# Abstract 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. # Conclusion If security is a political discourse that justifies new forms of sovereign power by placing the actions of the state ‘outside’ politics, then [[biosecurity]] risks doing much the same, justifying a continuous state of emergency at the level of political life by reference to a continuous state of emergence at the level of molecular life. We might conclude, then, that biosecurity names much more than a set of political technologies whose purpose is to govern the disorder of biological life; it increasingly names a global project that seeks to achieve certain biomolecular futures by pre-empting others, and does so in part by reconfiguring in other places relations between people, and between people and their animals. [[Biosecurity weds biopolitics with geopolitics]]. We are perhaps now in a position to bring the two halves of this paper together. 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? For Nikolas Rose, the molecularization of life has brought us to a new moment in the history of [[biopolitics]], one in which bodies are understood in terms of their ‘genetic inheritance’, the management of risk is individualized, and the make-up of our bodies, and not just their conduct, has become the subject of technologies of self. In this ethopolitical regime biopolitics is understood in terms of governmentality, and politics takes as its concern the recognition of genetic conditions and the [[resource mobilisation|mobilizing of resources]] in their name. But this is not the only way in which the molecularization of life has been apprehended. If we attend to the global biopolitics of biosecurity — the government of the ‘global biological’
— we find a quite different relation between the biological and the political. On the one hand, the ‘genetic inheritance’ of the ‘somatic’ self comes to be replaced by ‘precarious’ bodies inhabiting ‘virtual’ biologies. On the other hand, forms of pastoral power recede while new forms of sovereign power appear. But how are we to understand the relation between the two? At the very least, we must see Rose’s ethopolitics as something more particular and less universal, as perhaps a form of biopolitics within globalization that is specific to the zone of ‘liberal peace’ in the affluent spaces of the West. But more important, we must ask whether the conditions of possibility for ethopolitics — for secure bodies that are open to ‘improvement’ — include the extension of sovereign power elsewhere in the name of biological security. For not only does the [[Global South]] lie outside the technoscientific and cultural networks that compose the ethopolitical for Rose, but arguably biological existence there is increasingly subject to projects that seek to pre-empt risk through new forms of sovereign power. We are faced with the troubling thought that in the molecular age, what appears to us in terms of an ethics of ‘care of self’, and as a pressing problem of democracy, may appear to others as yet another expression of empire.