When Improper Life appeared in 2011, its author, Timothy Campbell, had already established himself as an important spokesman for recent developments in the theorization of biopolitics and sovereignty, especially those that have emerged over the last twenty or so years from Italian philosophers Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Improper Life, which is part of the University of Minnesota Press's Posthumanities series edited by Cary Wolfe, offers a nuanced though concise overview of the most important theorizations of biopolitics since Martin Heidegger. Erudite and engaged, it traces a dense thread of ideas with vast and real implications across decades and languages. The book is remarkable for the attention it gives to issues of writing and communication, and for its attempt to sketch out a possible "affirmative" biopolitics for the future. Campbell's principal argument is that biopolitics, as it has been conceived to date, invariably "drifts" toward the "thanatopolitical," which is to say that it depends not so much on life as on a more or less dissimulated instrumentalization of death to understand how the body politic is organized and controlled.
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