Biotechnology has emerged in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries alongside a variety of formulations of 'the ethical' and in this way biotechnology has become an ideological phenomenon swept up in structuring freedom and processes of designating living beings in a full and objective manner.

In his Biotech Fantasia in Borderlands Daniel Hourigan says:

As discussions from a variety of contemporary thinkers, including Habermas, Heidegger, Lacan, and Zizek, have shown, through processes of modernisation human beings have been able to master life through technology. However, bare life returns to haunt humanity in biotechnology. Biotechnology reverses the pre-modern problem of either externally encountering the thing-in-itself as an opaque essence or partaking in essence through a pantheism that relies on a divine order. In biotechnology we find ourselves firmly within the rawness of bare life, having the preconditions of our capabilities set by our genetic profile. The essence of bare life is thus dedifferentiated from the life-world because the macro processes of daily life are grounded in the micro relations of our genetic material.