ancy in his recently translated (into English) work, La création du monde ou la mondialisation, has a note on the term biopolitics. The note is reproduced in full below. This note in 3 pages, with its own set of notes, at first occasions a few points of clarity, a direction of further research and then some reconfigurative maneuvers that enframe biopolitics in Nancy’s work on ecotechnology. This reframing then turns on the final page to a dense argument for the poverty of biopolitics. The biopolitical diagnosis of the limits of democratic management entangle us, life and politics in the symptoms of democracy.

[page 93]

A Note on the Term: Biopolitics

We have heard quite a bit in recent years about the term biopolitics. This word was created by Foucault. It has been used by several theoreticians in several senses. The variety of these senses and a certain general indetermination of the term require a clarification.

In Particular, the use of similar terms such as “bioethics” furthers the confusions since “bioethics” is concerned with the moral decisions made when confronted by the new possibilities of biological technology (or of “biotechnology”) and does not claim to designate an ethics generally restricted to the bios.[1] “Biopolitics,” on the contrary, seeks to indicate the order of a politics generally determined by life and devoted to its maintenance and control. What is meant by biopolitics, in principle, is not “a politics about life or living” but, rather, “life determining politics,” or else “the sphere of politics coextensive with the sphere of life.”[2]

For Foucault, in a more narrow way, the word designated the fact that, from the eighteenth century on, the control of the conditions of human life[3] became an expressly political affair (health, nutrition, demographics, exposure to natural and technological dangers, etc.). Until that time, power had little interest in this and had other objects for its exercise: first and foremost, territory. I have nothing to add to this historical thesis, which is certainly important, except that it seems to me that it would require 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).

Foucault considered that totalitarian politics – Nazi first, socialist as well – were biopolitics because they were devoted, rather than to the domination of their adversaries, to the mastery of a population, of a “race,” or of a “people” defined according to norms of health, or productive vitality, etc. (Foucault ranks everything under a very general category of “racism.”) Here I will not enter [Page 94] into the precise examination of these theses. I believe it necessary, however, to ask if “life” truly constitutes the object (real or imaginary, is not the issue now) of these powers, or if it is not rather a destinal figure (“race” or “the human worker”) that comes to substitute for the classical figures of sovereignty. The reduction of these figures to “life” is not sufficient to ground their political affective power.

According to the extension recently given to the concept, or rather according to that which is in reality a changing of the concept under the same word, it seems one must understand the following: politics (still assigned to the State) progressively takes for its object the controlled management of natural life.

However, it is clear that so-called “natural life,” from its production to its conservation, its needs, and its representations, whether human, animal, vegetal, or viral, is henceforth inseperable from a set of conditions that are referred to as “technological,” and which constitute what must rather be named ecotechnology where any kind of “nature” develops for us (and by us). That life is precisely the life that is no longer simply “life” if one understands it as auto-maintaining and auto-affecting. What is revealed, rather, with ecotechnology, is the infinitely problematic character of any “auto” in general. It is in this context that a “biopolitics” is possible, since it is defined by a technological management of life. This supposes that existence thus managed is no longer, tendentiously, an existence that engages anything else than its reproduction and its maintenance through finalities that remain the secrets of power, unless they are simply blind or purposeless finalities of the eco-technological totality of motion.

Thus bios – or life as a “form of life,” as the engagement of a meaning of a “being” – merges with Zoë, bare life, although such life has, in fact, already become technē.

Politics is thus implicitly nothing other than the auto-management of ecotechnology, the only form of possible “auto”-nomy that precisely no longer has recourse to any heretofore possible form of a politics; neither the self-founding “sovereignty,”[4] since it is no longer a matter of founding, nor the “discussion concerning the justice” of an Aristotelian polis, since there is no longer a polis, nor even the contestation or the differend, since living and power go in the same direction according to an asymptomatic consensus and devoid of finality, or of truth.

The term biopolitics in fact designates neither life (as the form of life) nor politics (as a form of coexistence). And we can certainly admit that in fact we are no longer in a position to use either of these terms in their ordinary senses. Both are, rather, henceforth subject to what carries them together into ecotechnology. [Page 95]

But then the danger of the word is revealed in that it seems to authorize two forms of interpretations, both of which surreptitiously maintain an unusual sense of the term. One can attempt to think that this life, reduced to an absence of form other than its management motivated by an economic and social power that only seeks its maintenance, finds itself dialectically delivered to an absence of ends through which it would find itself as though in its nascent state, exposed to the absence of the meaning of its bare contingency, such that it would be therefore capable of reclaiming as its own invention: an indefinite birth, sliding by its very errancy and by its absence of justification outside of the domination that manipulates it. The form of life would be the furtive play of an elegant withdrawal from the grinding machine. One can think on the contrary that the control thus revealed of a technological production of life places life in the state of producing itself as a whole, and of reappropriating the exteriority of domination in a common auto-production or auto-creation whose vitality reabsorbs and accomplishes, in itself, any politics.

In one way or another, by an emphasis upon life itself or politics reappropriated in common, what is put into play again is the twofold dialectic postulation by which, on the one hand, an extreme figure (previously known as the proletariat) is revealed – the bareness of which establishes in its truth-character – while, on the other hand, the power reappropriated by the living community effectuates the negation of political separation. This figuration and this negation have haunted Western consciousness ever since the invention of democracy put an end to politics founded on figures of identification. But it is clearly insufficient to seek a new figure (whether figureless, anonymous, and stripped of identity), or to render dialectical the negation of the identificatory pole. These two motifs, opposed or conjoined, can give momentum, perhaps, to necessary struggles – and there are numerous. But they cannot address the problem opened by democracy, that is to say, a problem posed by ecotechnology that demands, or that produces, the absence of separable figure and the absence of identifiable end: because until this point it was between figures and ends, between phenomenalization of a teleology and a teleology of phenomanlization, that any part of life and/or politics, of meaning of life, or of form of politics, has operated.

It is not a question here of developing this clarification further. At least it should serve to show that what forms a world today is exactly the conjunction of an unlimited process of an eco-technological enframing and of a vanishing of the possibilities of forms of life and/or of common ground. The ”world” in these conditions, or “world-forming,” is only the precise form of this problem.[5]

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[1] The word biopolitics can also assume the following meaning today: “an ethico-socio-political reflection on the problems posed by biological technoscience,” with an emphasis at times on “political power interested the biotechnological possibilities.” … Thus to limit ourselves to a few recent examples in the volume Biopolitik, directed by Christian Geyer (Frankfurt-am-Main: Surkamp), as in no. 1 of Multitudes, “Biopolitique et Biopouvoir” (Exils, 2000), which opens discussions on the concept itself.

 

[2] No doubt one also encounters more narrow usages of the word. But I consider here the usages that claim to be the most properly philosophical and to engage with this term propositions that fundamentally reevaluate each of the terms that compose it. I do not seek to clarify these usages under names or works: I am only characterizing tendencies.

 

[3] Human life was what was at issue for Foucault. We see without difficulty that vegetable and animal life followed a parallel destiny at the same time (breeding, care, etc.). In any case, that destiny began long ago ever since the beginnings of cultivation and breeding. Certainly, there is henceforth a mutation in this technological continuum: the question is precisely to understand it.

 

[4] On the condition of not confusing, as is often the case, between “sovereignty” and “domination.”

 

[5] See below note 13 on page 125. Note 13: This determination is similar to those that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest with their concept of “Empire”: absence of borders, suspension of history, social integration [see Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001)]. In brief, it would be a question of a Moebius strip, each side of which passes incessantly into the other. That is not sufficient reason, to my mind, to make of this “Empire” “the biopolitical nature of the new paradigm of power” (E, 23), because power does not set itself up there as such in the same way as in the State, and because “life” is a quite insufficient notion to designate such a managed regulated or deregulated totality. The “world” would be a more precise notion: a “world” as the reverse of a “cosmos,” and as concern (mourning and awaiting) for a “totality of meaning.”