Life beyond optimisation: Agamben and the bioethical question of the living

This article examines how Giorgio Agamben's philosophy can be made productive for contemporary bioethics. Starting from the distinction between zoē and bios developed in Homo Sacer, it argues that bioethical reasoning frequently presupposes a concept of life as an isolable biological substrate, available for protection, regulation or improvement. Three theses develop this claim. First, the principle of informed consent, whose modern history leads back to the Nuremberg doctors' trial, presupposes a political status that consent itself cannot confer. Second, data-driven medicine renders the body legible primarily as biological function. Third, the debate on germline intervention disputes the treatment of a genetic substrate while rarely asking whether this substrate adequately describes what is being changed. Against both the optimising and the preserving stance towards life, Agamben's notion of form-of-life marks the point at which the separation of biological life from the life that is lived is no longer taken for granted. The article closes by examining the limits of this perspective in light of Agamben's controversial writings on the COVID-19 pandemic. Agamben thus contributes less a normative bioethics than a critical ontology of life, one that enables bioethics to reflect on its own presuppositions.