The Power of Abstraction and Its Antagonism: On Some Problems Common to Contemporary Neuroscience and the Theory of Cognitive Capitalism. Matteo Pasquinelli Life cleaves to matter, elaborating and contracting matter, bringing to life the virtualities within the material in unknown directions. Life emerges as a becoming-concept, a becoming- thought or—as a consciousness, a becoming- brain. (Grosz 2012) We accept far too easily that there exists a fundamental conflict between knowledge and life, such that their reciprocal aversion can lead only to the destruction of life by knowledge or to the derision of knowledge by life. [...] Now, the conflict is not between thought and life in man, but between man and the world in the human consciousness of life. [...] It is not true that knowledge destroys life. (Canguilhem 1965) The philosophical debate of the last years, at least at the boundaries of French and Italian political theory, has been marked by a conceptual oscillation that has alternately emphasised immaterial labour or affective labour, knowledge economy or desire economy, the cognitive or the biopolitical. No research or political agenda have been immune from such a hypnotic spiral, which can be traced back to a millenary low-intensity hostility between the Western concepts of body and mind. After a period focusing on the knowledge economy and immaterial labour, for instance, at the end of the ‘90s, the affective turn of the humanities forced political theory to give a specific attention to affective labour. On this conceptual journey, theorists rediscovered the reproductive and care labour that feminism attempted to politicise already in the ‘70s. In the same period, biotechnologies and the notion of bios occupied centre stage in debates around new forms of power. A common critique emerged that took the paradigm of cognitive labour to be overlooking the biological and genetic materiality of the body, and more importantly its libidinal and affective dimensions. Lazzarato (2006) proposed interestingly the idea of noopolitics as an extension of the definition of biopolitics to cover also the flesh of the collective imaginary and mind technologies. It must be underlined, however, that the