of «life»? How does it relate to the biopolitical turn? According to Davide Tarizzo, in order to answer these questions, we must first ask ourselves whether our conception of «life» does not contain metaphysical assumptions that are still partially hidden under our scientific and political claims. The author proposes to extend the scope of an untamed ontology and to connect the semantics of autonomous will and the semantics of autonomous life through the claim that it is autonomy that constitutes the metaphysical threshold of modernity.
Davide Francesco Tarizzo (Mon,) studied this question.