Is it possible to think a politics of health, that includes the child yet to be born, that is not biopolitical? Nancy in his note on biopolitics suggests that Foucault’s historical thesis on the birth of biopolitics from the 18th century requires:

a more precise examination of what the biopolitical preoccupations were before the modern era (there was a politics of wheat in Rome and a politics of birth in Athens, for example).

This use of ‘biopolitical’ seems (to me) different from the others in Nancy’s text. Firstly, it addresses an expressly historical account of biopolitics rather than the more metaphysical interpretation belonging to Agamben. Secondly, in making this address Nancy uses biopolitics to refer to a form of coexistence, rather than to designate a form of auto-management. Nancy opens the question of collective subsistence and reproduction before population or populousness.

There is a direction to this question, the taking up of an historical change while inquiring about its life before its happening, that is perhaps a familiar gesture in Nancy’s work on the political. Here in commenting on Foucault’s account of a birth, the appearance of something, Nancy asks about its prior presence. But if we segue into Nancy’s discussion on Schmitt in ‘Politics I’ from The Sense of the World, we hear him ask concerning the abandonment of the theologicopolitical, about the political’s prior absence:

In order to begin to get one’s bearings within the dis-orientation of the political, it is necessary, first of all, to be clear about what has been called, since Carl Schmitt, the “theologicopolitical.” We have too facilely repeated — in particular on the occasion of the bicentenary of the execution of Louis XVI — that Sovereignty, having (sacrificially) deprived itself of theologicopolitical transcendence, wandered off in search if a “secular” substitute. … [moderately large gap] … First of all, one must ask oneself how and up to what point there was politics, for the greater number of people, in the epoch of the theologicopolitical. There may well have been no politics, or only very little, in the sense of a being-together into which one could enter, in the sense of a knot to be tied [lien à nouer]. In this respect, for the majority there was only religion (in a domestic, ecclesiastical, corporatist, or other variety). And the “end of the political” is thus, like the “end of art,” only the end of religion: the end of an order of given, tied-up sense. (Nancy, 1997: 91)

In each case, appearance or disappearance, there is a tracing back of the absence or presence so that history is never a sequence of creation or destruction, but at the same time remains disrupted. Where Nancy seems concerned with Schmitt that we mistake religion for politics thereby mourn a loss, part of his concern with biopolitics seems to be that in focusing on the novelty (or, as well, an ever presence) we understand the enmeshment of life and politics only in the form of biopolitics.

Biopolitics for Foucault was typified by such problematics as exemplified in the British parliamentary Report of the Children’s Employment Commission 1863 (cribbed from Marx):

“the potters as a class, both men and women, represent a much degenerated population, both physically and mentally”, that “the unhealthy child is an unhealthy parent in his turn”, that “a progressive deterioration of the race must go on”, and that “the degenerescence of the population of Staffordshire would be even greater were it not for the constant recruiting from the adjacent country, and the intermarriage with more healthy races.”

That is a concern with the (here interchangeable) categories of race and population as divisible and measurable components of human progress, so that health, generation and a common body are the inseparable investments of power. As Foucault points out the appearance and expansion of biopolitics and anatomopolitics was indispensable to the development of capitalism (1990: 140-1), but the politics in Foucault’s compound terms neither designates an economic mode nor his diffuse concept of power. It seems to simply pick out a set of techniques of surveillance, a logic of management and a cluster of organisations whose oversight was designated to a domain of “politics”.

However, Silvia Federici, in her book Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, argues that by filling in the absences of Foucault’s account of the power’s investment in the body, by returning to a history of the slave’s body and the woman’s body, it is possible to read biopower (biopolitics and anatomopolitics as conjoined bipolar technology) as a strategy of capitalism:

A study of the witch-hunt also challenges Foucault’s theory concerning the development of “bio-power,” stripping it of the mystery by which Foucault surrounds the emergence of this regime. Foucault registers the shift - presumably in 18th-century Europe - from a type of power built on the right to kill, to a different one exercised through the administration and promotion of life-forces, such as population growth; but he offers no clues as to its motivations. Yet, if we place this shift in the context of the rise of capitalism the puzzle vanishes, for the promotion of life-forces turns out to be nothing more than the result of a new concern with the accumulation and reproduction of labor-power. We can also see that the promotion of population growth by the state can go hand in hand with a massive destruction of life; for in many historical circumstances - witness the history of the slave trade - one is a condition for the other. Indeed, in a system where life is subordinated to the production of profit, the accumulation of labor-power can only be achieved with the maximum of violence so that, in Maria Mies’ words, violence itself becomes the most productive force (Federici, 2004: 16).

Thereby through Federici the political of biopolitics turns out to be the creation and maintenance of a particular set of economic relations, which take hold of particular bodies at particular points in time in order to ensure the continued provision of workers. So that the body of the worker is fixed and reproduced in a set of dependent relations to other fixed bodies. Part of Federici’s argument is that women’s consignment to domesticity, achieved with massive violence, that was firmly entrenched by the Enlightenment was a directly result of both labour crises and a focus on the accumulation of labour. That between 1300 and the 1500s, particularly in cities, woman had freedoms of occupation and solitary living that were to be successivly stripped from them. Of particular note they operated as city employed surgeons, eye therapists, midwives and obstetricians. Federici talks about this as public health-care which poses the question what was public health in a period not preoccupied with the population or reproducing the labour force (2004: 31)?
I do not know to what extent Federici’s use of the term public health is anachronistic, nor of the particular arrangements of its provision in Europe in this period (sources, libraries, translations etc.), but this question is a more specific version of Nancy’s. What were the health preoccupations and collective arrangements of the polis in the era before the directed accumulation of labour-power? The point of inquiry is that following Federici what must be severed in order to think a politics of health outside of the biopolitical is the knot of health and capacity to labour. The immensity of this knot, today, can be felt in the imbrication of disability and suffering, the capacity to enjoy life and a full menu of options for career. However, the problem lies in that health/labour neither exhausts population accounts of health nor enters the terrain of capital and value that infuses illness.

Hopefully more tomorrow.