If biopolitical theory, as Ernesto Laclau has argued, propagates the fantasy that it is possible 'to be beyond politics,' political formalism, representatives of which might range from Hegel and Marx to Derrida, would hold human being at its most elemental, life at its barest, to be essentially political: 'Man is a political being' (zoon politikon). In his view's closer reading of Aristotle, the difference between animals, man, and gods—the specificity that pertains to men, man's attribute—is that his life is qualifiedly political: there is no human life without politics, without the political interactions and designations of how to make life, of how to sustain human being in its desperate interdependence. In Agamben's 'complete' biopolitical conception, then, 'the direct antagonism of things' could be the conflict between politics and life (where the victor's name is 'biopolitics'); in the other, materialist conception [it] could be that irresolvable conflict among forms of life that is the stuff of politics.
Anna Kornbluh, The Order of Forms (pg. 130-31)