Well burrowed, old mole!

Timothy Campbell’s Improper Life is an exposé of the consequences of accepting Martin Heidegger’s philosophy of technology. As he explains on page one, “to the degree that we speak of biopolitics today, lurking beneath is a conception of technology deeply indebted to Heidegger’s ontological elaboration of it.” He aims to isolate the emergence of a politics of death in Heidegger, and to show how it has impacted thinkers who try to critically appropriate Heidegger’s work. This book is a response to a crisis within contemporary academia; the historicist/posthumanist/biopolitical paradigm seems to be incapable of offering anything but fatalistic prophecies of doom when it comes to the relation between life and technology.  Campbell follows Heidegger’s ontologization of technology in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Peter Sloterdijk. The first three chapters of the book are devoted to critical readings and in the fourth, Campbell offers an outline of what he calls an affirmative biopolitics which historicizes biopolitics instead of ontologizing it and thus releases other potentials than the current entanglement of technology and death. 

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