Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy by Italian theorist Roberto Esposito has recently been taken up in English-dominated academic circles, following its translation into English in 2008. The book contributes to a growing literature concerned with the manner in which “biopolitics” – the politicisation of biological life, its categorisation, hierarchisation and utilisation, as Foucault defined it – has come to determine or preoccupy politics.
For this first blog post, I want to take Esposito’s introduction (p3-12) and think with and around it. To do so, I will briefly provide an overview, followed by some more in-depth unpacking and analysis of several compelling points. It won’t be a long post, but in the following weeks I will develop it in relation to the chapters of the book.
The term “biocracy” comes up on page 10 of Esposito’s introduction. To my mind it describes the chiasmatic relationship between bios – life – and the development of forms of governance from the time of western modernity onward. In other words, a particular conception of “life” has been tied to political structure, intervention, action and discourse. We are familiar with this in terms of the promise that the state will look to retain and enhance the health and life of its citizens (in Hobbes this was motivated by the cynical view of humanity as one against the other unless order is externally imposed; in other liberal theories the state may mediate relations in the social body in order to ensure a preexisting equality). Indeed, here the notion of governmentality demonstrates the ways in which the government is invested in the management of risk for the future. This can lead to an optimistic application of the biopolitical paradigm: that the management of bodies is for a greater social purpose.
The recognition that Western politics has ‘life’ at its centre is not a new thought, but Esposito promises to think beyond Foucault’s work and address the question Foucault grappled with but did not get to answer: “Why does a politics of life always risk being reversed into a work of death?” (Esposito 2008, 8 ) This is a challenging presupposition and somewhat counter-intuitive: that any politics with ‘life’ as its focus risks in its very structures and institutions, turning into the very thing in declares itself to be guarding against. Esposito provides some confronting examples of what he diagnoses as the “acute oxymoron of humanitarian bombardment” (2008, p. 4 ): for example, the bombing of Afghanistan in the name of the future of Afghani peoples. He summarises this phenomena in the following way: “To keep them alive at all costs, one can even decide to hasten their death” (2008, p. ). Achilles Mbembe and Giorgio Agamben have made similar arguments in relation to biopolitics, examining the ease with which it turns into “necropolitics” (Mbembe), or thanatopolitics (Agamben). Mbembe provides a critical analysis which does reverse the stated intentions of biopolitical models of power by revealing the selective work of ‘enhancing and maintaining’ life under colonial regimes, and indeed, the fact that some life is maintained at the expense of other life. Agamben, however, notes the overarching philosophical structures that determine contemporary expressions of sovereign power, and ties these to biopolitics in order to argue that sovereign power places life at its core, and decides upon its fate, creating the figure of “bare life”, life that can be killed without constituting sacrifice. At one point in Homo Sacer (1998), he claims that everyone is potentially “bare life” because we are all subject to sovereign power.
In Agamben the relationship between sovereign power and biopolitics is, I think, mutually constitutive in that the management of peoples serves sovereign imperatives: it arranges the relationship between the state and its peoples. Where Agamben uses the concept of bare life to implicate both totalitarian and democratic systems of power in violence, and to make ‘humanitarian’ categorisation (for example, the concept of the ‘refugee’) responsible for its biopolitics, Esposito uses the model of immunity to discuss the manner in which both ‘positive’ and ‘negative’ uses of biopolitical categorisations are inherently about exclusion. This is because, as the term immunity suggests, an organism divides itself (power proliferates) in order to fight itself in the work of maintaining or restoring a ‘healthy body’. Using this medical terminology is interesting, as the body’s ability to fight infection, virus and so on, is usually considered in positive terms. However, if we transfer this to the realm of politics, it begs a series of questions: even ‘good’ examples of bioplitics contain an immunity response: this means that the concept of the ‘healthy body politic’ is predicated on the exclusion of those elements deemed unhealthy.
Esposito wants to situate biopolitics with modernity historically: he asks, “Does biopolitics precede, follow or coincide with modernity?”(2008, p. 8 ) The immunity model of power is his link, as it is the figure of the vulnerable individual in need of protection, or the self-interested, self-preserving subject, that instantiates, or placed as structurally necessary, the immunity response. Esposito writes: “Only modernity makes of individual self-preservation the presupposition of all other political categories, from sovereignty to liberty” (2008, 9).
Closing his introduction, Esposito makes some very contentious claims about the role of philosophy in political action. Biopolitics cannot be reformed or applied in the name of progression because it is not radical enough. I can’t help but think of this in relation, again, similar claims made by Agamben. Agamben argues that expanding and developing further categories – even those made with the best of intentions – still places life at the mercy of sovereign.
And yet, Esposito gestures toward an “affirmative biopolitics”. What this looks like will be fascinating to learn.
