How can we think of life in its dual expression, matter and experience,
the living and the lived? Philosophers and, more recently, social
scientists have offered multiple answers to this question, often
privileging one expression or the other - the biological or the
biographical. But is it possible to conceive of them together and thus
reconcile naturalist and humanist approaches? Using research conducted
on three continents and engaging in critical dialogue with Wittgenstein,
Benjamin, and Foucault, Didier Fassin attempts to do so by developing
three concepts: forms of life, ethics of life, and politics of life.
In the conditions of refugees and asylum seekers, in the light of
mortality statistics and death benefits, and via a genealogical and
ethnographical inquiry, the moral economy of life reveals troubling
tensions in the way contemporary societies treat human beings. Once the
pieces of this anthropological composition are assembled, like in
Georges Perec's jigsaw puzzle, an image appears: that of unequal lives.