Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
Ibidem, p. 183.
Ibidem, p. 188.
21
M. Foucault, Il faut dfendre la socit, p. 228.
19
20
From an extreme boundary of power, death or rather the possibility of killing someone regarded as racially inferior or dangerous is integrated in the field of political action as a radical way of defending the lives
of those deemed worthy of defense and encouragement. This defense of
life by means of death is based on a system of normalization supported
by the Darwinian evolutionary model24, that is, a system of bio-regulation
of the State25. More than simply bared, this life that might be waived
life whose forced death becomes an inevitable fate is also desirable for
modern society as a whole to the point of being politically and technically implemented. It is a death perfectly assimilated to the governmental
system and to the management of the collective population. Thus, this
disposability of life is integrated and infused in the social structure: the
issue of death is no longer an external and extreme limit to the political
modern regime; rather, it becomes one of its effects and functions in the
biopolitical practices.
In La volont de savoir, Foucault focuses on presenting what he called
the device of sexuality26. Again, he insists on the idea that sex is in the
crossroads between body and population, since it is the element that
articulates the axes of the technologies of regulation and disciplinary technologies in a way that they coexist as mutually imbricated27. It is according to this biopolitical characteristic of sex as a target and an object that
G. Agamben, Homo sacer, Seuil, Paris 1997.
M. Foucault, Il faut dfendre la socit, p. 228. See also J. Bernauer, Par-del vie et mort:
Foucault et lthique aprs Auschwitz, in Michel Foucault philosophe, Seuil, Paris 1989, p. 320.
24
M. Foucault, Il faut dfendre la socit, pp. 229 and 233.
25
Ibidem, p. 223.
26
M. Foucault, La volont de savoir, pp. 99-173.
27
Ibidem, pp. 191ss. See also M. Foucault, Il faut dfendre la socit, p. 224.
22
23
and life, we can better understand its productive trait, since what determines and establishes norm is the regularity of its actions on life.
Therefore, norm is not equal to a rule or a law, but to a process which
is historically and socially situated; a process that is different from a mere
accident or deviation because of its steadiness and regularity. More than
that, norms are similar to the regularities of power relationships hence
implying even the possibility of exerting counterpowers and resistance.
Unlike law and its pretension to universality, norm is inherently changeable, because it only occurs in the effectiveness of its action and only
grasps it through the regularity of the effects caused by it.
If the relationship between life and norm, i.e. between subjectivity
and norm, is a mutual relation of immanence, then the idea that norm as
a political force produces life and subjectivity implies that life and subjectivity are as dynamic and flexible as norm. This dynamism and this flexibility manifest themselves in the form of diversity and differentiations of
the subject and of the living beings that we all are. However, due to their
reciprocity, life and subjectivity compel normalization apparatus and the
statistically normal curves to modulate themselves, to adapt themselves
to the occurrences of differentiation and deviations from these curves.
Consequently, it is possible to assert that norms precede life and subjectivity in its constraint over them, since the multiplicities of forms that life
and subjectivity take on as experiences can be arranged, classified, hierarchized, and eventually valued on the basis of a regulatory pattern previously established. This is what Foucault, referring to the disciplines, called
normation, where people, their behaviors, their gestures in a word,
their whole lives in their very little details are conformed to standards
taken as value, a value built up pursuing a determined result50.
Foucault probably used the above-mentioned expression to describe
the devices of normalization which perform the inversion of the relationship between normality and norm. By means of this inversion, the
standard norm is opposed to differentiations and variations in order to
enable a more detailed analysis of the phenomena; in this analysis, the differential individualities are acknowledge and, at the same time, considered
along one and same line, without ruptures, while simultaneously dismembering the different normalities in relation one to another51. As a result,
50
51
56
57
racism and, more particularly, of Nazism itself. Through the lens of his
interpretation of biopolitics, Foucault shows that Nazism is not a kind of
excrescence of the history of modern Western societies, which strive to
label themselves as democratic and advocate of human rights. Certainly, it
is by means of a similar strategy that Agamben was able to interpret Walter Benjamins famous saying, according to which the State of exception
is the rule: so as to exterminate bare life (liable to be killed, but not to be
sacrificed, in Agambens words), there is in modern capitalist societies a
sort of co-substantiality between the juridical-institutional model and the
biopolitical pattern, which allows one to take the state of exception as a
paradigm of the political structures of modern societies64. Or, following
Espositos interpretation, the biopolitical paroxysm produced by Nazism
culminates in a lack of distinction between sovereign power and biopolitics itself, in such a way that in the biopolitical regime, sovereign law isnt
so much the capacity to put to death as it is to mollify life in advance65.
In turn, Foucault also refers to paroxysm. Above all, he declares that
Nazism revealed a complex type of relationship between sovereign power
and biopolitics, identified by him as coextensive or concurrent. But probably the play between the sovereignty principle and the biopolitical principle also occurs in all other States, either socialist or capitalist66. Nazism
was not an extemporaneous incident; again according to Foucault, the
very possibility of the Nazi State to become an assassin State is not given
by its racist trait, which justifies and legitimizes it, but by its own biopolitical functioning67. Genocide are justified by racism, but their functional
and technological economy follow the pattern of biopower: it is the biopolitical strategies and relationships that determine how and under what
conditions life can become a normative value a desirable life and, at the
same time, how it settles which deviations and anomalies are undesirable
or even noxious an expendable life.
If all these approaches seem to present the paradoxical framework
of biopolitics whose purpose is to promote life, but ultimately also
produces death , it is because of the immanent relationship between
life and death that is evidenced in an undeniable way as a value for bioG. Agamben, Homo sacer, p. 14.
R. Esposito, Bos: biopolitica e filosofia, p. 157 (ET: p. 145), emphasis added.
66
M. Foucault, Il faut dfendre la socit, p. 232.
67
Ibidem, p. 228.
64
65
.
The Normative Immanence of Life and Death in Foucauldian Analysis of Biopolitics
According to Roberto Esposito, the Foucauldian interpretation is divided and
dual, and it does not solve what he calls the biopolitics enigma, that is to say:
how can biopolitics, which aims at protecting and promoting life, lead also to
death? In this article I demonstrate that biopolitics is not paradoxical as it may
seem, since it is characterized by relations of reciprocal immanence between biopolitics and life, on account of the way it rules the relations between norm and
normality. Thus, life is the ultimate object and aim of biopolitics: transformed
into a value, life turns itself into norm, making it possible to take actions and
strategies of broad range even in a paradoxical way. Taking this scenario of reciprocal immanence, death may be understood as a phenomenon innate to life; in
the same manner, its direct or indirect occurrence may be taken as a consequence
inherent to lifes biopolitical exercise.
Keywords: Foucault, Esposito, Canguilhem, Biopolitics, Life, Death, Norm.