Lazzarato on Biopower

There seems to be a reading of the zoe-bios distinction in Cote/Prybus that they remember form Lazzarato which was not in our materials. I followed the endnotes and found an article where Lazzarato develops his critique of Agamben and ferrets out his take on biopolitcs.

http://www.geocities.com/immateriallabour/
lazzarato-from-biopower-to-biopolitics.html

This paragraph feels important:

Giorgio Agamben, recently, in a book inscribed explicitly within the research being undertaken on the concept of biopolitics, insisted that the theoretical and political distinction established in antiquity between zoe and bios, between natural life and political life, between man as a living being [simple vivant] whose sphere of influence is in the home and man as a political subject whose sphere of influence is in the polis, is “now nearly unknown to us.” The introduction of the zoe into the sphere of the polis is, for both Agamben and Foucault, the decisive event of modernity; it marks a radical transformation of the political and philosophical categories of classical thought. But is this impossibility of distinguishing between zoe and bios, between man as a living being and man as a political subject, the product of the action of sovereign power or the result of the action of new forces over which power has “no control?” Agamben’s response is very ambiguous and it oscillates continuously between these two alternatives. Foucault’s response is entirely different: biopolitics is the form of government taken by a new dynamic of forces that, in conjunction, express power relations that the classical world could not have known.

--dan