Democracy is inseparable with biopolitics, its system is underlined by the biopolitical citizen.

Moreover, post-structural political theorists, such as Giorgio Agamben, Robert Esposito, and Jacques Rancière, focus on biopolitics from many different angles in their engagements with modern western democracies (see also Campbell, 2011; Prozorov & Rentea, 2017).1 For Agamben, what sets liberal democracies apart from ancient Greek notions of democracy, is not the integration of biological life into the sphere of politics per se, but the fact that biopolitics becomes inseparable from sovereignty in modern democracies. The “production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (Agamben, 1998, p. 6). Agamben distinguishes zoe as the negative foundation of bios as the essence of modern politics (Agamben, 1998, p. 7). A crucial aim of Agamben's critical engagement with biopolitical sovereignity is to show the ways in which democracy and totalitarianism converge. Roberto Esposito similarly highlights the fundamental importance of biopolitics in liberal democracies. He views biopolitics as underlying all democracies, because democratic citizens are understood as purely rational individuals, which are per definition separated from their bodies. In modern liberal democracies, personhood equals disembodied subjectivity, which is an effect of biopolitics itself (Esposito, 2012). In its current form, democracy is used on and not in favor of bodies. With this insight, Esposito reveals a fundamental paradox of liberal democracies; namely, that the democratic rights that aim to protect the precarious reality of a human embodied life, rest upon a fiction of legal personhood that is based on disembodiment.2

From a different angle, Jacques Rancière's work also applies the premise that biopolitics and democracy are inseparable. Rancière's theory is grounded in the duality of police and politics, whereas the “essence of the police lies neither in repression nor even in control over the living” but “in a certain way of dividing up the sensible” (Rancière, 2010, p. 36). The “‘distribution of the sensible’ … defines the forms of partaking by first defining the modes of perception in which they are inscribed” (Rancière, 2010, p. 36). Thus, the order of the police always entails a biopolitical dimension. It is an “order of bodies that defines the allocation of ways of doing, ways of being, and ways of saying, and sees that those bodies are assigned by name to a particular place and task; it is an order of the visible, and sayable” (Rancière, 1999, p. 29). Based on this premise, Rancière identifies the act of disrupting the existing bodily order as democratic politics. Democracy then is “the system of forms of subjectification through which any order of distribution of bodies into functions is undermined, thrown back on its contingency" (Rancière, 1999, p. 101).