Biopolitics: A Reader edited by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze

8/14/2019 Biopolitics: A Reader edited by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze

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biopoliticsa reader

Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, editors


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A John Hope Franklin Center Book


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biopolitics

a reader

imothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, editors

Duke University Press Durham and London 2013


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2013 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States o America on acid-ree paper

Designed by George . Whipple

ypeset in 10/14 Minion Pro by Westchester Publishing Services

Library o Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Biopolitics : a reader / imothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, editors.

pages cm

A John Hope Franklin Center Book.

Includes bibliographical reerences and index.

ISBN 978-0-8223-5332-4 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8223-5335-5 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. BiopoliticsPhilosophy. I. Campbell, imothy C.II. Sitze, Adam.

JA80.B547 2013

320.01dc23

2013032321


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Biopolitics: An Encounter 1

imothy Campbell and Adam Sitze

1

Right o Death and Power over Lie 41

Michel Foucault 2

Society Must Be Deended, Lecture at the Collge de France,

March 17, 1976 61

Michel Foucault

3

Te Perplexities o the Rights o Man 82

Hannah Arendt 4

Selections rom Te Human Condition 98

Hannah Arendt

5

Introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Lie 134

Giorgio Agamben

6Te Politicization o Lie 145

Giorgio Agamben

CONTENTS


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vi | Contents

7

Biopolitics and the Rights o Man 152

Giorgio Agamben

8

Necropolitics 161

Achille Mbembe

9

Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death

in the Lie o the Universal 193

Warren Montag

10Biopolitical Production 215

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

11

Biopolitics as Event 237

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

12

Labor, Action, Intellect 245Paolo Virno

13

An Equivocal Concept: Biopolitics 269

Paolo Virno

14

Te Biopolitics o Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions

o Sel in Immune System Discourse 274Donna Haraway

15

Te Immunological ransormation:

On the Way to Tin-Walled Societies 310

Peter Sloterdijk

16

Biopolitics 317Roberto Esposito


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Contents | vii

17

Te Enigma o Biopolitics 350

Roberto Esposito

18

Te Diffi cult Legacy o Michel Foucault 386

Jacques Rancire

19

From Politics to Biopolitics . . . and Back 391

Slavoj iek

20

What Is It to Live? 412Alain Badiou

21

Immanence: A Lie 421

Gilles Deleuze

Acknowledgment o Copyright 427

Index 429


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.

Tere comes a moment in the history o a concept when, looking back, one

recognizes a break, an event, something that appears to have set in motion

everything that comes afer; when what was impossible to see beore presents

itsel, now seemingly without complication, as the origin that provides thelens with which the lines o uture pasts can be glimpsed. As a result, not only

do the earlier contexts by which the concept was understood shif, but so too

does the horizon o meaning shared with other conceptsthe moment when

living contexts, as Walter Benjamin might say, are transormed into the origin

o the concept itsel.

No such singular moment comes to mind when charting the history o

biopolitics. No dening interval offers itsel as the lens able to superimpose

the past and the uture, allowing us to look back and say, ah, yes, it was pre-cisely then that biopolitics was born, exactly then that politics gave way to

biopolitics, power to biopower, and lie to bios, zo, and the orms o lie that

characterize our present. Part o the reason or the missing origin o biopoli-

tics may be simply a question o timeor better, not enough time, as not enough

time has passed or a complete accounting o biopolitics, biopower, and or

their possible genealogies and archaeologies to have been written. Indeed, it is

only today, at a moment that seems both belated and too soon, that a codica-

tion o the biopolitical is underway. For many years now, in a process that ismore automatic than one would hope, we have been witnessing the seemingly

inescapable selection o authors and texts, the exclusion o others, the catalogue

INTRODUCTION

BIOPOLITICS AN ENCOUNTER


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2 | Introduction

o genres that characterize the eld o studyin a word, the writing o a

canon. Given that such a project remains incomplete, competing versions, not

only o the origins o biopolitics, but also o the question o its principal sub-

ject and object, will continue to spark debates, transatlantic and transpacicexchanges, and struggles or conceptual dominance. Tis is a salutary part o

the codication currently underway; it is essential or coming to terms with

why biopolitics continues to be eatured so prominently in contemporary on-

tologies o the present. o be sure, this means that no point or observing the

totality o biopolitics is available to us: there exists no perspective that would

allow us to survey and measure the lines that together constitute the concepts

theoretical circumerence. But this also means that what at rst appears to be an

endless processdebating the endlessly blurred boundaries o biopoliticsis at

one and the same time something else as well: an occasion or thinking. It is

an opportunity to ree ourselves rom any one map or navigating the rough

seas o the biopolitical, be it the straightorwardly historical and empirical,

the phenomenological, the existentialist, the post-Marxist, or the posthuman.

What to some might eel like a missing ground thus evokes or us a different

response: an invitation to be creative; a call to ask impertinent questions that

one normally might be too embarrassed or too araid to ask; a solicitation tobring other methodologies, practices, and interpretive keys to bear on the

study o biopolitics so as to mark, with all necessary caveats, where we stand

in relation to it.

With this in mind, the ollowing pages have been written not merely under

the sign o biopolitics, its emerging limits, paradoxes, and increasing theo-

retical weight, but also its recesses, olds, and shifing contours. o do so we

have opted to dramatize biopolitics as the expression o a kind o predicament

involving the intersection, or perhaps reciprocal incorporation, o lie and poli-tics, the two concepts that together spell biopolitics. Te problem at the core o

that meetingthe task, perplexing yet also inescapable, o coming up with a

theory to make sense o the encounter between the concepts o lie and

politicsalso lies at the very heart o some o the most exciting and diffi cult

developments in scholarship today.

Te reasons or this centrality are, in one sense, not hard to understand.

So many o the crises that orce themselves upon our present, afer all, seem to

pivot on the very same axis. oday, or example, we witness the resurgence oneo-Malthusian anxieties that overpopulation and high birth rates in unde-

veloped regions will push the earths various agricultural carrying capaci-


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Introduction | 3

ties beyond their breaking point. We participate in debates over healthcare,

social security, retirement ages, abortion, and immigration that are so chronic,

bitter, and entrenched that in many countries they have led to violence and

the breakdown o longstanding political institutions. We engage in strugglesover the unequal global distribution o essential medicines and medical tech-

nologies, maniested most visibly in the / pandemic. We observe a

constantly morphing War on error (or, as it is now called, Overseas Con-

tingency Operations) whose security tactics range rom drone strikes to

racial proling to the normalization o exceptional juridical spaces such as

indenite detention in Guantanamo Bay to the massive surveillance o all

orms o electronic communication. We discover the emergence o a global

trade in human organs, with body parts excised rom the healthy bodies o

the poor in impoverished regions o the earth, and then transported and

transplanted into the sick bodies o the rich. We experience the development

o new technologies whose innovative potentialities strain, to the point o rup-

ture, against established codes o intellectual property rights, not to mention

longstanding traditions o morals and ethics, producing not only what seem

to be unprecedented possibilities or a new mode o political economya

commons that is neither private nor publicbut also the conditions ora redoubled return o old antasies o immortality: whereas the modern

subject dreamed o becoming a prosthetic God, the contemporary subject

wants to use technology to overcome mortality itsel, once and or all, whether

through a gradual, generalized negation o death or through the achieve-

ment o a sudden, rapturous singularity.

Te examples could be multiplied, but our point by now should be clear:

taken together, these crises have produced a context in which there is a de-

mand or scholarly theories that illuminate the relations between lie and poli-tics. o this demand theres been at least one particularly strong response: the

reactivation o an account o lie and politics offered some thirty years ago by

a French philosopher named Michel Foucault. Foucaults rst analysis o bio-

politics appeared in a short piece, more an appendix than anything else, ti-

tled ominously enough Right o Death and Power over Lie, which orms the

nal part o his 1976 book, La volont de savoir.Tat this little text eventually

would launch its own share o articles and books was not at all clear in 1978,

when the text rst appeared in English as Part III o Te History o Sexuality,Volume . Tose o us old enough to remember reading it nearly upon publica-

tion will recall that early scholarly attention initially ocused on Foucaults


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nding that sexuality was a problem or the Victoriansa then shocking

discovery that today is more likely to elicit shrugs than anything elseand on

the implications o Foucaults concept o power or Freudianism and Marx-

ism. Te texts concluding passages on biopolitics, by contrast, seemedanomalous i not aberrant: apparently unconnected to the pages that preceded

them, these passages also would seem disconnected rom the two urther vol-

umes o Te History o SexualityFoucault would publish beore his untimely

death in 1984. Consequently, it seems, Foucaults short remarks on biopolitics

would be received by Anglophone scholars in a most symptomatic manner,

with a silence all the more pronounced or appearing at a moment when Fou-

caults work otherwise was becoming inuential in almost every discipline in

the humanities and social sciences.

Over time, however, these other pages o the La volont de savoirbegan to

gain traction. Certainly, eminist readings o Foucaults biopolitics, especially

Donna Haraways 1989 essay on postmodern bodies, played an early and

important role in pushing orward biopolitics as a central category in post-

modernity.Te same could be said or readings set orth by tienne Balibar,

Paul Gilroy, Agnes Heller, and Anne Laura Stoler, each o whom, albeit in very

different ways, singled out the term in the 1990s as a decisive horizon or stud-ies o the politics o race.Yet it was not until 1998, with the English translation

o Giorgio Agambens provocative rereading o Foucaults Right o Death and

Power over Lie in Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Lie, that Fou-

caults long-dormant text on biopolitics was reactivated in its current orm.

With the appearance o Agambens controversial commentary on Foucault,

which in 2000 was ollowed by the very different but equally controversial

appropriation o Foucault by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their book

Empire, the concept o biopolitics began to migrate rom philosophy tonot-so-distant shores, including but not limited to the elds o anthropology,

geography, sociology, political science, theology, legal studies, bioethics, digi-

tal media, art history, and architecture.

Te result is what might be called a biopolitical turn: a prolieration o

studies, claiming Foucault as an inspiration, on the relations between lie

and politics. As part o the voracious intellectual appetite or everything

biopolitical, a slew o related neologisms has entered into circulation. In addi-

tion to bioethics, biotechnology, biopower, and biohistorybio-terms thatwere all, in one way or another, already in circulation prior to the biopolitical

turnscholars now proposed to study bioculture, biomedia, biolegitimacy,

4 | Introduction


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bioart, biocapital, biolabor, bioscience, biohorror, bioeconomics, bioinormat-

ics, biovalue, biodesire, biocomputing, biotheology, biosociety, and biocen-

trism, among others. Working in the best experimental spirit o the philosophic

traditions o empiricism and nominalism, the inventors o these neologismsseemed to have wanted to shed light on whats new or unprecedented about

the present. And yet even as the content o these terms seemed resh and new,

their orm remained amiliar, even traditional. Its odd, afer all, that the stan-

dard nouns o disciplinary reasonart, culture, science, society, economics,

capital, and so onshould so consistently repeat themselves at and as the root

o these inventions, as i the old objects o existing academic discipline would

somehow be transormed simply through the piecemeal addition o the prex

bio-. Indeed, interpreted as a general phenomenon that exceeds the con-

sciousness o any single scholar, the compulsion to reinterpret everything

today in terms o biopolitics appears to repeat a similar inationary tendency

that began nearly two decades ago, when during the cultural turn o the

early 1990s it seemed like everything could and should be reinterpreted with

reerence to culture. I its the case that todays biopolitical turn is warranted

by some sort o desire to comprehend the new, something unprecedented in

our present, its thus curious that the neologisms through which this desirehas expressed itsel nevertheless silently obey a disciplinary grammar that is

anything but new.

Other scholars, reacting with irritation to the compulsive novelty that

seems to drive the biopolitical turn, have written it off as nothing more than a

mere ad. For these scholars, biopolitics is little more than a passing trend o

academic ashion, and a particularly insidious one at that. Not least because

the biopolitical turn has brought with it renewed attention to the sort o onto-

logical problems to which the empiricist social sciences have long been aller-gic, these critics have tended to denounce the emerging discourse on biopolitics

or its neglect o historical and cultural contextualization, or its monolithic,

reductive, and homogenizing claims, and or its embrace o a theological lexi-

con that seems to be mystiying and vague, i not also politically regressive.

Te brusque tone o this criticism notwithstanding, its ar rom clear that

dismissals o this sort allow any escape whatsoever rom the ull thrust o

biopolitical questioning. Some skeptics o biopolitics, or example, seem to

believe it possible to disregard the claims that characterize the biopoliticalturn simply by pointing out its incommensurability with the redemptive energy

o the existing principles o modern democracy. Tese same critics, however,

Introduction | 5


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ofen ail to ask what it means that these very same principles derive their en-

ergy precisely rom the secularized assumptionthanatopolitical to the core,

i Agamben is correctthat every human lie is and must remain sacred.

Tese scholars seem to want a secular, egalitarian politics that improves theliving standards o the worlds populations; but they cannot account or the

genesis and basis o their own sense o urgency (or, as Hannah Arendt might

put it, or the way they experience the necessity o their own political com-

mitments). In the end, it seems to us, the tendency to dismiss biopolitics as

mere ashion is not only premature (since so ofen the very premises o these

same dismissals, unexamined as they are, testiy to their ailure to ully digest

the conceptual challenge o biopolitics). Its also, ultimately, just as symptom-

atic as is the tendency to turn biopolitics into the very synecdoche o the

new: neither approach, in our view, is able to understand why it is that biopo-

litical inquiries into the relation between lie and politics should turn out to

require, with such unusual regularity, a undamental rethinking o one o the

basic categories o the philosophy o history, namely, the event.

.

Tis anthology offers the reader a chance to produce a much different response

to the biopolitical turn. We think theres a more diffi cult, but also more re-

warding, way to think about the demands o a world in which the couplet o

lie and politics seems to reappear as the innermost interior o every resh

crisis. Rather than enthusiastically affi rmbiopolitics as the newest, latest, and

most obvious theoretical response to these crises, hastily rejectbiopolitics as

nothing more than the newest, latest, and most passing o academic ads, or

deensively reiybiopolitics into yet another empiricist and historicist researchagenda, we propose an attentive re-readingo the texts that today have become

the source o so much dispute, in so many languages and regions, and that as

such have come to constitute something like a paradigm o biopolitics.

Tis will be a rereading that doesnt pretend, as do the various declensions o

the biopolitical turn, that theres a coherent concept o biopolitics that can be

extracted intact rom La volont de savoir, as the prior condition or its

straightorward affi rmation, rejection, or application. Put differently, we dont

suppose that Foucaults brie remarks on biopolitics, whether in his little 1976book or, especially, in the lectures concurrent with that book, can be inter-

preted as though they are consistent, transparent, and ully worked-through.

6 | Introduction


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In our view, Foucaults oray into biopolitics was anything but straightor-

ward. Filled with doubts and second thoughts, Foucaults writings on biopoli-

tics involve shifs, eints, changes in ocus and directionperhaps even, as

Foucaults most ungenerous critic has put it, deceptions.What appear tobe explicit conceptual innovations thus turn out to be, on reection, implicit

returns to problems Foucault had thought through earlier in his intellectual

itinerary. What looks like a coherent path or thought, mapped out in detail

and in advance by this new cartographer, reveals itsel instead to be a trail

that ades away into the conceptual wilderness. Conversely, what seem to be

explicit rejections o research on biopolitics, turn out on second thought to be

intensied engagements with biopolitics, only now on a new plane and in di-

erent terms. All o this implies a very denite reader o Foucault: one who is

alive not only to what Foucault saidin these pages but also, and much more

importantly, to what Foucault lef unsaid. Tis will be a reader who is less

concerned with affi rming, rejecting, or applying Foucaults biopolitics, than

with understanding precisely the turbulence o Foucaults textits hesita-

tions, doubts, and uncertainties. She will understand not only how these

generative opacities enablethe various declensions o the biopolitical turn but

also, and, again, much more importantly, retain the potential to exceed it romwithin.

Supposing a reader o this sort, we want to begin the task o rereading by

returning now to the text that seems to so many to have been the birthplace o

biopolitics: the nal pages o La volont de savoir. We reopen this text with the

intention o preparing the reader, in turn, to take a resh look at the more re-

cent texts on biopoliticsthe texts that, together, have recursively constituted

La volont de savoiras a sort o Urtext, an original score that seems to have

guided the way the relation between politics and lie has been understood inthe biopolitical turn. Our aim is to linger with the reader, in particular, over a

set o utterances that, precisely in their repetition over the last three decades,

seem to have materialized into what Foucault himsel would call statements

the nuclei, as it were, around which discourses orm.Our desire is neither to

praise or blame this rerain, nor to chant or march along with it. We instead

want to enjoin the reader to hear with us in these statements a different set o

repetitions, a set o silences that seems to us to be arhythmic and aberrant, but

to that same degree inviting and even provocative. Tis is a rereading that be-gins to unold only once the reader rst becomes alert to the impassesFoucault

encountered when he tried to work through the relations o lie and politics in

Introduction | 7


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the closing passages o La volont de savoir.Tere are at least our: species

living, the power o lie, the new millennial animal,and the resolution to live.

Scored together, these impasses allow us to take a step back rom our common

sense about the relation o lie and politics, in order to inquire into its mean-ing, conditions, and goals. aken together, in other words, they allow or the

encounter between lie and politics to be problematized, and as such, to be

thought anew.

Species LivingTe rst impasse in Foucaults account o lie and politics involves the intro-

duction o what Foucault in other venues reers to as knowledge-power. In Lavolont de savoir, Foucault relates this particular orm o knowledge-power

not only to the emerging eld o biology, but also to the development o di-

erent elds o knowledge concerned with lie in general, agricultural tech-

niques among them.Te period o European history in question is one to

which Foucault will return repeatedly in his discussions o biopolitics: the

period immediately preceding the French Revolution. Te overall effect o

these changes was a relaxation o deaths grip over lie; not absolutely, he

notes, but relatively. He writes:

In the space or movement thus conquered, and broadening and organizing

that space, methods o power and knowledge assumed responsibility or the

lie processes and undertook to control and modiy them. Western man was

gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world, an

individual and collective welare, orces that could be modied, and a space in

which they could be distributed in optimal manner. For the rst time in his-

tory, no doubt, biological existence was reected in political existence; the acto living was no longer an inaccessible substrate that only emerged rom time

to time, amid the randomness o death and its atality; part o it passed into

knowledges eld o control and powers sphere o intervention.

In this passage, Foucault locates a junction or lies uture enmeshment with

politics. As death withdraws, however slightly, gains are made in knowledge

about the substrates o lie that have now become accessible. With this shif,

in turn, we witness the emergence o a spacea year earlier in his lectures atthe Collge de France collected in Security, erritory, Population, as well as in

the last text he would ever author, he will preer to speak o a milieuin

8 | Introduction


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which Western man attends to the signicance o being part o a species

that lives while at the same time living in a world that is alive. In making this

claim, Foucault seems to assume that beore the conuence o lie and politics

that emerges thanks to the development o these lie-producing techniques,Western man did notully apprehend lie in terms o species, nor that the

world in which Western man lived actually merited the qualier living.

Foucault will give to this history a curious namebiohistorythat is, at

present, just as neglected as biopolitics was a decade ago. With this term,

Foucault proposes to mark those moments o pressure in which the move-

ments o lie and processes o history interere with one another, and which,

in turn, parallel an intensication o biopower.Foucault will place a caesura

at the moment o lies greatest intererence with history, distinguishing a pe-

riod prior to their encounter that he in the essay (as well as across his lectures

at the Collge de France rom 19751976 in Society Must Be Deended) will

call sovereignty. Beore deaths respite, Western man, when not dead, was,

according to Foucault, less alive than he later became.

We can well imagine why: when the risks o death appeared imminent

through epidemics or war, the possibility o eeling alive was much more lim-

ited. And yet such a division between history and biohistory proper raises aquestion, one that inorms so many o the essays collected here. What really

does it mean to say that lie has a history? Liethe very paradigm, it would

seem, o novelty and renewal itsel seems constitutively opposed to the

past that history cannot but take as its object, as well as to the uture his-

tory or which cannot help but to prepare us. What sort o events would this

biohistory consider, and how, i at all, would those events differ rom the

sort o events that contemporary philosophers, most notably Deleuze and

Alain Badiou, propose to consider? In what ways, or example, might our veryexperience o lie or esh today itsel, precisely in its immediacy and nov-

elty, derive its implicit schema rom a long-past event (such as the secularization

and immanentization o the Christian notion o the aferlie, or the emergence

o modern democracy in and through the beheading o the king)? What

meaning can lie have in an epoch, when lie itsel is no longer outside o

history, i it ever was, but is now simply an effect o history itsel, one o its

variables and contingencies? What meaning can living have when no element

o lie is outside the domain o politics, and no political interest can be oundthat does not in the last analysis concern lie? Conversely, how might certain

concepts o liepertaining to mortality and immortality, necessity and

Introduction | 9


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urgency, newness and the oldinscribe themselves into historiography itsel?

How might certain presuppositions about lie govern the very eld within which

historical knowledge then comes to be valuable or lie? For some o the think-

ers who appear in this anthology, the best response to this question will be toretranslate it into new and different termsdisplacing aliveness with im-

mortality, or redirecting species toward multitude. Others will respond by

radicalizing the trope o the organism as machine that has governed modern

philosophy since at least Descartes and Hobbes.For these thinkers, the task o

biohistory is to imagine a uture that does not so much anxiously question as

embrace the enraming o bare lie (or what Agamben calls zo) by techn

whether those be the bio-engineered humans o the sort imagined by Peter

Sloterdijk, the materially immortal beings theorized by Nishitani Osamu, or

the sort o cyborg lives or which Donna Haraway called in 1989.And or still

others, it signals a deense o linguistic virtuosity or the advantages o hybridity

as a model or an affi rmative biopolitics.

Foucaults own perspective in Right o Death and Power over Lie on

species living will move across different registers, but as the essay comes to

a close he will settle on an important shif in ocus: rom law to norm. In a

series o earlier lectures, o course, Foucault had devised an archaeology o theabnormal, and so in a sense his return to the conceptual axis o the norm isnt

surprising (even i it is, as Roberto Esposito notes, much more opaque than

Foucaults commentators have acknowledged). In La volont de savoir, by

contrast, Foucaults shif rom law to norm takes place alongside a homolo-

gous shif rom history to biohistory, with each shif in its turn being spurred

by a specic event: the emergence o population as an object o knowledge and

power. With the advent o biohistory, sovereignty wanes and with it the law as

the primary means by which sovereign power is exercised. Ofen the sugges-tion in these pages is that in a post-sovereign milieu, populations are less

subjected to sovereign power than they are governed through norms.Te

result is that living as part o a species or Foucault entails learning to live

with norms. Whereas beore the advent o biohistory, Western man did not

know how alive he was ( just that he was not dead), once the sel-evidence o

death withdraws, we witness the emergence o contingent standards or what

qualies as living. No timeless, transcendent lie and death laws determine

the destiny o this species, only changing, immanent measures that allow orthe evaluation o varying degrees and kinds o living. Knowing these norms

orms a pedagogical imperative or Foucault. Just as laws, Foucault tells us,

10 | Introduction


18/47

become norms, so too do institutions give way to the odd ensembles he calls

dispositis or apparatuses.

Foucaults use o the term dispositi, which is much more central to La

volont de savoirthan the English translation allows us to perceive,has in-creasingly become the subject o interest on the part o those writing today in

a biopolitical key.As such, it will be helpul to dwell here on some o whats

at stake in Foucaults use o the word. In an interview rom 1977, Foucault sets

out a number o meanings or the term. Te concept o apparatus, Foucault

says, names a thoroughly heterogenous ensemble o elements such as insti-

tutions, architectural orms, regulatory, decisions, administrative measures,

and laws; it is also a ormation which responds strategically to an urgency,

which is why apparatus enjoys a dominant strategic unction; it is also a set o

strategies o the relations o orce supporting, and supported by, certain types

o knowledge.When read against the narrative o lie and politics sketched

thus ar, it rapidly becomes clear why the concept o apparatus dominates so

much recent reection. Tis concept serves as a bridge between lie and poli-

tics; it is one o the ways in which their chiasmic intersection is measured, e-

ected, and elt as a strategic urgency. Te result is not that law ades into

the background or that the institutions o justice tend to disappear but ratherthat the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institu-

tion is increasingly incorporated into a continuum o apparatuses (medical,

administrative, and so on) whose unctions are or the most part regulatory.

In this prologue to biopolitics, jurisprudence cedes the stage to the appara-

tus, which aims at regulating lie with reerence to norms instead o laws, and

which discharges this aim with an intensity derived rom the newly strategic

necessity o lie or politics.

Tese apparatuses have a second unction as well. Not only do they re-mind us that we are alive in a living world or that together they separate his-

tory rom biohistory, separating species that are more alive rom those that

are less alive; they also represent what Foucault calls a biological threshold o

modernity: But what might be called a societys biological threshold o

modernity has been reached when the lie o the species is wagered on its own

political strategies.o describe this encounter, Foucault will use a curious

turn o phrase, one that is by no means sel-evident, but one whose implica-

tions are worth dwelling on and explicating. Biopolitics, in his phrasing, in-volves a sort o game in which nothing less than the species itsel, the species

as a living entity, is at play or at stake [enjeu].Given these stakes, it would

Introduction | 11


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be a mistake to underestimate the seriousness o this game. It is in act a wa-

ger, a most high-stakes gamble. Te impression reading Right o Death

and Power over Lie as well as Te Birth o Biopoliticsand Security, erritory,

Populationis o a game in which lie, which beore was one among a numbero stakes, begins to drif to another in which lie has now become the only

stake. Some o the reasons or such a drif surely concern the increasing effi -

ciency with which risk is calculated, such that calculations lead to a orm o

wagering over lie. Another reason may well be that the increasing material

valuations o lie, which were less possible when lie was held at bay by death,

begin to make it easier or a staking o lie in a context o wagering to take

place; as long as the knowledge-power on which the operation o apparatuses

was premised was insuffi cient to coalesce as a normalizing power around its

object, lie.Whatever the reason, an increasingly high-stakes speculation

about the status o lie and living begins. Knowledge o biopolitics entails risky

propositions: deaths slight withdrawal or living opens up the space or a

knowledge o lie that is irreducibly probabilistic in orm, such that under-

standing lies enmeshment with politics always involves some roll o the dice

about the uture o both lie and politics. In this sense, knowing the story o

how lie and politics come together means asking how it has come to be thatcollective lie has assumed the orm o a massive beta deadly serious game

o chance in which the population is at once the central playerand the main

prize, at once the subject o politicsand the objective o politics itsel.

Power o LieTe wagering on lie by politics that sets the scene or the birth o biopolitics

at the end o the eighteenth century isnt only ocused on a living species. As

knowledge-power takes lie as its object, and as the norm inects the law to-ward it, the body becomes available in ways that it hadnt beore or power. It

is at the level o the body that the conjunction o lie and politics will be elt

precisely because where lie beore was innite in Foucaults accountFoucault

will name it classical being in his 1966 book Les mots et les choses, translated

into English as Te Order o Tingslie is soon contained by the body. It is

when the body has been opened up and opened by power that we have a Kehre

or pivot that will spell the birth o biopolitics in Foucaults story.

Power would no longer be dealing simply with legal subjects over whom the

ultimate dominion was death, but with living beings, and the mastery [la prise]

12 | Introduction


20/47

it would be able to exercise over them would have to be applied at the level o

lie itsel; it was the taking charge o lie [la prise en charge de la vie] more than

the threat o death, that gave power its access even to the body.

Here, much as we saw above, the story o the encounter between lie and poli-

tics is marked by a chiasmus. Now, however, the chiasmus is not between lie

and history, but between the body and power. Tis taking charge o lie through

the body by power is one that inorms as well a number o readings collected

herethe immunitary declensions o biopolitics in Donna Haraway and

Roberto Esposito in particular.So too Alain Badiou, who will subtly shif

the wager rom lie to lies boundaries, that is to its ostensible container, the

body.Tis ocus on the body in biopolitics as cause and effect or its emer-

gence as a category indicates too that there is a mode o eeling, o being aware

o the body, that would make clearer just how ofen lie is wagered across

a bodys duration or time, or a subjects experience. Yet we should also note as

many do here that the taking charge o lie set in motion by a certain regime

o knowledge-power (which we might call the non-teleological natural sci-

ences), also includes another kind o holding that isnt merely on the side o

power. Such a possibility o grabbing hold o lie all the way to the body is notlimited to the state or the institution, but is enacted as well by the subject o this

new knowledge-power. Tat possibility is o course at the heart o Foucaults

reading o neoliberalism two years later in Te Birth o Biopolitics.

We note something else in the encounter between lie and politics, which

concerns precisely Foucaults bringing together living beings with how they

are seized. Tis notion o the seizing or the holding o living beings is one that

will reappear in the decades ollowing the publication o La volont de savoir,

as well as in his lectures rom the 1980s. Foucaults insight is that a power thatseizes living beings differs rom an earlier power that exercised power over

lie without also being able to take hold o it. We know the name o such a

power: sovereignty. Sovereignty with all its laws didnt undamentally seize

lie. Te knowledge-power o lie, however, doesand it does so in the precise

degree that scientic knowledge grasps the processes internal to the body.

Tis hold over living beings through and across their bodies that precedes

the advent o biopolitics is one Foucault spoke about in terms slightly different

rom sovereignty in Te Order o Tings. Tere Foucault, in lieu o speaking osovereignty per se, preers to describe what he calls the classical period o

being.

Introduction | 13


21/47

Classical being was without aw [sans daut]; lie, on the other hand, is with-

out edges or shading [sans range ni dgrad ]. Being was spread out over an

immense table; lie isolates orms that are bound in upon themselves. Being

was posited in the perpetually analyzable space o representation; lie with-draws into the enigma o a orce inaccessible in its essence; apprehendable only

in the efforts it makes here and there to maniest and maintain itsel.

Soon afer he notes: Biological being becomes regional and autonomous; lie,

on the connes o being, is what is exterior to it and also what maniests itsel

within it.Tese passages precede Foucaults reading o biopolitics, but they

are helpul in making clear the place o the body. One o the ways that lie

isolates orms that are bound in upon themselves will be through the body.We might well conclude then that the body provides the edge that power

grasps with its new knowledge o lie. With this reading in hand, biopolitics,

rather than resolving the opposition between lie and politics, attempts to solve

the enigma o a orce inaccessible in its essence by isolating lie in its corpo-

real orm. Te impasse that emerges here pertains to something like a missing

chronology. Classical being is succeeded by the enigma o the orce o lie,

which the conjunction o bios and politics in biopolitics answers. In other

words, biopolitics is the explicit solution to an inexplicit problem: powers in-

ability to ully access lie. Te more that knowledge-power grows in intensity,

the more the scene is set or the question o lie to be answered by apparatuses

that ocus, in particular, on the body. As the prior condition or this access, we

must call attention to a detail that other readings tend to overlook: in a biopo-

litical horizon, lie becomes representable once again. Te analyzable space o

representation that beore characterized beingnow, thanks to powers seizure

o the body, shifs toward lie.

Te Millennial AnimalOnce lie encounters the political thanks both to the lessening o deaths elt

presence and sciences mastery o lie through the body, bets on lie begin to

be placed at the level o the population. Modern man is born. But here Fou-

caults story veers unexpectedly. Rather than simply examining the ways in

which politics and lie come together across bodies in what Foucault calls an

anatomo-politics, he returns to the earlier theme o species living and re-rames it now as an antimetabole. It is this reraming that continues to grab

the attention o so many. Te passage: For millennia, man remained what he

14 | Introduction


22/47

was or Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity or a political

existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a

living being in question.Lets linger over the passage or a moment by rst

noting again the rhetorical move that will characterize so much o Foucaultsreection and those writing in a biopolitical key more generally. In Foucaults

transposition, the adjective living moves rom qualiying the noun ani-

mal to qualiying a much different noun: being. Te result is that lie

takes up the place o politics and politics the place o lie. Te reason or

this reversal, Foucault argues, is that something has changed with regard to

politics. Here there are two moments the reader should register. First, cross-

ing the biological threshold o modernity, or millennia political had quali-

ed existence, marking an addition to living. Once the biological threshold

or modernity has been crossed, by contrast, politics is now shorn o its quali-

ying status. Politics is no longer about addition; no longer does it qualiy

existence. It now appears to have become autonomous rom existence. Te

impression is that in some way this autonomy o politics is the condition or

problematizing what beore was not a problem. Te move rom addition to

autonomy, rom the political to politics, suggests not only that politics

lacks a mooring, but also that one o the main effects o this newly unmooredpolitics is to coner upon lie an unprecedented position. Modern man is no

longer a living animal but an animal who has somehow been separated rom

living being. Where beore man was a living animal under conditions o sov-

ereignty, which is to say under the classical episteme, now man is an animal

whose living has migrated to being. Only when politics has separated the ani-

mal rom his living can the very status o living be called into question. Te

living animal is replaced by an animal whose livingis in some sense separable

rom its existingwithout, we might say with recourse to the etymology othe word existence itsel, the ability to stand outside the living being he

discovers himsel to be (ex-sistre, to stand outside). Modern man, in other

words, exists in ways that the pre-modern animal did not thanks to a reeing

o politics rom its mere status as capacity or addition. Powers grasp o lie

(in the double sense o grip and understanding) does not allow us to stand

outside o our own lives, to project ourselves, to devise narratives able to change

the conditions o our living non-existence. We are the animal whose politics

place that existencenote existence, not liein question.Second, lets also note that Foucaults introduction o the animal whose

existence is put into question isnt really all that surprising. As he notes in Te

Introduction | 15


23/47

Order o Tings when speaking o Georges Cuvier and the science o living

beings, i living beings are a classication, the plant is best able to express its

limpid existence; but i they are a maniestation o lie, the animal is better

equipped to make its enigma perceptible.Once the animal comes to mani-est lie, that is to show us the incessant transition rom inorganic to the

organic by means o respiration or digestion, and the inverse transormation

brought about by death, death enters the rame once again. It is this swerving

o lie toward the animal in biopolitics that re-introduces death, but now rom

the inside, transorming the organic into the inorganic.Te animal in ques-

tion, it bears remarking, is not Aristotles political animal, but rather an ani-

mal who enrames a specic episteme (to remain with Foucaults terminology)

characterized by a cohabitation o death and lie that will be named living.

We recall that earlier Foucault had described the slackening o deaths hold

over lie which set the scene or Western mans opening to species living.

Here, however, death appears to return through the backdoor via the animal,

which Foucault reminds us was not the case with plants: Te plants held sway

on the rontiers o movement and immobility, o the sentient and the non-

sentient; whereas the animal maintains its existence on the rontiers o lie

and death. Death besieges it on all sides; urthermore, it threatens it also romwithin, or only the organism can die, and it is rom the depth o their lives

that death overtakes living beings. Te outcome o this change in course o

lie toward the animal is decisive or biopolitics: Te animal appears as the

bearer o that death to which it is, at the same time, subjected; it contains a

perpetual devouring o lie by lie. It belongs to nature only at the price o

containing within itsel a nucleus o anti-nature.Te intensication o the

death-bearing attributes o the animal appears as one possible outcome o the

encounter between biosandpolitika.What are we to make o this millennial animal who exists but perhaps

does not live and what mode o being is appropriate to the man and woman

who have crossed over the threshold o modernity into the crucible that re-

peatedly sutures lie and politics? What kind o chiasmic knowledge is con-

sistent with such an animal? What kind o problems does such an existential

animal respond to? Tese questions are a deeply important part o the ollow-

ing reader. Indeed we might say that all o the writers here are attempting

to work through what this state o existential animality ultimately means. Inthat sense, this reader is directed to the animal that we have become, or are

becomingand this is not just any animal, but the animal whose biopolitics

16 | Introduction


24/47

pose a threat to itsel. Tis is not to say that the authors collected here are in

agreement with Foucaults diagnostic. Clearly they are not, but all do respond

to it. For our part, we think it worthwhile to reect on the consequences o the

story Foucault tells about lie and politics, especially in relation to Foucaultsstunning phrase: a biological threshold or modernity. Even a quick glance

at the anthology o readings collected here suggests that the biological thresh-

old or modernity has shifed since Foucault wrote. Where will it be ound

today?

By way o response, lets return to an earlier moment in Right o Death

and Power over Lie in which Foucault, again in the language o wager and

gambling, speaks o another staking o lie that occurs thanks to the possibil-

ity o nuclear annihilation: Te principle underlying the tactics o battle

that one has to be capable o killing in order to go on livinghas become the

principle that denes the strategy o states. But the existence in question is no

longer the juridical existence o sovereignty: at stake is the biological exis-

tence o a population.For Foucault, decisions about the existence o those

populations are increasingly inormed by the naked question o survival.

Here to survive means crossing the biological threshold o modernity, to be-

come part o a population whose existence is the object o a political wager.Although Foucault will have little to say about the pedagogical effects o

this shif, surely one such effect will be learning what it means to be staked

collectivelywhat it means, in other words, to survive, to desire that ones

individual existence be sustained through some sort o wager on collective

lie. oday these gambles would seem to be at the very heart o contemporary

existence. In casino capitalism and other assorted orms o neoliberalism,

entire populations (o donors, o consumers, o persons) come into existence

whose effect is to send its members scurrying to learn how to survive indi-vidually. We survive without existingor, better, we survive individually

having orgotten how to exist collectively (given that there is no longer any

outside lef to view, let alone to stand on).

And yet this existing as part o a population and surviving solely as an

individual undoubtedly has another effect, namely to heighten, or a privileged

ew, the pleasures o being alive. Paradoxically, the more that populations be-

come unnecessary or superuous or capitalism, the more capitalism

reies the sensation o aliveness itsel as a scarce commodity thats indemand. Te more that certain populations are made the object o political

strategies that call their very existence into question, in other words, the more

Introduction | 17


25/47

euphorically alive other populations eelnot despite, but because o, the

planetary gambles in which theyre involved. Tis reader asks you to consider

this vertiginous wagerthis dizzying spiral o pleasure and poweras a third

impasse we inherit rom the analysis o the mastery o lie we nd analyzedin La volont de savoir.

Resolved to LiveOvercoming classical being and sovereignty, politics now reaches into the in-

terior recesses o lie through the body, making lie the very subject o and

object o politics. Lies dramatic need to maintain itsel and maniest itsel as

Foucault describes it nds its ally in a orm o politics that no longer maniests

itsel only within the traditional institutions, practices, and discourses o

modern politics. We see such a new politics liberated rom the traditional po-

litical spaces o old everywhere we look: in courts, in Western parliaments, in

metropolitan public spaces, and in amilies in which the political is nowhere

to be ound.And yet, the very return o the animal no longer moored to the

political raises questions about the direction that biopolitics will take rom

this point orward. Tis because in Foucaults analysis the animal carries

death within it, setting the stage or the nal act in the narrative o lies chi-asmatic exchange with politics. How can lie manage to maniest and main-

tain itsel when one result o the emergence o biopolitics is precisely to have

intensied the mortiying eatures o the subject o biopolitics, namely the

animal? Another way o saying this would be to note that in the birth o bio-

politics, an antinomy with regard to lie can be sensed: the increase in the

space or living creates an opening or politics, which in turn alters the ormer

relation between death and lie. Te earlier questions we raised about species

living and grabbing hold o lie merge into a more undamental question:what part does politicized death play in the suturing o lie and politics?

Here Foucault has little to tell us directly in Power o Death and Right

over Lie. We can glean a number o possibilities rom Foucaults other

works. In a seminar that appeared in 1976 as part o the lectures at the Collge

de France as Society Must Be Deended,which is included here, Foucault will

link the increasingly signicant role o death in biopolitics to racism which

reaches paroxysmic levels in the twentieth century during Nazism. In that

setting, biopolitics appears deeply homologous to thanatopolitics. Tere, theliving o a certain sel-identied race o human beings becomes identical

with the goal o excluding another race rom lie itsel, as i the death inter-

18 | Introduction


26/47

nal to lie could be avoided not by deerring it, but by displacing it, by creating

a stark new caesura internal to species-being. Te orm o racism Foucault

here invites us to consider is very different rom the sort o racism that now

has been reied into a lens or social scientic research. Te racism weexperience in the biopolitical eld cant be reduced either to the biological

essentialism that some complacent critics o racism have come to identiy

with racism as such, or to the neo-racismthe emphasis on xed and

immutable cultural differencesthat is the dialectical counterpart o this

complacent critical dependency on the authority o the natural sciences. It is a

paradoxical orm o racism, a racism that sorts out and hierarchizes popula-

tions without also seeking support either in theoretical racism (such as so-

cial Darwinism, Malthusian economics, or eugenics) or spontaneous racism

(the sort that ocuses on phenotype, and derives rom hatred, ignorance, or

irrationality).In the strict Foucauldian sense, in act, biopolitical racism pro-

duces its thanatopolitical effects in populations without any explicit reerence

to race whatsoever. Its a racism that, instead o reerring to race, now re-

ers, thanks precisely to the universalist tendencies o contemporary biology,

only to ambiguous caesur internal to a single species. It doesnt seek to

exclude certain populations rom the institutions o civil and political lie; itexplains why, despite so many painstaking attempts at inclusion, certain pop-

ulations nevertheless seem permanently incapable o achieving ourishing

lives within those institutions. Speaking now in the name not o a master

race, but on behal o the entire human species, it helps us understand why

enduring disproportions in unemployment, imprisonment, crime, and dis-

ease are not matters or political dispute or political resistance, but simply

ongoing statistical anomalies and pathologies the available political and ju-

ridical remedies or which have beentragicallyexhausted.Te result is aracism that is proper to laissez-airecapitalist economy: a racism that explains,

without open hostility, why the current unequal distribution o biopower

the distribution o the globalized world into lie zones (where citizens are

protected by a host o techniques o health, security, and saety) and death

zones (where wasted lives are exposed to disease, accident, and war, and

lef to die)regrettably could not be otherwise.

Foucault, o course, was not content simply to let biopolitics drif to the

thanatopolitical. As the recent publication o Foucaults later seminars sug-gests (not only the political lectures collected together under the titles Secu-

rity, erritory, Population and Te Birth o Biopolitics, but also his later

Introduction | 19


27/47

ethical courses on the Greeks), the intensication o death across popula-

tions is only one among many iterations o the biopolitical. In these other

texts, Foucault directs the reader toward governmentality as another possible

response to the power over lie. Such an outlet or biopolitics in governmen-tality, toward the governing o sel and others, is one that Foucault will nd in

the production o the collective interest through the play o desire, leading

him to speak o the naturalness o population and the possible articiality o

the means one adopts to manage it. At the same time, however, its ar rom

clear exactly what sort o politics is implied in Foucaults writings rom this

period. For a reader like Jacques Rancire, Foucaults problematization o

social security during the late 1970s leaves Foucaults thought on biopolitics

constitutively exposed to an appropriation o a Reagonite sort, where gov-

ernment is not the solution to our problems, but the problem itsel. Although,

on Rancires read, Foucault may not be the technocrat his earlier critics

supposed him to be, the ambiguities o his late books on ethics and politics

nevertheless permanently admit the possibility o nding in Foucault the ex-

emplary claims o neoliberal thought.

o be sure, Foucaults apparent abandonment o the project he outlined in

La volont de savoir did take place under conditions dened by the rise topower o neoliberal theories and practices in Deng Xiaopengs China, Marga-

ret Tatchers England, and Ronald Reagans America.Not least, however,

because Foucault during this same period ocused his attention on the ques-

tion o what it means or a philosopher to relate to the events o the living

present, we would be off the mark were we to consent to this reading too quickly.

During these eight incredibly pregnant years o lectures and inquirythese

lectures whose genius is inseparable precisely rom their incompleteness,

their open and exposed relation to their own present, their courage tothink out loudFoucault revealed how, among other things, neoliberal-

ism can accomplish the political aims it inherits rom pastoral powerits at-

tempts, that is to say, to provide or the salvation o both one and all only

on condition that itrstproduce a subject who conducts himsel as an entre-

preneur o himsel.Neoliberalism governs by metaphorizing the market as

a game, by metaphorizing the state as its umpire, and by metaphorizing indi-

viduals and populations as players or whom all choices are in principle

possiblewith the one exception o the choice not to play the game o themarket at all.

Given the way that neoliberalism not only totalizes but also individualizes

20 | Introduction


28/47

us, Foucaults amous ethical turn at the close o the 1970shis shif rom

the analysis o modern apparatuses o power-knowledge to a set o close

studies o ancient Greek practices or the care o the selmay not be the

solipsistic retreat or apology or neoliberalism that some scholars today sup-pose it was. Not only do these critics o Foucault seem to orget that all o

Foucaults ostensibly modern studies o power-knowledge during the 1970s

amounted, in effect, on Foucaults own terms, to an extended interrogation o

the genealogy o another ancient Greek gure (namely, Oedipus yrannos,

who in 1973 Foucault situated as a ounding instance o a relation between

power and knowledge rom which our civilization is not yet emancipated);

they also appear to leave in silence the sense in which Foucaults nal lectures

marked the beginnings o a maniestly philosophical act to cut against the

denitive events o his present, to create a political and theoretical lexicon

that would be up to the unprecedented task o bringing about the rst anti-

pastoral revolution.Under biopolitical conditions, in other wordsthese

conditions in which subjects are herded or shepherded by the neopastoral

practices o deregulation, privatization, incentivization, and marketization to

survive only insoar as one and all manage to conduct their lives in a suffi -

ciently entrepreneurial wayFoucaults ethical turn may be understood toyield nothing less than a paradigm o political resistance to the specic mode

o pastoral power that conronted him in his own present.

On this read, we would be obliged to think again about the politics im-

plied in the practice o philosophical truth-telling Foucault rediscovered, in

the last years o his lie, in the works o Euripides and Plato. Tis risky prac-

tice o courageous perormative statementsthe principled carelessnesso the

sel the Greeks called parrsiaconsisted o speech unadorned by any rhe-

torical techn, political speech the utterance o which, Foucault noted, had thepotential to place into question the very lie o the speaker himsel.In these

nal lectures o his lie, it would thus seem, the courage to tell the truth was

already emerging within Foucaults thought as the name o a death-deying

biopoliticsa counter-dispositito the thanatosthat is internal to and consti-

tutive o neoliberalism, a mode o seriousness that could serve as a counter-

point to the compulsory play o the market. ruth-telling, that is to say,

qualies as one o many techniques that could link the care or the polity di-

rectly and essentially to the ethical task o living well.Ethics, thought biopo-litically, would not then be reducible to a matter o individual choice; it would

make the political once again a qualier o being. Especially i one rereads

Introduction | 21


29/47

Foucaults La volont de savoiralongside his earlier work, and his oeuvreas

such within the horizon o the Marxist critique o capitalism, Foucaults

thought on biopolitics doesnt then exempliy neoliberalism, so much as pro-

vide an interpretive key or its deciphering and dissolution.

.

Without pretending this rereading o La volont de savoiris in any way com-

plete, lets nevertheless set down Foucaults book or a moment, in order to

return to and clariy the premise o this exegesis. What we hope to have pre-

sented to the reader by tarrying with Foucaults text in this way is the unusual

dynamic that seems to be at play in La volont de savoir. In the very text that

the biopolitical turn has converted into an Urtextor clariying the relations

between lie and politics, the encounter between lie and politics reveals itsel

not as a relation but as a series o non-relations. In La volont de savoir, it

seems to us, lie and politics encounter one another mainly in and through a

set ogenerative aporiasimpasses that arent merely negative, but that in

each case double as productive spaces, blind spots the very opacity o which

doubles, paradoxically, as a source o insight. Its this strangely inviting un-readability that, in our view, helps explain the sheer repetition o the story

Foucault tells, indeed the storys capacity, as it were, to get a grip or hold

on Foucaults readers. In particular, we think it no accident that Foucaults

text would incite so many readers to recite the story o biopolitics using the

terms and tropes o theatrein the orm o what Foucault himsel might have

called a theatrum philosophicum.Not least because the encounter between

politics and lie is, in genealogical terms, derived in part rom the relation

between the mask and the body,its understandable that Foucaults remarkson biopolitics should have been so consistently interpreted within the biopo-

litical turn with reerence to the terms o amiliar dramatic genres (such as

tragedy, comedy, epic, and horror). For Aristotle, remember, poetics is the study

oplotits the analysis o narrative twists and turns, o ironic reversals, o

sudden recognitions and ateul mistakes and errors, and above all o events.

Impasses o the sort we have outlined in La volont de savoirseem to us to

provide the prior condition on which Foucaults text may be converted into a

plot so dened: they seem to us to operate as so many hollow joints and emptysockets, so many open pivot points, the main unction o which is, in turn,

to allow readers to narrativize, using the amiliar and recognizable terms o

22 | Introduction


30/47

existing genres, an encounter thats otherwise unrecognizable, that indeed

has no genre o its own. Its with this in mind that we have collected the ol-

lowing readings. Each elaborates some element o Foucaults story; none

exhausts it.Te rst reading comes rom that political philosopher who Foucault al-

ways seems to have read, who sometimes even seems to have read Foucault,

and whose writings on lie and politics are biopolitical in all but name.

Foucaults 1976 reections on biopolitics, remember, taper off in an incom-

plete meditation on the strange way that lie and law interrelate in modern

politics. In modernity, Foucault argues, human needs, human potential, and

human possibility became juridied: they became the rallying cry or a new

revolutionary politics grounded in the rights o man and o the citizen. But,

Foucault observes, this happened at the same time that biopower was begin-

ning to consolidate its mastery o the body through new regimes o power/

knowledge. At the center o the rights o man, Foucault suggests, is thus a

curious impasse. Te modern concept o lie reers less to a single, stable es-

sence, than to a set o continuously shifing norms (pertaining to health and

welare, saety and security) that measured a set o intrinsically limitless de-

mands (you can never have enough saety or health, afer all).

Because thesenorms and demands eluded the juridical orms that proposed to protect lie

(and, classically, law operated through stable denitions o clear limits), the

rights o man could not materialize in the absence o very specic adminis-

trative apparatusesapparatuses whose structures needed to be just as vari-

able and expansive as the lie they proposed to govern was unpredictable and

unbounded. Te result was that human lie entered into law at the very mo-

ment that biopower grasped lie as a series o indenite, enigmatic processes,

and handed lie over to apparatuses o governmentality whose operation thenquickly began to exceed law rom within. Te rights o man, in other words,

were declared at the precise moment when law lost touch with lie.

As we know, Foucault would proceed to study this aporia rom the interior

o politics, by inquiring into the way that power gained access to lie through

the problematization o sexuality. Tirty years earlier, by contrast, Arendt

already had studied a similar aporiaonly rom the exterior o politics. Writ-

ing in the midst o the reugee crisis that emerged in the wake o the Second

World War, Arendt inquired into the aporia o human rights rom the stand-point o the masses o stateless people who had been excluded rom all legal

protections except those o human rights. Originally published in 1951, a year

Introduction | 23


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afer the Universal Declaration o Human Rights, Arendts reections on Te

Perplexities o the Rights o Man circle around an insoluble impasse internal

to that Declaration. Te stateless people who at that time clearly were most

in need o the protections o human rights were also those who were leastlikely to be protected by human rights. Because no right can be enorced out-

side o the horizon o an established political community, human rights were

all but meaningless or populations who no longer belonged to any political

community. And this, in turn, gave rise to the aporia that provoked Arendts

thought. At the very moment that the loss o their home qualied stateless

people as pure humans (as humans in general, rather than as members o

this or that particular political community, as English or French), their

human rights no longer could be effectively invoked. Te one subject to

whom human rights in principle ought to applythe abstract and naked

human, the human being conceived in its most basic existential givenness

was thereore also the one subject to whom human rights did notand could

notapply at all. Te community o those who belonged to no other commu-

nity except humanity as such, and who in principle should have been at the

very center o all human rights, were thereore paradoxically excluded rom

any human rights. Like the declaration o the rights o man analyzed byFoucault, the human rights analyzed by Arendt were declared at the precise

moment when law lost touch with lie. In the thinking o both Foucault and

Arendt (though in very different ways, and with much different corollar-

ies), the inclusion o lie within lawthus coincides with the exclusion o lie

rom law.

In the selection rom Te Human Conditionwe reproduce here,mean-

while, Hannah Arendt inquires into another o the problematics o lie and

politics that Foucault would take up only much later. Her point o departure isa conceptual reversal that anticipates one o Foucaults own, but without also

being reducible to it. For Arendt, the distinctive character o modern politics

is exemplied by its productive mistranslation o Aristotles ormulation o

the human: or the moderns, the human is not a political animal but rather

a social animal.In Arendts view, modern thought transposes to the po-

litical domains o action and work the concept o necessity that, or Aristo-

tle, was the hallmark o the reproduction o lie (through household labor and

the labor o childbirth itsel) and that, as such, was very antithesis o bothaction and work. Te symptoms o this transposition o lie onto politics, in

Arendts telling, include the disappearance o persuasion and reedom rom

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politics, the displacement o immortality by mortality as the central orm or

political historiography, and the emergence o violent techniques o govern-

ment dictated by the necessity o deending society against its own potenti-

alities o mortality and natality. In some ways, Arendts anxieties over modernpolitics seem to lead her to narrate the encounter o lie and politics in the

genre o a horror story: lie, in Arendts rendering, ofen seems like a blob

that is about to attack politics.In other ways, however, Arendts criticisms o

the modern reduction o politics to the saeguarding o lie, her studies o the

introduction o mortality into historiography, her inquiry into the concept o

sacred human lie as the residue o the secularization o salvation, and

above all her thinking on the problems o birth and natalityall today seem

to be so many oblique heralds o Foucaults later, comparable inquiries. Un-

derstood in this manner, Arendts Human Conditionprovides a complemen-

tary response to the same general eventthe same general problematization

o lie and politicsto which Foucault responded in La volont de savoir:

whereas Foucaults text considers the problematization o lie by politics, Te

Human Conditiontakes up the problematization o politics by lie. And in this

sense, the birth o biopolitics takes place in a way and at a site thatin true

genealogical ashioncuts against the origin stories that govern the biopoliti-cal turn.

Following Arendt is a series o texts rom the greatest contemporary di-

vulgator o Foucaults biopolitical narrative, and devoted reader o Arendt,

Giorgio Agamben. For Agamben, biopolitics is less a plotting o lie and

politics than a clue that points to the secret, inner link between modern de-

mocracy and its constitutive double: the totalitarian state. In Agambens ren-

dering, the story o biopolitics is actually a continuing story about sovereignty,

o bare lie produced by the state o exception. More tragic than epic, thebiopolitical or Agamben is not at all synonymous, as it is not only or Fou-

cault but also or Arendt, with the emergence o modernity in and through

the overturningo Aristotle. Rather it is coterminous with the whole o West-

ern metaphysics beginning withAristotle. Reworking Foucaults reversals and

chiasmic sleights o hand, Agamben offers the reader a single narrative o the

adventures and misadventures o a single conceptual person: homo sacer,

which Agamben, using precisely the language o classical poetics, calls the

protagonist o his book.Tis requires Agamben to appropriate Foucaultstext in a way that cuts sharply against Foucaults answer to the question o

precisely how, why, and when it was that lie happened to become the object o

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politics. Here, as elsewhere, the attentive reader shall have to be vigilant about

the risk that unexamined assumptions derived rom some or another un-

stated philosophy o history might predetermine our thinking about bio-

politics. Indeed, as Jacques Derrida, among others, has shown, any rigorousinquiry into biopolitics can, and should, throw into question the basic con-

cepts o the philosophy o history itselup to and including the concept o

the event.

What goes or time holds or space as well. I, as Carlo Galli argues, every

political thought is both grounded in and riven by an implicit political

space that remains inaccessible to it,then exactly what political space is it

that stirs within Foucaults remarks on biopolitics? Is it the European city,

into which and out o which grain ows? Te territory o the sovereign Euro-

pean state, as Foucault himsel seems to suppose? Te concentration camp, as

Agamben proposes?Te milieu o Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and Jakob von

Uexkll?Or is Foucaults thinking on biopolitics most notable or the way it

seems to abandon any thought o space whatsoever?How, in any case, might

explicit reection on that political space change the way we think o biopoli-

tics itsel? aking up the gure o sovereignty and bare lie produced by the

state o exception, but now in the political space o the postcolony, AchilleMbembe merges Foucaults right to take lie and let live and Agambens

discussion o homo sacer.Te result is a distressing account o a new and

different dimension to contemporary biopower: its unction as necropower.

Extending and intensiying Foucaults arguably incomplete meditations on

biopolitics and racism, Mbembe directs the readers attention to the way in

which necropower unctions to destroy persons by creating the rigidly stri-

ated spaces he calls death-worlds. Tis reading o biopolitics, which de-

pends crucially on the thought o Georges Bataille, reveals an intolerableexpenditure o lie that becomes apparent when death reveals the human

subjects animal side. In that reerence to the animal, Mbembe also gestures

to a possible resolution o the massive negativity o necropower in trickery in

ways that some readers may nd deeply troubling. Mbembes text is ollowed

by Warren Montags response in Necro-economics: Adam Smith and Death

in the Lie o the Universal. Montag too takes up Agambens gure o homo

saceras the subject o biopower to make an argument about the role o the

negative in the market theology o Adam Smith. But where Mbembe ocuseson savage and animal lie in political spaces o siege and occupation, Montag

moves the narrative o biopolitics up slightly to a moment in the thought o

26 | Introduction


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Adam Smith, in order to rethink the concept now within the smooth space o

the world market. His answer, despite its differences rom Mbembe, is equally

distressing. Te subsistence o a population may, and does in specic cir-

cumstances, require the death o a signicant number o individuals; to beprecise it requires that they be allowed to die so that others may live.Re-

gardless o what the reader concludes rom her examination o the Mbembe

Montag dispute, she should not ail to note something else: the way biopolitics

unctions in this dispute as a spur or the rereading o the oundational texts

o modern political thought, in order to draw out their specically biopolitical

valences and sculpt them into optics or understanding our present.Tis, we

would submit, is another iteration o the remarkable way that biopolitics is the

name or a certain technique o retelling. Not only is it the case that energy

implicit in Foucaults narrative spurs its own retelling; it is also the case that

the energy rom Foucaults narrative spurs the retelling o certain amiliar

stories, such as the history o political thought.

For its part, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negris rereading o Foucault

stands at the polar opposite o Agambens. In the rst o their texts we include

here, a selection titled Biopolitical Production rom their 2000 book Em-

pire, Hardt and Negri interpret the biopolitical nature o the new paradigmo power, as a orm o power that regulates social lie rom its interior. o

do so they decisively shif the ultimate horizon or biopolitics and biopower to

society and the social space in which lie and politics encounter each other. As

compelling as Foucaults account is or a contemporary ontology o ourselves,

they argue that Foucault ailed to consider that the true shared object o bio-

politics and disciplinarity is precisely society. By appropriating Deleuzes no-

tion o societies o control along with Foucaults linking o biopower with

capitalist subsumption at the end o the ancien rgimeas well as Agambensparadigm o biopolitics, Hardt and Negri believe they can account or the

intensication and generalization o the normalizing apparatuses o discipli-

narity that internally animate our common and daily practices in ways that

Foucault, Deleuze, and Flix Guattari cannot. Te name they give to this

new society o biopolitical control and right and paradigm o power is Em-

pire, which they term a milieu o the event. en years later Hardt and Negri

return to Foucault in a context o subjectivization and event by ollowing out

a distinction between biopolitics and biopower. In their account the intersec-tion o lie and politics is less a chiasmic encounter than an event that olds

inside and outside. Biopolitics, as they read it, is a disruptive orce that arrives

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rom the outside rupturing the continuity o history. At the same time the

event on the inside appears as innovation and creation. Emphasizing the con-

cept o event allows Hardt and Negri to shif the angle o vision away rom

the separation o lie and politics, and to accentuate existence as an affi rma-tive horizon or biopolitics todaya horizon that becomes especially clear

once we achieve ull theoretical sel-consciousness about the kernels and rag-

ments o secularized theological traditions that never ceased to animate the

basic concepts o modern political reason in the rst place. From this view,

biopolitics is not then the name or a tragic plot according to which liberalism

is permanently ated to retain the potential to revert to totalitarianism; it is

narrativizable, to the contrary, as the experience o a new orm o commu-

nism, one that bears almost no relation to the old bureaucratic communism o

the twentieth century, and that, existing as it does in a state o permanent in-

cipience, is utopian or even messianic in character.

Alongside these selections, we have included two texts, Labor, Action,

Intellect and An Equivocal Concept: Biopolitics rom Paolo Virno. Here we

see Virno grappling with the ambiguity o Foucaults story, especially the em-

phasis on modern man as animal by ocusing on the linguistic experience o

human beings. Elaborating a model o virtuosity as a response to biopower orwhat he preers to call labor-power, Virno winds up ocusing on the multi-

tudes potential to produce, in which labor-power marks a uture capacity or

virtuosity, in language. Te difference between Hardt and Negris perspec-

tive on biopolitics and Virnos really concerns their poetics. For Hardt and

Negri, the general ground or their reading o biopolitics is a world in which

the laughter o the multitude is meant to dissolve biopower, which ends, as

most comedies do, with victory, in this case o the multitudes ully extended

subjectivization in the common. Virnos outlook too is primarily comic withhis emphasis on the sel-assuredness o the virtuoso who keeps the upper

hand over labor power. Ofen though the impression is something slightly

more tragic, given the ease with which the general intellect maniests itsel as

a hierarchical system, as a pillar o the production o surplus value.

Te third section o readings opens with Donna Haraways classic essay

Te Biopolitics o Postmodern Bodies: Determinations o Sel in Immune

System Discourse. Haraway shows how deeply riven Foucaults narrative is

by what she sees as traditional orms o European humanism. In her posthu-man response, she nds solace in imagining a biopolitical body whose im-

mune system allows or increasing levels o contamination and hybridization.

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O particular interest is her notion that the immune system is a kind o prac-

tice that inorms the dialectics o western biopolitics, one that operates as a

Foucauldian apparatus able to produce bodies at the interstices o the normal

and the pathological. Tis is no Agambenian production o the sacred or theproane given that any component in immune systems can be interaced with

any other. And yet despite the seemingly Dionysian overtones with which she

writes o immunization, Haraway is less than sanguine about the ultimate

possibilities or immunized, semi-permeable selves to overcome the impos-

sibilities o individuation and identication.

German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk takes up Haraways immunized

semi-permeable selves and extends them to the decadence o collective orms

o lie today. Associating the advent o biopower and biopolitics to what he

calls the elaboration o modus vivendi under globalization, his reading o

biopolitics is less a deense o communal orms o lie and more a symptomol-

ogy o the dissolution o sel and place that has occurred under neo-liberalism.

Sloterdijk offers what might be described as a biohistory o contemporary so-

ciety in which ethnic denitions o nation-states unction less and less as

containers or collective lie. In their place a wager ensues on the development

o immunological designs capable o creating within these societies perme-able or thin walls. Individuals are tasked with designing their own orms

o immunity within these societies. Sloterdijks reading o biopower and

globalization shares a number o points o contact with his earlier essay titled

Rules or the Human Zoo, especially in his superimposition o orms o im-

munity with orms o habitation and domestication. Here though Sloterdijk

more orceully commemorates the end o communal lie, while casting his

gaze across the present uture landscape o thin walls, empty places, and

selves absented rom social and personal identity.Roberto Esposito also takes up immunity as a way o coming to terms

with contemporary biopolitics, but rather than turning to the cyborg, he

introduces the gures o incorporation and esh as the way o being in com-

mon o that which seeks to be immune. Te result is to show how the

establishment o a biopolitical language across a number o different disci-

plines cannot be thought apart rom that languages explicitly communitar-

ian connotations. In the second selection, Esposito sketches a genealogy o

immunity in classic liberalism. On Espositos read immunization emerges asdeeply constitutive o a liberal, political lexicon, which includes sovereignty,

property, and liberty. Esposito doesnt upend Foucaults account o how lie

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becomes the object o the political so much as complement it; immunization

is seen as the means by which biopolitics both protects and in some cases ne-

gates a commonly held lie. In the second o two texts rom Esposito, the Ital-

ian philosopher details urther how biopolitics may be situated within thehorizon o immunization. O special importance is the role o the body or

both sovereign power and biopower. Building on Foucaults ambiguous

reading o the norm sketched in Right o Power and Lie over Death, Es-

posito argues that immunity and biopower in modernity have become

co-terminous to the degree that immunization o living bodies ofen turns

into sel-de

Documents

Biopolitics: A Reader edited by Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze