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Biopolitics: A Reader - Softcover

 
9780822353355: Biopolitics: A Reader
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0822353350 ISBN 13: 9780822353355
Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2013

Synopsis

This anthology collects the texts that defined the concept of biopolitics, which has become so significant throughout the humanities and social sciences today. The far-reaching influence of the biopolitical—the relation of politics to life, or the state to the body—is not surprising given its centrality to matters such as healthcare, abortion, immigration, and the global distribution of essential medicines and medical technologies.

Michel Foucault gave new and unprecedented meaning to the term "biopolitics" in his 1976 essay "Right of Death and Power over Life." In this anthology, that touchstone piece is followed by essays in which biopolitics is implicitly anticipated as a problem by Hannah Arendt and later altered, critiqued, deconstructed, and refined by major political and social theorists who explicitly engaged with Foucault's ideas. By focusing on the concept of biopolitics, rather than applying it to specific events and phenomena, this Reader provides an enduring framework for assessing the central problematics of modern political thought.

Contributors. Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, Timothy Campbell, Gilles Deleuze, Roberto Esposito, Michel Foucault, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt, Achille Mbembe, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, Jacques Rancière, Adam Sitze, Peter Sloterdijk, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Timothy Campbell is Professor of Italian Studies and Chair of Romance Studies at Cornell University. He is the author of Wireless Writing in the Age of Marconi.

Adam Sitze is Assistant Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. He is the author of The Impossible Machine: A Genealogy of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

BIOPOLITICS

A READER

By Timothy Campbell, Adam Sitze

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2013 Duke University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-5335-5

Contents

INTRODUCTION Biopolitics: An Encounter Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze...1
CHAPTER 1 Right of Death and Power over Life Michel Foucault.............41
CHAPTER 2 "Society Must Be Defended," Lecture at the Collège de France, 
March 17, 1976 Michel Foucault............................................		61
CHAPTER 3 The Perplexities of the Rights of Man Hannah Arendt............82
CHAPTER 4 Selections from The Human Condition Hannah Arendt..............98
CHAPTER 5 Introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life 
Giorgio Agamben............................................................		134
CHAPTER 6 The Politicization of Life Giorgio Agamben.....................145
CHAPTER 7 Biopolitics and the Rights of Man Giorgio Agamben..............152
CHAPTER 8 Necropolitics Achille Mbembe...................................161
CHAPTER 9 Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death in the Life of the 
Universal Warren Montag...................................................		193
CHAPTER 10 Biopolitical Production Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri.......215
CHAPTER 11 Biopolitics as Event Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri..........237
CHAPTER 12 Labor, Action, Intellect Paolo Virno..........................245
CHAPTER 13 An Equivocal Concept: Biopolitics Paolo Virno.................269
CHAPTER 14 The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in 
Immune System Discourse Donna Haraway.....................................		274
CHAPTER 15 The Immunological Transformation: On the Way to Thin-Walled 
"Societies" Peter Sloterdijk..............................................		310
CHAPTER 16 Biopolitics Roberto Esposito..................................317
CHAPTER 17 The Enigma of Biopolitics Roberto Esposito....................350
CHAPTER 18 The Difficult Legacy of Michel Foucault Jacques Rancière......386
CHAPTER 19 From Politics to Biopolitics ... and Back Slavoj Zizek........391
CHAPTER 20 What Is It to Live? Alain Badiou..............................412
CHAPTER 21 Immanence: A Life Gilles Deleuze..............................421
Acknowledgment of Copyright................................................427
Index......................................................................429


CHAPTER 1

RIGHT OF DEATH ANDPOWER OVER LIFE

Michel Foucault


For a long time; one of the characteristic privileges of sovereign power was theright to decide life and death. In a formal sense, it derived no doubt from theancient patria potestas that granted the father of the Roman family the rightto "dispose" of the life of his children and his slaves; just as he had given themlife, so he could take it away. By the time the right of life and death was framedby the classical theoreticians, it was in a considerably diminished form. It wasno longer considered that this power of the sovereign over his subjects couldbe exercised in an absolute and unconditional way, but only in cases where thesovereign's very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If hewere threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or contesthis rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects totake part in the defense of the state; without "directly proposing their death,"he was empowered to "expose their life": in this sense, he wielded an "indirect"power over them of life and death. But if someone dared to rise upagainst him and transgress his laws, then he could exercise a direct powerover the off ender's life: as punishment, the latter would be put to death.Viewed in this way, the power of life and death was not an absolute privilege:it was conditioned by the defense of the sovereign, and his own survival. Mustwe follow Hobbes in seeing it as the transfer to the prince of the natural rightpossessed by every individual to defend his life even if this meant the death ofothers? Or should it be regarded as a specific right that was manifested withthe formation of that new juridical being, the sovereign? In any case, in itsmodern form—relative and limited—as in its ancient and absolute form, theright of life and death is a dissymmetrical one. The sovereign exercised hisright of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; heevidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring.The right which was formulated as the "power of life and death" was inreality the right to take life or let live. Its symbol, after all, was the sword. Perhapsthis juridical form must be referred to a historical type of society inwhich power was exercised mainly as a means of deduction (prélèvement), asubtraction mechanism, a right to appropriate a portion of the wealth, a tax ofproducts, goods and ser vices, labor and blood, levied on the subjects. Powerin this instance was essentially a right of seizure: of things, time, bodies, andultimately life itself; it culminated in the privilege to seize hold of life in orderto suppress it.

Since the classical age the West has undergone a very profound transformationof these mechanisms of power. "Deduction" has tended to be no longerthe major form of power but merely one element among others, workingto incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces underit: a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them,rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroyingthem. There has been a parallel shift in the right of death, or at least atendency to align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power andto define itself accordingly. This death that was based on the right of the sovereignis now manifested as simply the reverse of the right of the social bodyto ensure, maintain, or develop its life. Yet wars were never as bloody as theyhave been since the nineteenth century, and all things being equal, never beforedid regimes visit such holocausts on their own populations. But this formidablepower of death—and this is perhaps what accounts for part of itsforce and the cynicism with which it has so greatly expanded its limits—nowpresents itself as the counterpart of a power that exerts a positive influence onlife, that endeavors to administer, optimize, and multiply it, subjecting itto precise controls and comprehensive regulations. Wars are no longer wagedin the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf ofthe existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose ofwholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital.It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimeshave been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed.And through a turn that closes the circle, as the technology of wars has causedthem to tend increasingly toward all-out destruction, the decision that initiatesthem and the one that terminates them are in fact increasingly informedby the naked question of survival. The atomic situation is now at the end pointof this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the undersideof the power to guarantee an individual's continued existence. The principleunderlying the tactics of battle—that one has to be capable of killing inorder to go on living—has become the principle that defines the strategy ofstates. But the existence in question is no longer the juridical existence of sovereignty;at stake is the biological existence of a population. If genocide is indeedthe dream of modern powers, this is not because of a recent return of theancient right to kill; it is because power is situated and exercised at the level oflife, the species, the race, and the large-scale phenomena of population.

On another level, I might have taken up the example of the death penalty.Together with war, it was for a long time the other form of the right of thesword; it constituted the reply of the sovereign to those who attacked his will,his law, or his person. Those who died on the scaffold became fewer and fewer,in contrast to those who died in wars. But it was for the same reasons that thelatter became more numerous and the former more and more rare. As soon aspower gave itself the function of administering life, its reason for being andthe logic of its exercise—and not the awakening of humanitarian feelings—madeit more and more difficult to apply the death penalty. How could powerexercise its highest prerogative by putting people to death, when its main rolewas to ensure, sustain, and multiply life, to put this life in order? For such apower, execution was at the same time a limit, a scandal, and a contradiction.Hence capital punishment could not be maintained except by invoking lessthe enormity of the crime itself than the monstrosity of the criminal, his incorrigibility,and the safeguard of society. One had the right to kill those whorepresented a kind of biological danger to others.

One might say that the ancient right to take life or let live was replaced bya power to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. This is perhaps whatexplains that disqualification of death which marks the recent wane of therituals that accompanied it. That death is so carefully evaded is linked less toa new anxiety which makes death unbearable for our societies than to the factthat the procedures of power have not ceased to turn away from death. In thepassage from this world to the other, death was the manner in which a terrestrialsovereignty was relieved by another, singularly more powerful sovereignty;the pageantry that surrounded it was in the category of political ceremony. Nowit is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion;death is power's limit, the moment that escapes it; death becomes the mostsecret aspect of existence, the most "private." It is not surprising that suicide—oncea crime, since it was a way to usurp the power of death which the sovereignalone, whether the one here below or the Lord above, had the right toexercise—became, in the course of the nineteenth century, one of the firstconducts to enter into the sphere of sociological analysis; it testified to the individualand private right to die, at the borders and in the interstices of powerthat was exercised over life. This determination to die, strange and yet so persistentand constant in its manifestations, and consequently so difficult to explainas being due to particular circumstances or individual accidents, wasone of the first astonishments of a society in which political power had assigneditself the task of administering life.

In concrete terms, starting in the seventeenth century, this power over lifeevolved in two basic forms; these forms were not antithetical, however; theyconstituted rather two poles of development linked together by a whole intermediarycluster of relations. One of these poles—the first to be formed, it seems—centeredon the body as a machine: its disciplining, the optimization of itscapabilities, the extortion of its forces, the parallel increase of its usefulnessand its docility, its integration into systems of efficient and economic controls,all this was ensured by the procedures of power that characterized the disciplines:an anatomo-politics of the human body. The second, formed somewhatlater, focused on the species body, the body imbued with the mechanics of lifeand serving as the basis of the biological processes: propagation, births andmortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity, with all the conditionsthat can cause these to vary. Their supervision was effected through anentire series of interventions and regulatory controls: a bio-politics of the population.The disciplines of the body and the regulations of the population constitutedthe two poles around which the organization of power over life wasdeployed. The setting up, in the course of the classical age, of this great bipolartechnology—anatomic and biological, individualizing and specifying, directedtoward the performances of the body, with attention to the processes oflife—characterized a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer tokill, but to invest life through and through.

The old power of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefullysupplanted by the administration of bodies and the calculated managementof life. During the classical period, there was a rapid development ofvarious disciplines—universities, secondary schools, barracks, workshops;there was also the emergence, in the field of political practices and economicobservation, of the problems of birthrate, longevity, public health, housing,and migration. Hence there was an explosion of numerous and diverse techniquesfor achieving the subjugation of bodies and the control of populations,marking the beginning of an era of "bio-power." The two directions taken byits development still appeared to be clearly separate in the eighteenth century.With regard to discipline, this development was embodied in institutionssuch as the army and the schools, and in reflections on tactics, apprenticeship,education, and the nature of societies, ranging from the strictly military analysesof Marshal de Saxe to the political reveries of Guibert or Servan. As forpopulation controls, one notes the emergence of demography, the evaluationof the relationship between resources and inhabitants, the constructing oftables analyzing wealth and its circulation: the work of Quesnay, Moheau, andSüssmilch. The philosophy of the "Ideologists," as a theory of ideas, signs, andthe individual genesis of sensations, but also a theory of the social compositionof interests—ideology being a doctrine of apprenticeship, but also adoctrine of contracts and the regulated formation of the social body—nodoubt constituted the abstract discourse in which one sought to coordinatethese two techniques of power in order to construct a general theory of it. Inpoint of fact, however, they were not to be joined at the level of a speculativediscourse, but in the form of concrete arrangements (agencements concrets)that would go to make up the great technology of power in the nineteenth century:the deployment of sexuality would be one of them, and one of the mostimportant.

This bio-power was without question an indispensable element in the developmentof capitalism; the latter would not have been possible without the controlledinsertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustmentof the phenomena of population to economic pro cesses. But this was not allit required; it also needed the growth of both these factors, their reinforcementas well as their availability and docility; it had to have methods of power capableof optimizing forces, aptitudes, and life in general without at the same timemaking them more difficult to govern. If the development of the great instrumentsof the state, as institutions of power, ensured the maintenance of productionrelations, the rudiments of anatomo-and bio-politics, created in theeighteenth century as techniques of power present at every level of the socialbody and utilized by very diverse institutions (the family and the army,schools and the police, individual medicine and the administration of collectivebodies), operated in the sphere of economic processes, their development,and the forces working to sustain them. They also acted as factors of segregationand social hierarchization, exerting their influence on the respectiveforces of both these movements, guaranteeing relations of domination andeffects of hegemony. The adjustment of the accumulation of men to that ofcapital, the joining of the growth of human groups to the expansion of productiveforces and the differential allocation of profit, were made possible inpart by the exercise of bio-power in its many forms and modes of application.The investment of the body, its valorization, and the distributive managementof its forces were at the time indispensable.

One knows how many times the question has been raised concerning therole of an ascetic morality in the first formation of capitalism; but what occurredin the eighteenth century in some Western countries, an event boundup with the development of capitalism, was a different phenomenon havingperhaps a wider impact than the new morality; this was nothing less than theentry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life ofthe human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere ofpolitical techniques. It is not a question of claiming that this was the momentwhen the first contact between life and history was brought about. On the contrary,the pressure exerted by the biological on the historical had remained verystrong for thousands of years; epidemics and famine were the two great dramaticforms of this relationship that was always dominated by the menace of death.But through a circular process, the economic—and primarily agricultural—developmentof the eighteenth century, and an increase in productivity and resourceseven more rapid than the demographic growth it encouraged, alloweda mea sure of relief from these profound threats: despite some renewed outbreaks,the period of great ravages from starvation and plague had come toa close before the French Revolution; death was ceasing to torment life sodirectly. But at the same time, the development of the different fields ofknowledge concerned with life in general, the improvement of agriculturaltechniques, and the observations and measures relative to man's life and survivalcontributed to this relaxation: a relative control over life averted some ofthe imminent risks of death. In the space for movement thus conquered, andbroadening and organizing that space, methods of power and knowledge assumedresponsibility for the life processes and undertook to control and modifythem. Western man was gradually learning what it meant to be a livingspecies in a living world, to have a body, conditions of existence, probabilitiesof life, an individual and collective welfare, forces that could be modified, anda space in which they could be distributed in an optimal manner. For the firsttime in history, no doubt, biological existence was reflected in political existence;the fact of living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that onlyemerged from time to time, amid the randomness of death and its fatality;part of it passed into knowledge's field of control and power's sphere of intervention.Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects overwhom the ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the masteryit would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the levelof life itself; it was the taking charge of life, more than the threat of death, thatgave power its access even to the body. If one can apply the term bio-history tothe pressures through which the movements of life and the processes of historyinterfere with one another, one would have to speak of bio-power to designatewhat brought life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicitcalculations and made knowledge-power an agent of transformation of humanlife. It is not that life has been totally integrated into techniques thatgovern and administer it; it constantly escapes them. Outside the Westernworld, famine exists, on a greater scale than ever; and the biological risks confrontingthe species are perhaps greater, and certainly more serious, than beforethe birth of microbiology. But what might be called a society's "thresholdof modernity" has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on itsown political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle:a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modernman is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being inquestion.


(Continues...)
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Publisher
Duke University Press Books
Publication date
2013
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0822353350
ISBN 13 
9780822353355
Binding
Paperback
Number of pages
456
Editor
Campbell Timothy, Sitze Adam