REVIEW Antonella Cutro, Technique et vie: biopolitique et philosophie du bios dans la pensée de Michel Foucault (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2010), ISBN: 978-2-296-54085-9. Much has been published since Cutro's Tecnica e vita (2004) first appeared. Her book, however, has enduring merits that make the French translation reviewed here quite valuable. Drawing on English, French, and Italian scholarship, it offers a thoroughgoing reading of Foucault's translations, interviews, and writings, in terms of the

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... concept of life that he encountered in the "biological philosophy" of the 1950s. And it will be especially interesting to anyone concerned with his relation to three of its proponents: Georges Canguilhem, Raymond Ruyer, and Viktor von Weizsäcker. Life and technique are intimately connected. For Cutro, Foucault was always interested in political life and its conditions of possibility, matters of technical manipulation and assembly that make certain forms of political life possible while simultaneously defining them in their governability. Technique, in Cutro's reading, is, therefore, "the key to how one elaborates the history of the present [actuel], to how one is governed via the truth, to how one can structure a constitutive relation with oneself" (7). Thus she aims to elucidate the articulation of technique and life in his work in order, "to clarify the way in which Foucault had the intuition that biological life had become a present [actuel] political problem" (8). She thereby offers a novel and convincing way to read Foucault's oeuvre. Though it sometimes moves a bit quickly-something that cannot be helped given the range of works discussed-her book is closely argued, well researched, stimulating, and offers many insights into the emergence, context, and implications of Foucault's works. In situating his works in relation to the problems of biological philosophy, Cutro not only gives a convincing reading of the unity of Foucault's writings, but also subtly moves attention away from Foucault himself and towards the shared objects, methods, and problems that he contributed to formulating and questioning. Cutro's book goes quite far in explaining the methods, concerns, and problems shared with Canguilhem that enabled Foucault to develop his own archeological and genealogical inquiries. And her presentation of their intellectual relation as an osmosis dependent upon shared membranes seems to offer a fruitful way into a philosophical history of their writings. But these membranes were not shared by them alone. There was a range of works in biological philosophy popular among students including Foucault in the 1950s, but Cutro restricts herself to discussing