You are right to say that there is a holy-grail rhetoric of molecularization in the term “life itself” however I’m not sure this can completely cover the work the term is doing.

‘Life itself’ seems to be configured in relation to a conception of ‘circuits of vitality’. In Politics of Life Itself Rose writes, “molecularization strips tissues, proteins, molecules and drugs of their specific affinities – to a disease, to an organ, to an individual, to a species – and enables them to be regarded as manipulable and transferable elements or units, which can be delocalized”. One response to this freeing from context is what Rose calls “pastoral powers” reconfiguring biopolitics in relation to emerging somatic ethics and politics. A different kind of response would be one which eschews this pastoral mode with its attention to responsibility and risk (not to abandon but to keep moving) and takes up a different ethic which is attentive to the unknown. I am not sure how to imagine this.

From what I understand I would say they primarily see the emergence of “life itself” as a result of the “molecularization of life”. However, one might also argue that today a re-biologization of life is taking place that makes the complex interactions between cells, systems of cells, multicellular organisms, populations of organisms and their environment a focus of heightened attention. So there is a certain return to the organism.

At any rate, the term “life itself” remains obscure if not mystical to me. I also wonder, if it might not ultimately be complicit with the pseudo-religious holy-grail-rhetoric of some molecular biologists.

As to Frédéric’s point, I completely agree. The distinction is being re-invented. But the fact that human biological matter is “not endowed with any particularly special qualities other than the usual species variations”, as Landecker so nicely says, must have some consequence for our thinking about the concept of biopower today. What these consequences might be, I don’t really know.