Form-of-Life

Form-of-life, as invoked in Neroni's argument, names Agamben's concept of a mode of political existence prior to—or beneath—the bifurcation imposed by biopower. For Agamben, biopower operates precisely by splitting life: it separates "bare life" (zoē, the mere biological fact of living, exposed to sovereign violence) from politically qualified life (bios, life as lived within a form, with rights and recognition). Form-of-life designates the integrated, undivided mode of existence that would precede or overcome this split—a life inseparable from its form, where the biological and the political have not yet been (or are no longer) torn apart. It is, in this sense, Agamben's name for the political-existential ground that biopower has colonized and fragmented.

The theoretical stakes of the concept, as Neroni's text handles it, are explicitly comparative and critical. Form-of-life is positioned as Agamben's candidate for a counter-biopolitical mode of being—what he hopes to restore or think beyond bare life. However, the passage signals a limit: because Agamben's framework remains anchored to the body and gesture rather than the psychoanalytic subject (marked by unconscious, desire, and lack), his form-of-life remains a partial gesture toward resistance rather than a fully theorized one. It bridges toward, but does not arrive at, the Lacanian subject whose desire and jouissance constitute a genuine site of antagonism to biopower's administration of life.

Within neroni-hilary-the-subject-of-torture-psychoanalysis-and-biopolitics-in-televisio, form-of-life occupies a hinge position: it is the concept that marks how close Agamben comes to a psychoanalytic account of resistance while still falling short. The argument is structured as a critique of biopolitical theory (Foucault, Hardt & Negri, Agamben) for failing to theorize adequate resistance because it jettisons the subject in favor of the body. Form-of-life is Agamben's attempt to name a political-existential wholeness that biopower destroys—and his concept of gesture (cross-referenced in the corpus) is treated as the closest he gets to the kind of in-between, non-identity-fixing moment that psychoanalysis would locate in desire and the subject.

The concept's deepest tension becomes visible when read against the cross-referenced canonical concepts. Desire (Lacanian) is irreducibly a product of the split introduced by language—it is constituted through lack and the Other, not recovered from some prior wholeness. Form-of-life, by contrast, implies a pre-split integrity, a life-form not yet alienated by biopower's bifurcation. From a Lacanian vantage point, this is where Agamben's project remains philosophically naive: the subject of desire is never "whole" before its division; division is originary. Similarly, Identity in the Lacanian frame is never self-coincident but constituted through its own failure and the Other's inscription. Form-of-life risks fantasizing an identity-before-difference, a singular wholeness (touching also the cross-referenced concept of Singularity) that psychoanalytic theory would read as imaginary rather than as a genuine resource for contesting biopower. Agamben's concept thus functions in Neroni's text as a productive limit-case: instructive precisely at the point where it fails to think the subject as structurally split.

The Subject of Torture: Psychoanalysis and Biopolitics in Television and FilmHilary Neroni · 2015 (page unknown)

Agamben's own name for this previous political being is a form-of-life, a form he feels has been bifurcated by biopower.

The word "bifurcated" is theoretically loaded: it names the specific operation of biopower as a splitting—separating bare biological existence from qualified political life—and positions form-of-life as the pre-bifurcated unity that biopower destroys; meanwhile, "previous political being" suggests a temporality of loss and potential recovery that the Lacanian framework will contest, since for psychoanalysis no such prior wholeness ever existed.