Beyond the Biopolitics of Capability and Choice in Human Development: Being, Decision, and World

International development is one of the primary biopolitical problematics of the 21st century. Yet, biopolitical critiques of ‘human development’ tend to leave the framework’s ontological underpinnings largely unexplored. This article seeks to remedy this gap by problematising the notions of ‘capability’ and ‘choice’ in human development through an engagement with Martin Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysics of modernity. The article argues that underlying human development is an ontology that enframes human beings as a contingent, orderable, and calculable reserve of capabilities. The enframing of choice in turn conceals the limitedness of the conditions within which choice can happen. As opposed to such liberal choice, the article puts forward an ontological notion of ‘decision’, which entails understanding the world as an openness that resists any final determination of being. A politics that draws its involvement in the world from the openness of being entails the ability to question critically even...