In what ways can it be said of the molecularization of life that it has made our biological existence a political concern in new ways? This essay examines two different answers to this question. The first, exemplified by the work of Nikolas Rose, suggests that the molecularization of life, together with the individualization of risk, has given rise to a new ‘somatic’ self, and a new ‘ethopolitical’ order in which our biological life has becomes our life's work. The second, most evident in growing concern over ‘biosecurity’, posits a vulnerable subject, thrown into an unpredictable molecular world characterized by exchange and circulation and full of ‘emergent’ risks. Whereas the former has arguably led to new forms of governmentality, and new kinds of pastoral power, this paper argues that the latter has been widley taken up as a justification for the global extension of forms of sovereign power whose purpose is to pre-empt certain biological futures in favour of others. An exclusive focus on the former not only risks leaving the latter unexamined, it may leave us unable to consider how the two are related.

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In an interview in 1977 Michel Foucault proposed the term dispositif for a heterogeneous set of discourses, practices, architectural forms, regulations, laws, and knowledges connected together into an apparatus of government. Drawing upon later articulations of the concept by Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben, and exploring a range of innovations in the ‘management’ of urban life, this paper reworks Foucault's concept as a means for understanding—and potentially contesting—new modes of government that have emerged in response to the crisis of climate change. Against understandings of ‘government’ in terms of a totalizing plan from which new practices and technologies usher forth, this paper emphasizes the ad hoc, and ex post facto nature of ‘government’ as a set of diverse and loosely connected efforts to introduce ‘economy’ into existing relations in response to a perceived ‘crisis’. The paper concludes by exploring Agamben's notion of ‘profanation’ as an adequate political response to the dispositif of resilient urbanism.

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