Resistant lives: law, life, singularity

This article examines the potential of Roberto Esposito’s work for a rethinking of the relationship between norm and life: in particular, the possibility of a vitalization of normativity which subverts the normative ordering of individual lives. Esposito’s intervention in biopolitical debates allows us to think of a micropolitics of life as zoe which contests the ordering molarpolitics of Life as bios. The author examines this play between normativization of life and vitalization of norm in the context of citizen resistance to the attempt to normatively order their reproductive choices in the case of the 2004 Italian law on assisted reproduction