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Around 1800, parallel to heavy changes on the political stage in general and the replacement of taxonomical thought by the idea of life as living within life sciences - an observation by Michel Foucault, which he, after The Order of Things, deepens in his lectures on The History of Governmentality between 1977 and 1979 - choreography also changes fundamentally. This change manifests very obviously in the Letters on Dancing and Ballets by Jean Georges Noverre from 1760, published as a manifesto in their first edition approximately 20 years before the closing of the Académie Royale de Danse in Paris. In Noverre, there can be found a lot of hints pointing toward the complex problem of biopolitics, although nowadays many scholars mainly refer to him solely as the inventor of ballet d'action and in this context as an early precursor of romantic ballet in the nineteenth-century.

In Jean Georges Noverres Briefen über die Tanzkunst zeigt sich, inwiefern das Aufkommen der Ästhetik um 1800 mit dem korreliert, was Foucault Biopolitik nennt. Mit Rancière demonstriert Stefan Apostolou-Hölscher: Sie beziehen sich dennoch anders auf das Leben. Weil Biopolitik sich aus der Freisetzung von Potentialen speist, setzt sie vermögende Körper voraus. Umgekehrt jedoch sind vermögende Körper denkbar, deren ästhetische Praxis in einem widerständigen Verhältnis zur Biopolitik steht. Diese Spannung wird vermittels Stücken von Sasa Asentic, Jérome Bel, Mette Ingvartsen/Jefta van Dinther, Ivana Müller und Yvonne Rainer skizziert.

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The concept of ‘man’ is introduced by Michel Foucault in the context of a discursive formation that, for him, emerges toward the end of the 18th century, following the epistemes of the Renaissance and Classical periods, which, by way of contrast, had foregrounded similarity and representation as ordering principles. Instead of a guaranteed correspondence between the subject and the object of thought, the modern era is concerned with the finitude of concrete ‘human beings’ in their relation to an abstract ‘humanity’, and asks under what conditions is a correlation of a subject with its objects possible in experience.