Presentation: Calvin Davison, Esposito's The Enigma of Biopolitics

Calvin Davison
LITCS 114
Bldg. 494, room 160B
3 March 2016

Summary

In The Enigma of Biopolitics, Esposito takes an in-­depth look at biopolitics in order to explain why it is an enigma. He begins by reviewing and analyzing the historical texts that influenced Foucault, he also analyzes texts from the second and third waves of biopolitics. He then picks apart the close connection between biopolitics and history, biopolitics and sovereignty and subjectivization and death.

Part One: History

Biopolitics is now an important part of national conversations. The concept of biopolitics has undergone many shifts in how it’s presented and defined throughout the years. It can be used to closely examine and explain concepts of law, sovereignty and democracy.

• Esposito makes it clear, that although biopolitics has considerable power to affect these categories, it does not replace them.
• It is important to note that these categories have also shifted through time.
• Esposito states that the domain of law is gaining terrain both domestically and internationally (13).
• Sovereignty has also increased, Questions of life and death no longer have to do with single areas, but with the world in all of its extensions.

Despite the importance of biopolitics to the current world, the term continues to be defined somewhat ambiguously, there are several reasons for this.

• Biopolitics can be used in philosophical debate and can be debated about.
• biopolitics appears to be situated in a zone of double indiscernibility.
  • It is hard to differentiate ζωή from βίος.
  • The relationship between βίος and ζωή is further complicated by technology.
  • How can politics react with natural life if technology is now so intertwined with human life?

Biopolitics vs. biopower

• Biopolitics is politics in the name of life.
• Biopower is life subjected to the command of politics.
• These two terms often become confused.

Biopolitics is subject to competing readings and continuous rotations of meaning. This means it is in danger of becoming an enigma due to differing interpretations.

Esposito identifies and analyzes many different texts that influenced Foucault: The first few texts he analyzes take an organistic approach to biopolitics.

• The first few are a selection of primarily German essays that are joined by a vitalistic conception of the state (16).
  • The second organist essay is Rudolph Kjellén’s The State as a Form of Life.
  • In his essay the state is understood to be a living form.
  • Like any living thing, the state has instincts and natural urges.
• Kjellén’s essay was the first to propose the natural state as something that could not be overcome by politics.
• The political is nothing else but the continuation of nature at another level and therefore destined to incorporate and reproduce nature’s original characteristics.

The next text that influenced Foucault was the essay that used an anthropological approach to biopolitics, Staatsbiologie by Baron Jakob von Uexküll.

• He employed a pathogenic model of the state
• He claimed that Germany was a single body threatened by diseases of subversive trade unionism, electoral democracy, and the right to strike (18).
• He claimed that immigrants were pathogens that could either become symbionts in the system or true parasites that would harm the system and therefore, by extension the citizens.
• He concludes that Germany needed an immune system in the form of state doctors to control the true parasites.

The third text is the naturalistic approach: Bio-­politics by Morley Roberts.

• Roberts believes that politics and biology, and particularly medicine are tightly intertwined.
• He goes into an in depth association of the different parts of state as different parts of the human immune system.
• The difference in his system is that he assumes the host or state can die from its infection.
• He also highlights expulsion of races in his model.

The second wave of biopolitical theory happened in France in 1960.

• Aroon Starobinski argues for the possibility as well as the necessity that politics incorporates spiritual elements that are capable of governing these natural powers (20).

The essays of this wave still fail to define biopolitics in a non-­generic way.

Third wave starts in 1970 in the Anglo­-Saxon world.

• A research site opens for studying biopolitics.
• International conventions were held.
• Journals, associations.
• Shift in philosophy
  • While political philosophy presupposes nature as the problem to resolve...American biopolitics sees nature its same condition of existence (22).
  • Politics can’t conform to nature’s ends, so it becomes informed by it.

Intersection of Darwinian evolution and ethological research

• Social events do not require historical explanations
• All political behavior that repeats itself with a certain frequency in history—­from the control of territory to social hierarchy to the domination of women­—is deeply rooted in a prehuman layer not only to which we remain tied, but which is usually bound to resurface. (23)

Part Two: Politics, Nature, History

Esposito turns his attention to Foucault’s writing now. Foucault has to distance himself from his predecessors in order to take a new stance on biopolitics.

• Foucault and his predecessors all shared a general dissatisfaction with how modernity has constructed the relation among politics, nature, and history.

Sovereignty and power

• Foucault argues that all modern philosophies must exist within a three-point grid of sovereignty, people and law.
• The concept of sovereignty relies on the existence of two distinct entities, namely, the totality of individuals and power.
• There is a zero-sum relation between the sovereign and people.
• In other words, when people gain rights, the sovereign’s power decreases and vice versa.

Conflict

• The sovereign can only have power based on his right to rule, and he can use rights to ensure his dominance.
• The presumed conflict between sovereignty and law is displaced by the far more real conflict between potential rivals who fight over the use of resources and their control because of their different racial makeup (26).
• War uses the protection of people’s rights to excuse the death it causes.

Shift of crime from individual injuring sovereign to individual damaging society.

• The criminal act is no longer charged to the will of the subject.
• This causes the line between law and medicine to blur.

Politics affects life, life affects politics.

• While political actions are imposed on life, life enters into power relations.
• Foucault asserts that liberty, democracy and equality are derived from βίος.

Foucault places life at the center of the frame.

• Nothing more than life...is touched, crossed, and modified in its innermost being by history (29).
• Darwin’s accidents of a historical nature influenced Foucault’s view of nature and history.
• Contrary to Anglo­-Saxon views human nature does not stand alone.
  • human nature depends on culture and history.

Redefining biopolitics

• biopolitics is defined by the way in which politics grasps, challenges, and penetrates life (30).
• history and nature as well as life and politics are tightly intertwined.

Subjectivization and death

• biopolitics either leads to subjectivization or death.
• If biopolitics produces subjectivity, it can be considered a politics of life.
• If biopolitics produces death, it can be considered politics over life.
• The two vastly different outcomes add to the paradox that is biopolitics.

Part 3: Politics of life

Biology and politics are locked in a power struggle.

• either life holds politics back, pinning it to its impassible natural limit, or, on the contrary, it is life that is captured and prey to a politics that strains to imprison its innovative potential (32).

Relation between sovereignty and biopolitics

• Biopolitics and sovereignty can be chronologically related to each other or superimposed on each other.
• Foucault splits over both views in his theories.

Biopolitics is incompatible with sovereignty

• Where sovereignty attempts to control land, new politics attempt to control human bodies.

Subjectivization

• The common Judeo-­Christian analogy for subjectivization is that of a Shepherd with his flock.
• The members of the flock have Subjective participation in the act of domination.

Police science

• The police need to be able to produce goods as well as protect against harm.
• Object of police is to ensure that citizens thrive and live.

We are able to support and resist power

• In fact life appears to dominate the entire scenario of existence (38).
• In other words, by having life we are able to manipulate power.

Part Four: Politics over Life

Esposito notes that Foucault does not answer the question If life is strong enough to resist the power that besieges it, why is there a mass production of death in our modern day society?

• Esposito questions how so many genocidal wars can be fought in a period of biopolitical scholarship.
• Nuclear power forces us to ask How is it possible that power of life is exercised against life itself? (39)
• Now wars are not waged for power, but for protecting human life.
• This is a paradox: we need death in order to protect life and allow it to thrive.
• Biopolitics constantly blurs lines with Thanatopolitics.
• Thanatopolitics concerns itself with questions of who should live and who should die.

Sovereignty and biopolitics cannot be placed on a single line

• They are better modeled on separate lines that occasionally intersect
• There are two contrasting theories on biopolitics
  • The first is that it was the old sovereign power that adopts biological racism for itself (41)
  • The second is the new biopolitical power that made use of the sovereign right of death in order to give life to state racism (41)
• These hypotheses place either sovereignty as a tool of biopolitics or biopolitics as a tool of sovereignty
• Foucault identifies both hypotheses but does not side with either, he in fact comes up with his own opposing hypothesis that the disappearance of the sovereign paradigm allows a vital force break free

Continuist vs. discontinuist hypotheses

• Continuist: genocide is the natural outcome of life
• Discontinuist: any violence is an exception to the rule

Esposito concludes with his idea why biopolitics is an enigma

• The two terms of life and politics are to be thought as originally distinct and only later joined in a manner that is still extraneous to them (44)
• He claims that the only way to stop biopolitics from being an enigma is to use a different interpretive key to analyze it