basis: the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.
Biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.
implication: the politics and sovereignty of killing vs. letting live
Foucault's biopower: who is the subject of the right to kill? Is biopower a sufficient explanation for the justification of murdering the enemy as the main goal?
-
Politics, the Work of Death, and the
Becoming Subject
-
The State of Exception: a condition where sovereign can transcend the rule of law in the name of the public good
- ex. Nazi death camps: often primary example of
absolute power of the negative
. In this case the state of exception no longer has a time limit.
- Normative reading of Democracy: Politics is defined by its paradigms:
- autonomous venture (reason = subject's truth) vs. agreement through communication (politics as the exercise of reason in public sphere)
- Instead of
reason
being our truth, why not life and death
and other more direct experiences?
-
How does death structure our idea sovereignty, the political, and the subject?
-
First, he discusses some dominant ideas about the death and our personal relationship to it:
-
Hegel: the human becomes a subject, separate from the animal, via work & struggle. Work/struggle = confrontation with death.
- Hegel's life of the Spirit:
that life which assumes death and lives with it. Spirit attains its truth only by finding itself in absolute dismemberment.
(vs. fear of death)
- DEATH holds significant means to finding the truth.
- exists in the realm of absolute knowledge and meaning
- Politics can be seen as
death that lives a human life
-
Georges Bataille:
- death & sovereignty: Life itself exists only in bursts and in exchange with death.
stench of life
- is at once source and repulsive condition of life. Devoid of meaning.- Essentially self-consciousness.
- in realm of absolute expenditure: the luxurious character of death: It is so excessive that it cannot be negativity, as Hegel would say; it is excess and anti-economy.
- correlation between: DEATH, SOVEREIGNTY, SEXUALITY: (losing form to make new form)
- truth of sex: sexuality is linked to violence/dissolution of boundaries of body and self.
- sovereign world: where the limit of death is done away with. (requires the risk of death so you can defeat it)
- politics: the difference that disorients the idea of the limit. Put into play by violating a taboo.
-
Biopower and the Relation of Enmity
-
Sovereignty here means: the right to kill. He cites the two states of Exception and Siege. Emergencies in these states are partly real, and partly manufactured.
- State of Exception: (see pg. 1)
- State of Siege: the government limits people's freedom to enter or leave
- In these states, what is the role of government and the fictionalized notion of the enemy?
-
Foucault: finding subgroups within humanity to decide who lives and dies. Biological.
- racism and creation of the
other
: tool to decide life and death
- sovereign decides death:
the calculus of life passes through the death of the Other; or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to kill in order to live.
- foundations of Nazi dehumanization: colonial imperialism, Industrial Revolution and WWI's mechanization of people, etc.
- Reason and Terror: tradition of the public seeking revenge and blood (French Revolution etc.)
- Terror and narratives of mastery and emancipation:
The historical self-creation of humankind is itself a life-and-death conflict.
- ex. Communism as survival against tides of capitalism: social relations must be decommodified forcefully.
The subject of Marxian modernity is, fundamentally, a subject who is intent on proving his or her sovereignty through the staging of a fight to the death.
-
SLAVERY: early instance of biopolitical experimentation
- plantation as state of exception
- slave's triple loss: home, control of body, political status. This triple loss is identical with absolute domination, natal alienation, and social death (expulsion from humanity altogether).
- not community (community needs power of speech and thought)
- individuals are kept in state of injury
- plantation owner owns their life
- Slave life as death-in-life.
- because of this, another life arises:
Treated as if he or she no longer existed except as a mere tool and instrument of production, the slave nevertheless is able to draw almost any object, instrument, language, or gesture into a performance and then stylize it. Breaking with uprootedness and the pure world of things of which he or she is but a fragment, the slave is able to demonstrate the protean capabilities of the human bond through music and the very body that was supposedly possessed by another.
-
COLONIALISM: the colony as a formation of terror
-
Sovereignty in the Colony:
consists fundamentally in the exercise of a power outside the law (ab legibus solutus) and where peace
is more likely to take on the face of a war without end.
- (This is seen in Carl Schmitt's earlier definition of sovereignty:
the power to decide on the state of exception
)
- States and European domestication of war / creation of juridicial order
- Patterns of 'rights' to death and control as seen in Imperial Colonialism:
-
the right to wage war
- european decision to kill / make peace was in the fundamental definition of a state
- state could not rule outside its borders
- state organized ways of 'civilizing' killing (the act itself)
- territorialization of the sovereign state: determination of frontiers in new global order
- The result is a distinction between rules applying to Europe and to the globe (areas seen as available for colonial appropriation).
- Colonies are not organized in state form: this state of exception is deemed to operate in service of
civilization.
Colonial warfare is not subject to legal and institutional rules. Simultaneously, the natives are seen as part of nature, less than human, and can be killed without humanizing the act in terms of murder.
-
Necropower and Late Modern Colonial Occupation
- Colonial occupation: seizing, asserting control over an area and giving that area new rules.
- Sovereignty, in this condition: occupation. Occupation means relegating the colonized populations to sub humanity (between subjecthood and objecthood).
- Colonial Spatialization: new dividing of territory
- ex. South African apartheid: township (oppressive controlled place to live) vs. homelands (rural bases/reserves). Laws were imposed so that blacks couldn't own land etc.
-
PALESTINE: (Late-Modern Colonialization)
- the colonial state claims fundamental sovereignty based on history and identity, due to a
divine right to exist
-
Violence & sovereignty: both have a divine foundation (and
otherness
is defined by deity worship)
- violence towards Palestinians [nominally] validated by a history of violence: Holocaust; the
original crime
- Types of violence and sovereignty:
- territorial fragmentation: sealing off and expansion of settlements.
- the Politics of Verticality (Eyal Weizman): 3d of boundaries across sovereign bulks vs. planar division of territory. y-axis division (above and under ground along geographic line, which leads to precise killing from the air).
- colonial occupation operates with over/underpasses (separation of airspace and ground), as well as terrain. Roads separate Israeli/Palestinian traffic networks.
- surveillance and control: both internal and external in this new colonialism
- infrastructural warfare: bulldozing and uprooting of homes, trees, and resources.
- Late-modern colonial occupation connects multiple powers: disciplinary, biopolitical, and necropolitical. Forced seclusion leads to invisible killing as well as outright execution.
- State of Siege = a military institution.
- Killing: does not distinguish between the external and the internal enemy. Freedom is given to local military commanders to use their discretion as to when and whom to shoot. Movement between the territorial cells requires formal permits.
-
War Machines and Heteronomy
-
Contemporary Wars:
- Wars of Globalization: 'hit-and-run' (versus past: conquest, acquisition, takeover)
- Increased collateral damage, long and short term damage intended to force enemy into submission. More like nomadic attacks than those of sedentary nations.
- examples: Gulf War & Kosovo: targeted life-support system of the enemy. (Cutting off all of Belgrade's resources).
- patchwork of powers and territories that change and shift in the war, rather than the
regular army
occupying a specific geographic space.
- ex. African wars and political trends:
- the people at war are not of one group, military manpower is bought and sold by people whose identity is insignificant.
-
war machines: made up of segments of armed men that split up or merge with one another depending on the tasks to be carried out and the circumstances. Polymorphous and diffuse.
- arose in Africa in late 20th century because post-colonial governments couldn't build economies to sustain political authority and order.
- not enough resources, inability to form debts (often plants seeds of political ties), leading to enclave economies
- enclave economy: an economic system in which an export based industry dominated by international or non-local capital extracts resources or products from another country
-
management of the multitudes: the extraction and looting of natural resources by war machines goes hand in hand with brutal attempts to immobilize and spatially fix whole categories of people or to unleash them, to force them to scatter over broad areas no longer contained by the boundaries of a territorial state.
- these people are then divided into refugees, rebels, child soldiers etc.
- massacre: now that weapons are more powerful, in a condition defined by life or death, this is the new tragic measure of power:
War is no longer waged between armies of two sovereign states. It is waged by armed groups acting behind the mask of the state against armed groups that have no state but control very distinct territories; both sides having as their main targets civilian populations that are unarmed or organized into militias.
- Genocide. Brutality to the body. The meaning of a skeleton.
-
Palestine
-
the logic of martyrdom vs. the logic of survival
- Death and terror vs. terror and freedom: terror at heart of each
- Elias Canetti: survivor is the one who, having stood in the path of death, know- ing of many deaths and standing in the midst of the fallen, is still alive.
-
- logic of survival
each man is the enemy of every other. It is the death of the other, his or her physical presence as a corpse, that makes the survivor feel unique.
- logic of martyrdom
-
- trapping of the body
- enemy is a prey for whom a trap is set
- location: spaces of everyday life
- the body: uniform, concealed weapon, new relationship of form and matter.
- The sacrificed identifies himself with the animal on the point of death. Thus he dies seeing himself die
- power may be derived from the belief that the destruction of one's own body does not affect the continuity of the being
- Martin Heidegger argues that the human's
being toward death
is the decisive condition of all true human freedom. In other words, one is free to live one's own life only because one is free to die one's own death.
- Biopower is insufficient to account for contemporary forms of subjugation of life to the power of death.
- death-worlds, new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead