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The framework of resilience has been claimed to strip bodies of both hope and the promise of the future, reducing life to mere biology, concerned only with its survivability. This article interrogates such claims by critical theory, analysing the definitions of life and time embedded in them. Reading the figure of human nature as it appears in US President Obama's call for a common humanity – united by hope in a world of insurmountable insecurity – this article asks what promises structure liberal subjectivity when security and universalism are seemingly abandoned. Through the lens of Agambian biopolitics, I argue that resilient life is produced not in opposition to hope, but as its embodiment, turning indefinite insecurity into a continuous experience of hope, and hence into a structure of promise. As such, I submit that the hopeful life today has become the barest of all, engendered by the production of a paradoxical temporal indistinction between an open future and the inevitability of catastrophe.

In critical theories of security, it is often claimed that the governance oflife operates by the production of fear, an emotion marked by its political character,working as to arrest bodies in the present. Simultaneously, hope is often announcedas fear’s binary opposite, as the condition of possibility of a future beyond thepresent. Hope is thereby rendered as an ethical imperative, opposed by default toboth power and politics. Through a reading of contemporary affective theoreticalcritique, this paper questions the role of this analytical binary in masking thearticulation of hope as a political concept of governance and power, central as hopearguably has been in the creation of the liberal subject. As such, this paperinterrogates whether not the analytical distinction between hope and fear rather ispolitical, functioning as to confirm rather than challenge the affective, temporal andpolitical framing of the War on Terror – thereby disallowing from the outset areading of fear and hope as simultaneous modes of governance, hailing bodies intoplace by offering both the dream and fear of another world.

Practices of global development have been critiqued for reproducing a notion of the suffering poor as bare life; passive, despairing and devoid of both hope and potentiality. In contrast, this article treats the experience of hope not as external to the governance of underdeveloped life but as a biopolitical technology central to its formation. Reading US President Obama’s call to recognise underdeveloped life as inherently hopeful and potential, this article analyses the biopolitics of development at the moment when the separation between lives on the basis of its capacity for hope is explicitly banished. Emerging from this reading is a troubling paradox, one in which hope and despair enter a zone of indistinction. Encouraged to embody this indistinction, it is argued, is a bare and hopeful form of neoliberal life, a potential yet not sovereign being. Hopeful, but without the capacity to conceive of or to act towards a different future.