Last time on Preoccupied Biopoliticals: Kant distinguishes medicine, from the other higher faculties of law and theology, as the most autonomous from sovereignty because its concern is nature. Still, Kant describes a threefold relation between the study of medicine and the state, in each case the medium of relation is the people or public. Firstly, Kant describes a relationship of the people’s convenience where a government provisions doctors for public use. Secondly, Kant describes a relationship of safety, where the government protects the people from illegitimate, irresponsible or zealous doctors. Lastly, Kant describes a relation of exploitation where worthless bodies, corpori vili (see vile), are provided to medicine for the extraction of medical knowledge.
This entails two commitments that are inextricable. Firstly, health is a non-political capacity of the body - the health of the human body is independent of any particular social organisation, or rather the concept of a healthy body will be the same regardless of a body’s social situation. There is a human body, a single biological substratum that properly gives rise to a natural capacity for human health. In Husserl’s words, “My flesh already has the meaning of being a flesh typical in general for us all” (cited in Mbembe 2001, if anybody has the source for this I would be much obliged). In this respect medicine conducts experiments on bodies in order to map the coordinates of health for all human flesh.
Secondly, corporeal value is tangible for politics. While bodies and their health are natural things and so valuable as objects to medicine, there is a bodily worth that is the domain of politics. Corpori vili divides the flesh of the people, which has political value, from flesh that does not. The vileness of some flesh is precisely its exteriority to a political sphere. It is the possibility of this division that grounds Kant’s claim as to medicine’s autonomy from politics. If health could only be studied within the domain of political value, if there are no corpori vili that can proffer a study of health, then it becomes a political question or a technology. However in Kant’s formulation it remains a knowledge of nature that can be applied or offered by politics.
As Derrida notes, Kant’s Conflict appears to be a justification of a defacto situation (p2 [pdf]), so the cut of corpori vili should be read as a reasoning for already ongoing experiments in the production of medicine as a quasi-industrial knowledge. In this sense the objects of medical experimentation in the eighteenth century divide the living from dead, the human from animal and the continent from the colonial. The corpori vili were cadavers, animals and doomed races.
However, the worthlessness of a corpse was not a settled issue. As Helen Macdonald details, in england from 1752 the only legally sanctioned supply of bodies were murderer’s bodies from the scaffold (2005, 12). The medical exploitation of criminal bodies was an additional form of punishment, whereby the post-hanging dissection of the body was a pronouncement of the body’s worthlessness. It was useless as citizen and merely natural flesh. Yet the state’s provision of the bodies of murderers was insufficient for medical demand. And a quotidian tactical struggle arose over bodies that left unclaimed. The site of medicine as public utility was also the site of medicine’s claiming of the public’s body - in literal fashion.
… surgeons and anatomists necessarily contrasted their need for bodies to dissect in the cause of science against many people’s horror of dissecting. Thomas Southwood Smith thought the ‘uninstructed and ignorant’ were ‘full of prejudice and error’, their feeling about the dead requiring ‘control, and sometimes even sacrifice’ in a nobler cause. When suggesting exactly whose bodies should be sacrificed in this way the London Medical Gazette favoured using the remains of ‘those unfortunate persons who have none to own them in life or to claim them when dead’… In Bristol during the eighteenth century, for example, it is known that poor patients whose bodies were not claimed within just a few hours of their deaths were almost always taken from ward to dissecting room. A contemporary student notebook (1822) shows that the only patients who died and were not dissected in that city were those with vigilant friends who sat with them until they were taken out of the institution in a coffin.
-Macdonald, H. (2005) Human Remains: Episodes in Human Dissection. Melbourne University Press. pp 28-9.
All extra-juridical medical exploitations were of those not sufficiently tied into political relations. In this sense life and death was not a proper border of political value. The value of one’s corpse was possessed by others and only fell, as cadaver, into the prerogative of medicine if it remained unguarded.
In both the juridical and extra-juridical medical claiming of bodies what occurs we can think of as necropolitics. Death is made productive for the engine of medicine, but also for sovereign power. Medicine converts the flesh it acquires, either through law or institutional possession, into knowledge. Sovereignty in the case of the criminal marks its own limit in the body of the condemned. The case of the unclaimed is more complicated. The designation of human flesh as both resource and possible superfluity functions as a mechanism of binding the political body. The very disappearance of the traces of those not suitably tied together firms the bonds of kinship under a sovereign.
In a sense what we have here is a moment of historical thought just prior to biopolitics. Just prior to a point where population arrives as a primary determinant category of politics. In play are institutional anatomo-politics, the borders of race, the political provision of health and internal, as opposed to well established colonial ones, experiments in necropower. Kant is using a delineation between nature and human citizenship to pose an autonomy of health from politics. For this to remain coherent Kant has to imagine a category of bodies, capable of health, that are in themselves excluded from the political. That is, bodies that are merely natural.
If Kant includes the perceptual technology of corpori vili as a domain of sovereignty then medicine appears as not something that is merely policed by government but an aspect of policing the people. And it is in the fusion of health and policing that the natural as a domain of medicine disintegrates.
More to come.
