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THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: variations on de anima

Melinda Cooper

Online Publication Date: 01 December 2002

To cite this Article Cooper, Melinda(2002)'THE LIVING AND THE DEAD: variations on de anima',Angelaki,7:3,81 104 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/0969725022000032490 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725022000032490

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journal of the theoretical humanities volume 7 number 3 december 2002

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ristotles natural philosophy continues to inform our most basic assumptions about biological life, even while its premises are being undermined by technological innovations in the biosciences. The political philosopher Giorgio Agamben has suggested that what is at issue in the contemporary politics of life is the production of an absolute potentiality. This is a question he traces back to Aristotles natural and political philosophy, and which leads him, via Xavier Bichat, to the ambivalent legal status of the brain-dead in contemporary biomedical practice. My own exploration of these issues will take me on a different tangent, via Marx, to Aristotles more peripheral reflections on counter-natural generation. If Agamben locates the defining gesture of modern biopower in the isolation of an absolutely potential life, I will suggest that recent regenerative biotechnologies require us to think through the very different question of definitized potentiality.

melinda cooper THE LIVING AND THE DEAD variations on de anima

does Foucault understand the bio of biopower and what kind of articulation between life and power does it entail? In a series of open-ended and tentative notes on the subject, spanning all the seminars of the late 1970s, Foucault seems to have enunciated a problematics that has become ever more insistent in contemporary political philosophy, while leaving the limits of life itself in a state of conceptual haziness. In response to this absence of definition, Agambens reading of biopower draws on a conceptual distinction that he derives from Aristotles political philosophy. In the classical world, Agamben points out, two terms bios and zoe were available to express what we now designate by the single word life. Hence, in Aristotles political philosophy, the contempla-

biopower
Agambens philosophical work, at least since Means Without Ends, can be read as an extended reflection on Foucaults theses on biopower. Foucaults argument, according to which what is in question in the politics of the modern state is life itself, assumes that some kind of transformation in the exercise of power must be thought through if we are to grasp the specific strategies of this unprecedented power over life. Yet what is decisive, and perhaps underdeveloped in Foucaults work, according to Agamben, is the way in which one understands the sense of this transformation.1 In another context, he points out that the concept of life itself remains curiously elusive in Foucaults work.2 In what way

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/02/030081-24 2002 Taylor & Francis Ltd and the Editors of Angelaki DOI: 10.1080/0969725022000032490

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tive life of the philosopher (bios theoretikos), the life of pleasure (bios apolaustikos) and the political life (bios politikos) could never have been rendered by the term zoe, for bios always refers to a qualified life, a form of life that determines the otherwise bare substance of zoe. Bios can thus be equated with the grammatically qualified use of the term zoe. In a passage where he attempts to define the ends of the ideal political community, Aristotle distinguishes between the simple fact of living (to zein) and an act of living that has been qualified in terms of an end (to eu zein).3 The relation between qualified and unqualified life, however, is not one of simple opposition and it is this point that interests Agamben. In Aristotles political philosophy, he notes, natural or unqualified life is excluded from political life and confined to the domestic sphere of natural reproduction.4 But this constitutive act of exclusion is at the same time an implication of natural life in the political sphere, an inclusion through which it is simultaneously qualified and subsumed.5 Taking this gesture to be characteristic of the Western political tradition, the fundamental question Agamben raises, albeit in various historical contexts, bears on the relation between politics and life, if life presents itself as what is included by means of an exclusion (ibid.). In modern European languages, Agamben notes, the distinction between a merely natural and a qualified form of life has ceased to be operative. The difference, he argues, has been rendered indistinct to the point that one term only the opacity of which increases in proportion to the sacralization of its referent designates that naked presupposed common element that it is always possible to isolate in each of the numerous forms of life.6 In the purely biological life that was identified by the life sciences of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Agamben discovers a vital substance that no longer recognizes the determinations of specific political form, an indeterminate life that nevertheless seems to have been wholly politicized in itself. It is precisely the advent of biological life that Foucault was exploring in his late seminars and miscellaneous writings on the theme of biopower. What interested Foucault here was the peculiar relation that modern capitalism, with its industrialization of the natural and biological sciences, had come to establish between life and politics. In an elliptical formulation that appears in the first volume of The History of Sexuality, he too draws on Aristotles political philosophy in order to locate the precise transformation of powers at work in the modern era:
For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics calls his existence as a living being into question.7

The threshold of biological modernity, he continues, can be located at the point when biological life comes to be included in the politics of the state. In the seminars that follow, he identifies this moment with the historical transition leading from the territorial state-form to the populationstate, arguing that such a radical transformation in the realm of political constitution necessitates a profound rethinking of power itself, beyond the limits of the juridical model of sovereign power. It is on this point that Agamben questions Foucaults thesis. For Agamben, biopower should be interpreted as a kind of historical contortion internal to the one exemplary political figure inclusive exclusion rather than a transition in the order of power which would wholly differentiate the territorial state from the modern population-state.8 Life, in his reading, is not the excluded that only comes to be included in the realm of the political in the modern era, but rather that which is at once included and excluded, determined as form and excluded as substance, even in classical political philosophy. In Aristotles political works, for example, zoe as natural life is both separable from and already presupposed within the political or philosophical form of life.9 What perhaps distinguishes the modern biopolitical state, according to Agamben, is the fact that it offers something of a revelation of the most secret foundations of the classical state-form, through a kind of indetermination of the opposition between the included and the excluded:
Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does

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nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond (derived from a tenacious correspondence between the modern and the archaic which one encounters in the most diverse spheres) between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii.10

Perhaps Agambens most sustained development on the exercise of biopower is to be found in his reading of the modern philosopher of territorial state power, Hobbes.11 The Hobbesian constitution, he notes, is founded on the presupposition of an absolute life, which must be at once included and excluded from the realm of the political. Drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt, Agamben argues that the conceptual fiction of the state of nature is not to be interpreted as that which precedes the political constitution, but rather as the state of exception that founds its order. Life, in the state of nature, can be defined only in terms of an absolute exposure to violence, the unlimited right to take the life of another, a right that also translates as an unlimited danger. It is this life of absolute exposure that the political order is required to represent, through an act of simultaneous inclusion and exclusion the subsumption of exposed life within the political form of legal personhood is the price it must pay for protection from absolute violence. But in this sense also, Agamben insists, political representation implies an always latent threat. To the extent that it protects through a simultaneous movement of inclusion and exclusion, the political order is also capable of revoking or suspending its privilege. Indeed, according to Agamben, it is the permanent possibility of its own suspension that founds the legitimacy of political constitution:
The state of exception, which is what the sovereign each and every time decides, takes place precisely when naked life which normally appears rejoined to the multifarious forms of social life is explicitly put into question and revoked as the ultimate foundation of political order. The ultimate subject that needs to be at once turned into the exception and included in the city is always naked life.12

Agamben, in the fact that the state of exception here tends to become the rule. In the medicalization of life that begins with the modern biosciences, it is the nude life of the biological that is exposed to the full glare of the political sphere and which increasingly threatens to escape the protection of legal personhood. In the advent of modern biopower, then, Agamben identifies nothing other than the actualization of a threat that has always been presupposed in the constitutive power of the sovereign state, whether in its classical or modern forms. He therefore relocates biopower precisely within the conceptual model that Foucault was attempting to escape:
The Foucauldian thesis will then have to be corrected or, at least, completed, in the sense that what characterizes modern politics is not so much the inclusion of zoe in the polis which is, in itself, absolutely ancient nor simply the fact that life itself becomes a principal object of the projections and calculations of State power. Instead the decisive fact is that, together with the process by which the exception everywhere becomes the rule, the realm of bare life which is originally situated at the margins of the political order gradually begins to coincide with the political realm, and exclusion and inclusion, outside and inside, bios and zoe, right and fact, enter into a zone of irreducible indistinction.13

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If some kind of historical rupture is to be located in the modern state-form, it lies, according to

Aristotles political philosophy, with its distinction between qualified and unqualified life, bios and zoe, therefore continues to provide a crucial reference point for Agambens thinking on biopower even while he is interested in the political effects of their indistinction. In this article I will be interested not only in Agambens relation to Aristotles political philosophy but also to his thinking on natural generation. As the De anima suggests, zoe itself is not without formal determinations allowing us to distinguish between the different orders of natural life vegetative, animal and human. In a recent text, Absolute Immanence, where he is directly concerned with the philosophical legacy of Foucaults biopower, Agamben pursues a more detailed genealogy of his concept of bare life by looking at the role of the plant in the De anima. Even within the order of natural life, it would

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seem that something like a bare life is both included and separable. but in plants the male and female principles are undivided, wherefore they generate out of themselves, through seed.18 And in the sense that sexual reproduction presupposes a first kind of contradiction the material differentiation of male and female forms animals seem literally to be like divided plants.19 It is the faculty of sensation, proper to animal life, that introduces a first level of discrimination into the order of life forms. In the De anima, Aristotle defines sensation as a mean that discriminates between two contraries, allowing us to judge the quality of a sense object in terms of its deviation from the norm.20 Sensation, as a power of discrimination at work in the senses, is what establishes the rule of non-contradiction, according to which it is impossible for the same thing to be present and not be present at the same time in the same subject.21 Nothing can be hot and cold, black and white, male and female at the same time, but only one or the other in potential. It is this rule that plants ignore in their indivisible, undifferentiated, insentient existence. Hence, when Aristotle introduces the rule of non-contradiction in The Metaphysics, he refuses to provide a positive foundation for its logic, but rather establishes its validity through an act of exclusion involving that most indifferent of life forms the plant. The rule of non-contradiction is so essential to the categories of discourse, Aristotle asserts here, that its justification can simply be established by refuting anyone who doubts it. If, on the other hand, the other person refused to speak, the whole enterprise would be a waste of time since this person would be like a plant.22 Commenting on this passage, Agamben notes that:
Insofar as they are founded on a tacit presupposition (in this case, that someone must speak), all refutations necessarily leave a residue in the form of an exclusion. In Aristotle, the residue is the plant-man, the man who does not speak.23

bare life nutritive life

Within the history of Western philosophy, Agamben locates a decisive moment in the identification of a bare life in Aristotles De anima. This is the moment where Aristotle isolates amongst the various understandings of the term to live the most general and most separable of living substances.14 As Agamben points out, Aristotles definition of this minimal living substance follows the method delineated in The Metaphysics, according to which an indifferent and common substratum must first be identified in order for the discrimination of the defining attributes of a thing to take place. In general, Aristotle contends here, when we seek a cause both in the realms of discursive categories and of nature, we are asking through what thing does something belong to something else?15 Hence, in the De anima, Aristotle tells us that it is in virtue of the nutritive life of the plant, the faculties of growth and decay, nourishment, excretion and regeneration that all living things have life.16 Plant life, in other words, is the minimal substance to which the higher functions of animal life (sensation, perception, locomotion) and human life (cognition) can then be attributed. It is that something which can be separated from the higher animal and human functions and survive on its own, while necessarily inhering in all other life forms. Within Aristotles natural philosophy, then, the nutritive life of the plant functions as the basis of all predication, leading up to the distinctively human life of the political sphere. But in itself it exists in an unqualified state indifferent to contradiction. This is first of all an indifference to the founding contradiction of animal life sexual difference. As a substance, the plant is endowed with the power to preserve and regenerate itself, but this is a kind of generation that takes place before the differentiation of male and female principles, a generation that is strangely indistinguishable from the act of selfnourishment.17 The reproduction of animal life presupposes sexual difference, Aristotle writes,

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In Aristotles philosophy of life, the plant is both prior to the rule of non-contradiction, indifferent to its decisions, and yet wholly constitutive of its logic. It is what is left when the discriminating

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power of non-contradiction gives way. When he turns to the De anima, then, it is in the vegetative life of the plant that Agamben rediscovers the figure of included exclusion. sense, as the privation of active feeling, sleep can be experienced only by a being who has first acquired sensation. In this sense, then, we ought to consider the original condition [of the foetus] to be not sleep but only something resembling sleep, such a condition as we find also in plants, for indeed at this time, animals do actually live the life of a plant.27 But in the last instance even this comparison proves to be imprecise, since the sleep of a plant can never be interrupted, whereas the foetus exists in a state of dormant perceptiveness that will gradually awaken or actualize into sense as it grows. Unfolding the complexities of this argument, Aristotles successive definitions lead us from the idea of nutritive life as sleep to something resembling sleep to something that cant be sleep in any sense of the term, since it precludes all actualization of sensation, all waking up. It is impossible that plants should sleep, for there is no sleep which cannot be broken, and the condition in plants which is analogous to sleep cannot be broken.28 It seems that what Aristotle is trying to exorcise here, in his attempt to rigorously distinguish nutritive and animal life even in sleep, is the possibility of a purely potential or dormant animal life that, like the plants, might never experience wakefulness or never wake up again while not actually being dead. The mutual interdependence of the potential and the actual, of matter and form, in Aristotles philosophy, means that sleep can never be separated from its functional realization. As a potential perceptiveness, the sleeping body can exist only for the sake of an end. It is therefore a strict rule for Aristotles natural philosophy that all sleep must be subject to awakening.29 There is perhaps one instance in his work on natural generation where Aristotle encounters an animal life existing only in potential, in a kind of uninterrupted sleep. This is the case of the unfertilized egg, which confronts Aristotle with the enigma of female parthenogenesis (matter from matter, potential from potential). He raises the enigma himself:
And yet the question may be raised why it is that, if indeed the female possesses the same soul and if it is the secretion of the female which is the material of the embryo, she needs

sleep
Aristotles logic of attribution, while inherently hierarchical, allows for a certain inclusion of each of the higher functions in the lower ones, if only in a dormant state. This is most evident in his reflections on the intermittent or transient periods in which the actualized life of the animal returns to or endures in a state of potential. Agambens reading of De anima points us to these intermediate states, although he doesnt look at the specific cases identified by Aristotle in his miscellaneous writings in natural philosophy. One such example can be found in the case of sleep an intermediate zone that fascinated Aristotle and that he comes back to again and again in his natural philosophy, offering conflicting interpretations of its precise location in his order of life forms. Defining sleep as the privation of wakefulness and its potentiality, Aristotle concludes that both states must be recognizable on the basis of a common criterion perception or sensation.24 In the first place, then, he claims that it would appear impossible for a plant to sleep, since it cant even feel. At other times, though, Aristotle seems to define sleep as a threshold between the perceptual life of the animal and the nutritive life of the plant, one that is experienced when sensation exists only in potentiality. For the animal, he writes, it represents something like a boundary between living and not living, between sensation and insentience, since the sleeper is neither altogether nonexistent nor yet existent.25 In this sense, Aristotle appears close to according the sleeping body the status of nutritive life he points out, in another context, that most of the nutritive functions of digestion are carried out during sleep.26 It is on the basis of these hesitant distinctions that Aristotle attempts to assign a place to the developing foetus. In the first instance, he argues that if life pertains to wakefulness on account of sensation, it is possible to consider the first stages of development as a state of sleep. Yet in another

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the male besides instead of generating entirely from herself.30

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Aristotles first response to this question is to reiterate the generative role of paternal seed in sexual reproduction. If the sensitive soul is lacking in the reproduction of matter, it is impossible for face, hand, flesh, or any other part to exist; the matter produced will be still-born and stunted, no better than a corpse or part of a corpse.31 Yet the unfertilized egg represents something of a puzzle. It is neither totally devoid of life like an egg of wood or stone an artifice that only has the shape (morphe) of an egg but not the generative form. Nor is it alive or actualizable in the sense that it could develop into a fully formed, feeling animal. That the unfertilized egg participates in some way in lifes potential is testified to by the fact that it is at least capable of going bad. In the last instance, Aristotle accords the unfertilized, rotting egg, the minimal life of the plant:
It is plain, then, that they have some soul potentially. What sort of soul will this be? It must be the lowest surely, and this is the nutritive, for this exists in all animals and plants alike.

But in his haste to find a solution to the enigma of the unfertilized egg, it would seem that Aristotle has underestimated the paradox he has uncovered here. For although it is like a plant, the egg is nevertheless produced by an animal. Here, then, is an example of a purely potential animal life, existing in a state of sleep that will never wake up to sensation. Drawing on Aristotles own terminology, we could define the existence of the unfertilized egg as an uncooked or raw life in which the potential to actualize-asform has not simply been momentarily interrupted but radically suspended. This is not to say that potentiality as such has been extinguished, simply that the unfertilized egg materializes a pure potentiality, capable of preserving itself independently of any determinate actualization.

brain death
Agambens attempt to isolate a bare nutritive life in Aristotles philosophy of life is closely

informed by the medical experiments of the lateeighteenth-century French vitalist Xavier Bichat. Agamben could be seen as carrying out a kind of conceptual autopsy following the anatomical incisions traced by Bichat both in his theory and practice. What is of interest in Bichats work, for Agambens purposes, is the fact that he remains within the terms of Aristotles natural philosphy, while reversing the order of enquiry, as if the secret of his vitalism were to be found in the discontinuous collapse of functions, rather than their hierarchical accumulation and differentiation into exclusive forms. Aristotle, as we have seen, uncovers the insistence of nutritive life within the earliest stages of animal development the foetus and the egg and the intermittent state of sleep. Within his philosophy of natural generation, the role of this minimal substance is to provide the substratum to which oppositional difference can then be attributed. It is a beginning the condition and starting point of all predication. Death, on the other hand, as a final loss of function and vital heat, seems to hold little explicative power for Aristotle it is of the order of accident and not of essence. What Agamben finds significant in Bichats work, and representative of a larger shift in perspective, is his fascination for life at the point where it subsides into death. For Bichat, who is reported to have performed an incalculable number of autopsies, it is precisely the undoing of organic differentiation, the progressive dissolution of functions, which exposes the essential substance of vitalism. While operating within the terms of Aristotelian philosophy, his method could be described as a dis-attribution of form, one that reproduces what he takes to be the general process of death, whether natural or violent. Following Aristotle, he compares the life of the foetus to a state of sleep that hasnt yet awakened, a nutritive life where the functions of animal existence are present only in a state of potential. But for Bichat this is also a state to which animal life must return before the final instance of death:

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in the old man external functions are extinguished one after another and organic life continues even after animal life has almost fully come to an end. From this point of view, the condition of the living being about to be annihilated by death resembles the state in which we find ourselves in the maternal womb, or in the state of vegetation, which lives only on the inside and is deaf to nature.32 from organic life, which is nothing other than a habitual succession of assimilation and excretion, it is still Aristotles nutritive life that constitutes the background against which the life of superior animals is separated and on which the animal living on the outside is opposed to the animal on the inside. And when, at the end of the eighteenth century, as Foucault has shown, the State started to assume the care of life and the population as one of its essential tasks and politics became biopolitics, it carried out its new vocation above all through a progressive generalization and redefinition of the concept of vegetative or organic life (which coincides with the biological heritage of the nation).33

Death, in Bichats philosophy, therefore becomes a multiple, discontinuous process, as Foucault had pointed out. Yet it is not so much death itself that fascinated and horrified Bichat, according to Agambens reading, but rather the lingering survival of the nutritive functions even when all consciousness has disappeared, the breathing, sweating, unconscious, unfeeling body which nevertheless isnt a corpse. Bichat rediscovers Aristotles intermediate zone between sensorimotor and nutritive life, the numb border-land between living and not-living, but whereas Aristotles intermediate states are all either intermittent or transient, this is a loss of functions that endures as pure potential, and can only subside into death. His vitalist philosophy redefines life as something that survives as long as it takes to go bad in essence, a rotting egg. For Agamben, Bichats attempt to isolate a physiological state of survival on the threshold of death holds more than a simple scientific interest. It clarifies what he takes to be a correlative reinvention of the political sphere in the modern liberal state-form. For whereas Aristotle situated the space of politics at the highest level of an order of life forms leading from and subsuming the nutritive life of the plant in the life of the public sphere, what is at stake in the political strategies of the modern liberal state, according to Agamben, is nothing other than the lowest, most undetermined of life forms, the bare life that sustains and survives in them all. It is this bare substance of survival, he argues, which is now exposed to the full glare of political decision:
In the history of Western science, the isolation of this bare life constitutes an event that is in every sense fundamental. When Bichat, in his Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort, distinguishes animal life, which is defined by its relation to an external world,

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In recent medical practice, he points out, the intermediate state, which Bichat isolated in his theoretical studies on death, has been realized as an actual clinical condition with the help of lifesupport and resuscitation technologies, and institutionalized in legal form via the category of brain death:
And today, in discussions of ex lege definitions of new criteria for death, it is a further identification of this bare life which is now severed from all cerebral activity and subjects that still decides if a particular body will be considered alive or, instead, abandoned to the extreme vicissitudes of transplantation.34 Bichat could not have foretold that the time would come when medical resuscitation technology and, in addition, biopolitics would operate on precisely this disjunction between the organic and the animal, realizing the nightmare of a vegetative life that indefinitely survives the life of relation, a non-human life infinitely separable from human existence.35

It has often been noted that the Western legal tradition allows for no intermediate zone between the living and the dead. The distinction between person and thing, subject and object of right, assumes that life and death are antinomic states and that the frontier between the two corresponds to a discontinuous moment in time. Late twentieth-century biomedical technologies such as the electroencephalograph, the ventilator, cardiac defibrillation and feeding tubes, however, have made it possible to sustain the nutritive

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life of the body its heart beat and circulation for extended periods of time, even after the cessation of all brain activity. In the clinical context, this has led to the isolation of a bare vegetative life in which a body is maintained in a minimal state of survival for purposes of organ transplantation. The right to exploit living organs and tissues for medical ends, which at first glance would seem to profoundly contradict the traditional rights of the person, has been secured via a redefinition of the legal distinction between the living and the dead. On the one hand, the understanding of life and death as antinomic states has been upheld in nominal terms, the bodily integrity of the living person has suffered no violation. Yet, at the same time, the legally pertinent moment of death has been realigned to coincide with brain death rather than the final cessation of all nutritive functions. This innovation has meant that the intermediate state of vegetative survival, which allows a body to outlive its cerebral death for up to a year, is in effect relegated outside the domain of right and equated with legal death. Life-support technologies introduce the brain-dead body into a space of paradoxical inclusion and exclusion from the domain of right, where it is at once totally an object of juridical decision yet still alive in biological and clinical terms.36 Here, then, is a lucid illustration of the way in which the technical production of a minimal life intersects with and suspends classical legal categories to reveal a state of exception latent within the space of right. For in the terms of the Western legal tradition, the nutritive life of the body is assumed to coincide with the rights of personhood, guaranteeing that as long as it lives and dies with the whole person, it will be safe. But when it becomes technically possible to sustain the tissues, fluids and functions of the body long after the death of the person, the protection offered by this coincidence breaks down, and the surviving body drifts into an exceptional zone on the threshold between personhood and thinghood.37 In this sense, Agamben argues, Foucaults formula definition for the shift from a sovereign to a biopolitical exercise of power, needs to be revised:
Foucault defines the difference between modern biopower and the sovereign power of the old territorial State through the crossing of two symmetrical formulae. To make die and to let live summarizes the procedure of old sovereign power, which exerts itself above all as the right to kill; to make live and to let die is, instead, the insignia of biopower, which has as its primary objective to transform the care of life and the biological as such into the concern of State power [A] third formula can be said to insinuate itself between the two, a formula that defines the most specific trait of twentieth-century biopolitics: no longer either to make die or to make live, but to make survive. The decisive activity of biopower in our time consists in the production not of life or death, but rather of a mutable and virtually infinite survival. In every case, it is a matter of dividing animal life from organic life, the human from the inhuman, the witness from the Muselmann, conscious life from vegetative life maintained functional through resuscitation techniques, until a threshold is reached: an essentially mobile threshold that, like the borders of geopolitics, moves according to the progress of scientific and political technologies. Biopowers supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of the living being and the speaking being, zoe and bios, the inhuman and the human survival.38

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In other words, biopower, as Agamben understands it, works to produce a survival that entails an extreme dis-attribution of life functions, an isolation of the minimal substance inherent in but also separable from all qualified life forms. It is an exercise of power that seeks to maintain and preserve the intermediate state of sleep that Aristotle locates on the borders between life forms, in the moments when the higher functions of animal life revert to potential. Here, however, what is at stake is the production of a life sustained as pure potential, since it has been definitively separated from the power to actualize or reawaken into the functional and whole organic form to which it should rightfully belong. In brain death, the body is kept alive, even resuscitated if it suffers a heart attack, but it has been excluded from the right to reawaken as the juridical person it once coincided with.

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In an important essay dating from 1986, entitled On Potentiality, Agamben attempts to formulate the essential preoccupation of his philosophy in the form of a question:
I could state the subject of my work as an attempt to understand the meaning of the verb can [potere]. What do I mean when I say: I can, I cannot?39

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In this essay Agamben presents his miscellaneous investigations into the fields of literature, linguistics and philosophy in terms of a common reflection on the Aristotelian concepts of potentiality and actualization, dynamis and energeia. We are so used to reading Aristotles work as a theory of the faculties, Agamben reminds us, that we tend to obscure the crucial question of the relation between potentiality and actuality, the more or less intermediate states of alteration that determine the coming-to-be of potentialized matter, within the notion of a faculty. Unlike the Megarians, who only recognize becoming in act, Aristotle accords a positive existence to potentiality, such that it can never be simply absorbed into this or that determinate actualization. It is this pre-existence of potentiality, Agamben suggests, that might explain what otherwise appears to be an aporia in Aristotles philosophy of sensation. In the second book of the De anima, for example, Aristotle insists on the fact that there is no sensation of the senses themselves, no feeling in the capacity to feel:
But there is a difficulty as to why it is that there is not also a sense of the senses themselves. There is also a difficulty as to why the senses do not produce sensation without external bodies, there being in them fire, earth and other elements, which are objects of sensation either in themselves or by their accidents. But it is clear that the perceptive faculty is not in activity, but only in potentiality and for that reason does not perceive on its own, just as the combustible thing is not burnt in itself without the thing that burns.40

awaken into the principle of non-contradiction which assigns it into this particular form while excluding it from another. But Agamben asks here how can a sensation exist in the absence of sensation? How can an aisthesis exist in the state of anesthesia?41 The important thing to note here, he stresses, is that Aristotelian potentiality in no way signifies the simple privation of a function in act. In its dormant state of insentience, the power-to-feel surpasses, in its available possibilities, the actualized sensation. For whereas energeia is committed to a determinate form, potentiality retains the power to become and not to become, to actualize and not to actualize. Contrary to energeia, it holds the power of its own impotence. In Agambens words:
All potential to be or do something is, for Aristotle, always also potential not to be or not to do (dynamis me einai, dynamis me energein) without which potentiality would always already have passed into act and be indistinguishable from it.42

For Aristotle, it would seem, sensibility in act presupposes a prior state of insentience. Sensation must be capable of a state of noncontradiction, a logical numbness, before it can

Hence, sensation, as Aristotle conceives it, represents not so much a faculty but rather an insentience that is capable of persisting in its own dormant state, irreducible to the forms it might or might not become. At the same time, however, Aristotle always in effect couples the power to be and not to be with its end. While according potentiality an irreducible existence, he is unwilling to envisage a potential life that might be sustained in its bare indetermination, without reference to actualization. As we have seen, Aristotles examples of potential life are all either intermittent, transient or aborted. As all movement implies rest, the waking state that actualizes the life of the animal requires an intermittent return to potential but this return can never be permanent. Likewise, the dormant state of the foetus is the first stage in a movement of progressive actualization into organic form. And the unfertilized egg only survives long enough to rot. For Aristotle, sensation can flicker in and out of anesthesia, but there is no permanent, uninterrupted state of numbness unless we count the limit case of the unfertilized egg. As he himself

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states in very simple terms, there is no sleep without waking. Agamben, on the other hand, operates a radical isolation of that which remains separable but never in fact separated in Aristotles thinking a vegetative life of pure potentiality come unstuck from all predication. In the very same movement, he diagnoses the political gesture that he takes to be characteristic of modern biopower. In the body on life support and the preserved body parts of the organ banks, he discovers a power of sensation that exists in a state of anesthesia, a numb potentiality for life that has been rendered clinically incapable of resuscitation into the organic form it once actualized.43 Not that the clinical isolation of a vegetative life signifies an utter powerlessness or an exclusion from all possible actualization. It is just that there is nothing in the bare life of the donor organ that commits it to this form over that, this person over another. In the absence of all exclusive determination, the organ has taken on what Agamben calls a whatever existence:
For if it is true that whatever being always has a potential character, it is equally certain that it is not capable of only this or that specific act, nor is it therefore simply incapable, lacking in power, nor even less is it indifferently capable of everything, all-powerful: the being that is properly whatever is able to not-be, it is capable of its own impotence.44 attribution of demographic, ethnic, national and political [and, we might add, organic] identity.45

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It is within the tensions of this double stratagem that Agamben situates his own investigation. Two moments might be identified in his philosophy. There is the frozen animation of the intermediate zone in which he isolates the state of anesthesia at the heart of all sensation. But this freezeframing is also what allows him to think the freedom of substitutability, the transplantation of potentialities outside the distinction of species and genus, universal and singular, which is the subject of his work on community. In this sense, Agamben situates his philosophical investigation in the ambivalent tensions of modern biopower, in which the freedom and happiness of human beings is played out on the very terrain bare life that marks their subjection to power.46

nutritive life or monstrous life?

If Agamben unsettles Aristotles philosophy of natural generation, it is to the extent that he is interested in those moments where the orders of life subside into each other, become indistinct, go to sleep. His philosophy of absolute potentiality cryogenizes the organ and liberates it, in suspended animation, from the constraints of determinate form. But this is still a way of remaining within the thresholds defined by the theory of organic generation even if the point is no longer to ascend that order, from the vegetable to the human, but rather to identify the intermediate zones where inclusion blurs into exclusion and all higher forms of life collapse into the simple, self-preservative existence of the plant. Even when he envisages the exchange of potentialized organs across the limits of form, Agamben never challenges Aristotles natural philosophy as a theory of genesis. Yet there is another dimension in Aristotles philosophy of natural generation one that is to be found not so much in the intermediate zones of his attributive logic but rather in those chance encounters, eruptions of error and hiccups in the order of genealogies that he relegates to the peripheries of his world. At various points in his natural and political philosophy, Aristotle comes

The organ for transplant acquires the freedom to reactualize in whatever determination, in whatever form, although it is not indifferently exchangeable it has been expropriated from the body it rightfully belongs to. What is involved in the exercise of biopower, as Agamben reads it, is thus a double movement of dis-attribution of organic form, in which the various qualified forms of life are stripped back to reveal their bare substance, and what we might call an infinite transplantation of functions. The isolation of an undetermined and unpredicated vital substance is what allows a selective reassignation of identities:
a survival separated from the possibility of any testimony, a kind of absolute biopolitical substance that, in its isolation, allows for the

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up against the problem of counter-natural generation productions, conceptions and growths that go counter to the ends of nature, proliferating outside the limits of finite form. These biological deformities are of the order of excess or accident. As such, they constitute a direct challenge to the fundamental postulate of Aristotelian philosophy, which states that nature always acts in accordance with an immanent end. Because of this, he can only register their occurrence in the form of an exception to the rule, random epiphenomena interrupting but never occasioning the generative process:
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For the monstrosity belongs to the class of things contrary to Nature, not any and every kind of Nature, but Nature in her usual operations; nothing can happen contrary to Nature considered as eternal and necessary, but we speak of things being contrary to her in those cases where things generally happen in a certain way but may also happen in another way.47

To take these phenomena seriously then would mean straying outside the bounds of Aristotles natural philosophy, perhaps towards a conception of nature more akin to that of Lucretius, who begins where Aristotle stops with the thesis of the generative role of chance.

counter-natural generation i: krematistike

Nature, according to Aristotle, engenders its forms in view of an immanent, final causality.48 Within this perspective, a movement can be said to be natural provided it acts in accordance with an internal principle, a limit that allows it to move or grow until it arrives at some completion, whether it be a form or a stopping point.49 In the order of higher life forms, it is paternal generation, the reproduction of the father in the son, that Aristotle takes to be the most natural of movements. The natural generation of life therefore involves a regular transmission of form or paternal seed from father to son, without excess or deviation. That is, if nothing interferes.50 For Aristotle doesnt entirely exclude the possibility of accidents in the generation of life

forms he simply argues that their rarity confirms the presence of an otherwise normative rule. The accident can be defined as what falls short of an end or what is in excess of an end. In either case, it is something that disrupts the regulative function of the limit in nature, abolishing measure and proportion, and interfering with the transmission of form. In some cases, Aristotle concedes, the accident can be generative but what it engenders is a monster. In the Physics, for example, he evokes the case of an ox born with a human head, and in the Generation of Animals we encounter similar stories of hybrid births or two-headed animals. These counternatural generations, he contends, can only be explained as the result of some accidental interference in the transmission of paternal seed, the corruption of some principle corresponding to what is now the seed, failures in the purposive effort.51 Biological monstrosities therefore belong to the class of things unlike the parent and can involve both excess or deficiency in the growth of the body.52 This is as far as he gets in his natural philosophy. However, Aristotle does return to the question of counter-natural generation in the unexpected context of the Politics, in a passage where he is concerned with the uses and misuses of economic exchange, the movement or changing-around of money. Here again, we encounter the question of a (re)production that escapes the natural ends of the domestic sphere. This time, what is at issue is the economic art of reproduction he calls krematistike. To understand the distinction Aristotle is attempting to make here between a natural and counter-natural movement of exchange, it is first necessary to look at his conception of value one that underlies Marxs later theory of value in the first book of Capital.53 It is in the Nicomachean Ethics that Aristotle puts forward a rigorous theory of value, even though, according to Marx, he fails in the last instance to identify the precise essence of the value-form and the reason for its exchangeability. In this particular passage, Aristotle defines value as what allows us to establish a proportional equivalence between things (a house and shoes for example) that arent of themselves commen-

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surable. For if exchange is to take place, the things which are to be exchanged should in some way be comparable.54 This equalization of exchange is what founds the association of free men in a political community: for neither would an association of men be possible without exchange, nor exchange without equalization, nor equalization without measurement by the same unit.55 Money therefore represents the conventional sign of equivalence, the mean or the measure that is designed to ensure the reciprocal proportion of exchanges within the political sphere, and to ward off excess or disproportion: [coinage] somehow operates as an intermediate or a mean; for it measures all goods exchanged and hence both excess and deficiency.56 Ultimately, according to Aristotle, the centripetal point that allows this movement of measured and limited changing-around to be established lies outside the sphere of exchange in the unit of measurement provided by need:
In reality, this measure is the need which holds all things together; for if man had no needs at all or no needs of a similar nature, there would be no exchange or not this kind of exchange.57

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While using the term krematistike to define all kinds of wealth acquisition, Aristotle distinguishes between a good krematistike, which is the art of accumulating goods for the purposes of the domestic sphere, and a bad one, whose most tangible expression is exchange-for-interest or usury. If the practice of usury represents a danger for the cohesion of the political sphere, according to Aristotle, it is because it separates coinage (rightfully defined as the unit of exchange and its limit) from the constraints of need.60 Usury demeasures value by speculating on its future realization invented as a security for making a future exchange, money thus becomes an end unto itself, and exchange is initiated with a view to accumulating value itself as other than itself, value-as-excess or surplus, coinage as interest.61 Such a movement can only be limitless, since it encounters no external ends in the sphere of domestic reproduction:
And to the wealth that comes from this mode of acquiring goods there is in fact no limit So while in one way it seems that there is necessarily a limit to wealth, in the event we observe that the opposite occurs: all those engaged in acquiring goods go on increasing their coin without limit.62

Provided exchange continues to be governed by need, then, its movement can be defined as natural. For as Aristotle explains in Book IV of the Physics, a natural movement is one that both measures and is measured by the number or time.58 In the last instance, all movements in the lunar and sub-lunar world are circumscribed within the eternal return of time and the infinite, circular and continuous movement of the perpetuum mobile a movement that is perfect, according to Aristotle, because its starting point perpetually coincides with its finishing point, and although infinite it is nevertheless limited or measured in relation to an immobile fulcrum.59 This is a centripetal universe that admits of no ellipses, a world without expansion. But just as at certain points in the Physics Aristotle evokes the problem of unnatural movements that threaten to unsettle the subordination of number and time to the immobile motor, he identifies two possible movements of changing-around in the political sphere.

Here we have the exceptional case of a number (coinage) that returns to itself while no longer coinciding with itself, of a future (interest) that realizes a past (loan) in the form of excess, a movement that is not only limitless in the sense that it perpetually returns to itself but also unmeasured and unmeasurable, since at the same time it never stops exceeding itself, proliferating, expanding. In terms of Aristotles philosophy of generation, such a movement can only be described as counter-natural.63 In both cases, Aristotle contends, the art of exchange can be explained in terms of a preoccupation with life. But whereas the art of household management is wholly contained within the ends of the good life, whose satisfaction is not limitless, the practice of usury is inseparable from a life of excess the production of sensation outside the discriminating mean of proportion. More precisely, the distinction hinges on the

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difference between two ways of getting pleasure. The good life, as Aristotle defines it, is one in which the pursuit of sensation is contained within the domestic sphere and where pleasure is regulated by the end to which it is assigned by nature the transmission of paternal seed from one generation to the next. The art of acquisition, on the other hand, evokes the dangers of a pleasure escaping the ends of paternal reproduction, a pursuit of pleasure that becomes an end unto itself and therefore without limit self-accumulating. Following the premise that all vice lies in excess or default, Aristotle draws a direct analogy between the excessive pursuit of pleasure and that other form of reprehensible accumulation the production of interest from exchange:
The cause of this disposition is preoccupation with life but not with the good life; so, desire for the former being unlimited, they also desire productive things without limit. Those who do actually aim at the good life seek what brings the pleasures of the body; so, as this too appears to lie in property, their whole activity centres on getting goods; and the second type of skill in acquiring goods has come about because of this. For since their pleasure is in excess, men look for the art which produces the excess that brings the pleasure. And if they cannot procure it by means of the skill of acquiring goods, they attempt to do so by means of something else that causes it, using each of their faculties in a manner contrary to nature.64 coinage from coinage. And so, of all ways of acquiring goods, this one is actually the most contrary to nature.65

Here is a growth that encounters no limit either in magnitude or time, the coming to be of a substance that never perishes and therefore never enters into the successive time of generation. This is a substance that is father and son to itself, and where the son continually calls into being the father, where the promise of future returns is what gives value a kind of speculative presence before it is realized as such.66

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counter-natural generation ii: female parthenogenesis

Aristotles comments on the art of chrematistics can be read in parallel with the discussion of female parthenogenesis we encountered in the Generation of Animals. For whereas the counternatural generation of number from number and time from time takes place in the immaterial sphere of exchange, what he raises in the Generation of Animals, at least as a question, is the possibility of a material auto-generation, a parthenogenesis of potential. His response to the question is immediately negative. It is impossible for the female to generate from herself, Aristotle states here, because the male seed is what provides the sensitive soul or form in conception, whereas the female menstrual blood provides the matter. Form, he argues elsewhere, is what congeals the potentialized fluid of female menstrual blood into the organic body with its differentiated parts and functions. It also acts as an end and limit to growth, following the rule that of all things that are put together in nature there is a limit and formula of their size and growth.67 But at this point Aristotle eradicates the question of a growth without limit by simply reiterating the natural law that without form, surface or organic ends, there is no life: if the sensitive soul is not present, either actually or potentially, and either with or without qualification, it is impossible for face, hand, flesh or any other part to exist; it will be no better than a corpse or part of a corpse.68 We have seen that the one (ambiguous) example of a female parthenogenesis Aristotle can

What Aristotle denounces in the art of acquisition is a form of counter-natural generation a male parthenogenesis. Coinage here becomes father and son to itself, but no longer respects the rule of normative transmission that would ensure a proportional resemblance between generations. It introduces an excess into the order of generation and produces a monster the proliferative offspring of exchange, an interest that never stops growing (the Greek word for interest, tokos, means both child and revenue):
For coinage came into being for the sake of changing-round, whereas interest increases the amount of the thing itself. That is where it got its name from: for what resembles a parent is precisely the offspring, and interest is born as

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come up with in this context is the case of the unfertilized egg a potential animal life that only survives long enough to rot. Its unrealized potential signifies a dead end in his thinking a full stop. This is the limit beyond which he refuses to think the question of material generation. This limit is reiterated in his cosmology in the form of a general law prohibiting the infinite expansion of space, matter and bodies. In general, if it is impossible that there should be an infinite place, and if every body is in place, there cannot be an infinite body.69 What is at stake here is the very centring of movement and time in the Aristotelian universe. For if matter could regenerate itself as something always greater than itself, and if the radius of the universe never stopped expanding, the circular, measured return of time would be decentred. The generation of matter from matter, outside the limits of surface and form, goes counter not only to Aristotles natural philosophy but also to the most fundamental laws of his cosmological thought. But following the example of counter-natural generation identified by Aristotle in the art of chrematistics, we might at least ask what would happen if by a freak of nature matter could reproduce itself outside the limits of form. What would this monstrous generation give birth to? An at least tentative response to this question can be found in Aristotles negative formulations on the question of female parthenogenesis. The offspring of a material birth without paternal seed, he tells us, if only in the oblique form of a radical impossibility, could only be without face, hand, flesh, or any other part, a formless, organless matter, something like uncongealed blood.70 And if we were to pursue the paradox of female parthenogenesis beyond the limits of Aristotles thinking, we could also deduce that this would be a matter without death immortal in the sense that, in the absence of form, it would encounter no finitude or limit to its growth, though neither could it come to life as an actualized body. An approximation of such a monstrous birth can be found in the cases of actual birth defects that Aristotle enumerates in the Generation of Animals. These deformities, which can be ascribed to a deficiency of form in the organization of maternal matter, include the multiplication or loss of parts problems of magnitude in other words as well as misplaced organs and sexual indifferentiation, both of which indicate a failure of the principle of non-contradiction:
Sometimes animals are born with too many toes, sometimes with one alone, and so on with the other parts, for they may be multiplied or they may be absent. Again, they may have the generative parts doubled, the one being male the other female Changes and deficiencies are found also in the internal parts, animals either not possessing some at all, or possessing them in a rudimentary condition, or too numerous or in the wrong place. No animal, indeed, has ever been born without a heart, but they are born without a spleen or two spleens or with one kidney And all these phenomena have been seen in animals perfect and alive.71

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In the partial absence of form, matter seems to undergo a definitization in which potentiality escapes the law of non-contradiction, engendering a hermaphrodite or proliferating into multiple non-exclusive organs and monstrous growths, or simply not actualizing at all.

marx the immortal life of value

In an early notebook on the De anima, Marx presents Aristotle as a diviner of springs:
Aristotles depth of spirit digs up the most speculative questions in the most astonishing manner. It is the manner of a treasure-hunter. Wherever shrubs or ravines or whatever manner of spring surges up, that is where his divining rod infallibly points.72

Marxs reading suggests that Aristotles philosophical divining-rod is directed towards the source of generation in all its forms, whether in his cosmological, natural or political thought. And it is precisely this question that animates the first book of Capital, where Marx is concerned with pinpointing the source of value, and ultimately of productivity itself, in a polemics against the operative illusions of capital. It is not surprising, then, that the language Marx adopts to resolve what is presented as an essentially economic problem, constantly draws on the

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processes of generation life, fertility, sterility, coming-to-be and passing away that abound in Aristotles natural philosophy. What Marx is seeking to divine here, following Aristotles method, is the source from which value is generated:
Here a task is set us the task of tracing the genesis of [the] money-form, of developing the expression of value implied in the valuerelation of commodities, from its simplest, almost imperceptible outline, to the dazzling money-form.73

This is a task that Aristotle initiated in the Nicomachean Ethics. But here is one instance, according to Marx, in which Aristotles divining powers failed him. For while he identifies value as the expression of a relation of proportionate equality, Aristotle fails to locate the source of equalization, the something that is common to both houses and shoes, to distinct use values. In the last instance, Aristotle explains the value-relation as a conventional expression of need. Marx, on the other hand, contends that the exchangeability value finds its material source in the social organization of production, an insight that was unavailable to the classical world with its foundations in slave labour.74 For Marx, then, the proportional equivalence of exchange value lies not in need, but in the communal substance of labour. Its genesis can be traced to the sphere of production, rather than the domestic economy of the household. Moreover, he defines the substance of value in temporal terms. Labour is a consumable use value, but one whose consumption can be measured as an expenditure of time. In the marketplace of exchange, this use value appears inasmuch as it represents a certain quantum of exchangeable labour-time the average, socialized labour-time required to produce a given commodity. It is the equalization of time, according to Marx, which determines the exchangeability of value, as well as all deviations from the principle of equal exchange. As such, it functions as a law of equivalence in his theory of the valueform, a normative reference point which enables him to establish the genesis of value on the postulate of equality and to denounce the creation of

surplus value as an extortion of excess-time the production of an inequality. As a normative limit to production, Marx situates the law of equivalence on the border between the natural and the social it represents, in his words, both an over-riding law of Nature and a social measurement that underlies like a hidden secret the apparent movement of exchange.75 For the value of labour-time is determined on the one side by the socialized movement of exchange and on the other by the limits inherent in organic life. In order to produce exchangeable value, the labourer whom Marx assumes to be male must first be able to sustain his organic existence:
Given the individual, the production of laborpower consists in his reproduction of himself or his maintenance. For his maintenance he requires a given quantity of the means of subsistence. Therefore the labor-time requisite for the production of labor-power reduces itself to that necessary for the production of those means of subsistence.76

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The time of organic life the time needed to preserve and maintain the organic existence of the worker thus represents the lower limit to the law of equivalence, the point below which the time of production can no longer be compressed. But it is in the sphere of sexual reproduction that we might posit the ultimate source and limit of value-production and hence the ultimate referent of the law of equivalence. For as Marx points out later on in the same passage, the law of equivalence must include not only the time needed to maintain and preserve organic life but also the time of its reproduction a point that is often overlooked in readings of Marx:
The owner of labor-power is mortal. If then his appearance in the market is to be continuous, and the continuous conversion of money into capital assumes this, the seller of labor-power must perpetuate himself, in the way that every living individual perpetuates himself, by procreation. The labor-power withdrawn from the market by wear and tear and death, must be continually replaced by, at the very least, an equal amount of fresh labor-power. Hence the sum of the means of subsistence necessary for the production of labor-power must include the means necessary for the laborers substi-

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tutes, ie. his children, in order that this race of peculiar commodity-owners may perpetuate its appearance on the market.77

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As this passage makes clear, the understanding of production that informs Marxs theory of value in the first book of Capital is predicated on a particular logic of natural generation the finite life of the organism and the successive time of sexual reproduction. The time required to reproduce mortal, organic life is what determines, in the last instance, the minimal value of labour. As such, Marxs theory of value presupposes the analogical relation between economic production and sexual reproduction that he had established as early as the German Ideology.78 Such a thesis implies that the time of reproduction is that without which all other productivity would be impossible, the incompressible lower limit to the creation of value. Here, then, in the finite time of organic life, lies the full solution to the genesis of value the source and measure of all generation, biological or economic. Marxs attempt to divine the source of value leads him to a twofold solution, in which the production of economic value is inseparable from the reproduction of organic life. It is on the basis of this law of equivalence that Marx distinguishes between two economies of circulation. In the movement of simple exchange, C-M-C, value simply mediates the exchange of commodities and is extinguished in the consumption of a use value. The movement of exchange is here subservient to the ends of organic life, where desire is consumed within the successive time of sexual generation, and the life of the organism is expended in the labour of self-preservation. On the other hand, the formula for capital, MC-M, describes a movement in which value-incirculation has no other end but its own return to itself, where time no longer mediates the exchange of use values, but enters, as it were, into private relations with itself.79 In capitalist circulation, Marx notes, value is never definitively expended or consumed in production, but simply advanced in view of a future return. Although circular, then, its movement is not

tautological. In the return of value to value, capital speculates on its own future realization as something in excess of itself. Value returns to its point of departure only to depart again as credit, and anticipated profit. The value originally advanced not only remains intact while in circulation, but adds to itself a surplus-value or expands itself.80 The movement of capital can therefore be described as limitless, Marx comments, not only in the sense that it incessantly returns to itself but also because it never stops exceeding itself, expanding its future.81 At this point in his argument, Marx refers to a footnote in which he cites the full text of Aristotles discussion of the krematistike in the Politics in capitalism, he notes, it is as if the movement of exchange-for-interest, which represented a peripheral danger to the economy of the Greek city, had now become the dominant mode of exchange to the extent that it even appears to initiate the process of production.82 And like Aristotle, Marx describes the movement of capital in terms of a counter-natural power of generation, one that escapes the limited ends of organic (re)production. This is a life that never stops growing, where eggs beget eggs, and money coughs up money, ad infinitum. Because it is value, it has acquired the occult quality of being able to add value to itself. It brings forth living offspring, or, at least, lays golden eggs, M-M, money which begets money such is the description of Capital from the mouths of its first interpreters, the Mercantilists.83 Whereas the organic life of labour cannot live on the products of the future, what Marx discovers in the logic of capital accumulation is precisely the speculative animation of value consuming and re-engendering itself in the future.84 The consistency of value is here purely dissipative, without chronological self-presence it cannot be realized in the here and now, in this or that determinate use value. If it is to survive as such it can only be in a future mode, as an after-life that needs to sustain itself in constant growth in order to enable production in the present. Marxs formula for capitalism therefore points to an inversion of powers between past and future, production and profit, in which the after-

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life of a life that has not yet been lived, the purely speculative existence of a future profit, realizes and gives birth to the past of production. Hence, in a Christianized paraphrasing of Aristotles notes on interest-from-exchange, Marx represents the trinity as an unnatural union in which the future engenders the past, the son begets the father, in order to give birth to an immaculately conceived surplus value:
instead of simply representing the relations of commodities, [value] enters now, so to say, into private relations with itself. It differentiates itself as original value from itself as surplus-value; as the father differentiates himself from himself qua the son, yet both are one and of one age: for only by the surplusvalue of 10 pounds does the 100 pounds originally advanced become capital, and so soon as this takes place, so soon as the son, and by the son, the father, is begotten, so soon does their difference vanish, and they again become one, 110 pounds.85

Capital, in other words, appears to become father and son to itself, through a process of spontaneous generation, although its self-generative movement is inhabited by an excessiveness that defies the laws of natural reproduction. Despite the revisions that Marx brings to Aristotles theory of value, the first book of Capital remains within the general categories of Aristotles political economy, with its distinction between a limited and limitless movement of exchange, a natural and counter-natural generation. Locating the source of exchangeable value within the time of organic (re)production, Marx denounces the self-accumulative powers of capital as the effect of an extortion of excess labourtime. The speculative movement of capital nevertheless insinuates itself into the time of production, and seems at least to take on a generative role in relation to the productive process. It is this illusion that Marx is precisely interested in dissipating here, by re-establishing the correct order of priorities between production and circulation, the successive time of organic life and the speculative time of capital. This is not to say that the illusion is inoperative or without material effects nor that these material effects can be

simply conjured away. Rather, it is a question for Marx of a material revolution that would reappropriate time itself within the sphere of production. But the extent to which the determination of the source of generation remains an open, unresolved question in Marxs thinking is often underestimated. The differences between Capital and the Grundrisse notes are illuminating in this respect. For in the Grundrisse, Marx opens his discussion of capital circulation with the statement that it is impossible to derive value from labour, and that to develop the concept of capital it is necessary to begin not with labor but with value, and, precisely with exchange value in an already developed movement of circulation.86 Moreover, the Grundrisse notes predict the eventual marginalization of industrial human labourtime as a limit to value-creation, in a production process that, according to Marxs historical diagnosis, would come to be increasingly integrated within the movement of circulation and its speculative temporality. In effect, the critique that Marx puts forward here, ten years before the publication of the first book of Capital, undermines the very basis of the law of value or equivalence (and would seem to predict the obsolescence of the theory of human surplus value).87 What such a critique might allow us to question although Marx doesnt do the work himself is the order of priorities between natural and counter-natural generation, organic and immortal life, that underlies the theory of value expounded in the first book of Capital. More tentatively, the questioning of the law of equivalence as a normative rule could perhaps be extended beyond the economic sphere per se to include the sexual dimension of Marxs theory of production (here I understand sexual in the widest sense of the term to include the processes of life, death, generation, fertility, sterility ). In effect, it is striking how accurately Marxs metaphorical formulations on the counternatural generation of value seem to articulate what is at stake in certain forms of contemporary biotechnological production. What I am interested in here are those biotechnologies that call into question the finitude of organic life the

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limits of form, species, generational time and sexual difference in the regeneration of the body. Has the accumulative power of value begun to invest our biological life? Before we could even begin to explore this possibility we would have to interrogate the assumption that the time of organic life represents an ultimate and incompressible limit to production in general, whether economic or biological. This is a question that Marx was unable to entertain but perhaps this impossibility reflects more on the social conditions of production of the late nineteenth century rather than the possibilities of capitalism itself.
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stem cells parthenogenic life

Such a question could be raised in relation to any number of recent biotechnologies. But it is perhaps in the field of stem cell research that it would seem to hold a particular resonance. In 1998 embryonic stem cells (ES) were grown in culture for the first time.88 ES cells are early universal cells that exist first of all in an undifferentiated state, but have the potential to turn into almost any somatic cell in the human body. For this reason, they are considered to be pluripotent. ES cells derived from an early human embryo are capable of unlimited, undifferentiated proliferation in vitro. In principle, such cells can be raised in culture to grow and divide for ever, in a state that prevents them from specializing into this or that particular cell. When these cells are transferred to a nutrient bath, however, they commence the differentiation process, generating a multitude of specific cell types. Research into stem cells, both in the embryo and the adult body, has raised questions about the experimental possibilities of manipulating the time of growth. Might it be possible to return the adult cell to a state of pluripotent dedifferentiation? Would it be feasible to reactivate and modulate the process of cellular differentiation using chemical signals? How can the time of growth be induced and controlled to generate this or that cell, in specific quantities, and as required for therapeutic purposes? Stem cells are of interest as therapeutic agents because of their enormous regenerative powers.

Although the differentiation process remains to be explored in detail, recent experiments suggest that such cells might be used in order to produce regenerative tissue for transplantation and grafts. It is envisaged, for example, that neurones could be cultured for neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimers and Parkinsons, pancreatic cells for diabetics and new cardiac muscles for the heart. It is anticipated also that ES cells could be genetically altered to suppress immuno-rejection, thereby producing a universal graft tissue for blood, bone marrow, lung, liver, kidney, tendons, ligaments, muscles, skin, hair, teeth, the lens and the retina of the eye. Several different directions have emerged in the field of stem cell research.89 The most controversial of these is perhaps the cultivation of ES cells through the use of somatic cell nuclear transfer, the mammalian cloning technique made famous by Dolly the sheep. The idea is that cloned cells would be used for autologous tissue transplantation, in which a patient would donate his or her own cells to produce genetically identical regenerative tissue. In order to do this, a researcher would need to transfer a somatic or non-reproductive cell from the adult donor into an unfertilized egg whose chromosomes had been removed. The resulting embryo, containing the nucleus of the donor cell, would be cultivated only until it reached the 100 cell or blastocyst stage. At this point, the developmental process would be suspended in order to produce ES cells capable of producing the particular cells required by the patient. In the mainstream media, such experiments have been closely associated with the debate around the ethics of human cloning. But the idea of cloning as the identical reproduction of a whole organism is perhaps the most familiar of nightmares and one that fails to capture the precise import of these recent developments. This is a point taken up by Roger A. Pederson, a leading researcher in the field. Pederson has taken it upon himself to declare a voluntary moratorium on the reproductive cloning of humans, in the name of the inviolability of the potential person.90 At the same time, however, he claims that stem cell research is not threatened by this critique because the cultivated

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cells have been rendered biologically incapable of developing into a whole organism. This involves a technical manipulation whereby the outer cells in the originating blastocyst, responsible for the development of the placenta, are removed. When these cells are excised the remaining inner cells are incapable of developing in a uterus. ES cells, Pederson concludes, are therefore no longer equivalent to an embryo in their developmental power (ibid.). Such a statement could be interpreted as a mere expedient in the face of pro-life opposition to stem cell research (which of course it is). But it also brings to light an effective and radical difference between stem cell experiments and other, more familiar, reproductive technologies. Stem cell research has no investment in the bodys potential to become an organism. What these technologies are striving to cultivate and control are the multiple potentialities of a tissue whose growth is no longer contained within the functional limits or time of organic development. ES cells have been deprived of the developmental power of the embryo, as Pederson suggests, but what they have undergone in the process is a very different kind of potentialization, open to multiple, non-exclusive and impersonal futures. This is an embryogenesis that precludes the teleological becoming of the foetus. In any case, despite the controversy it has sparked off, what the recent success in human cloning has seemed to confirm to more circumspect observers is the unsurpassable difficulty of producing therapeutic stem cells using cloning techniques.91 In the meantime, other scientists have been attempting to achieve the same results by deriving pluripotent stem cells from the cells of the adult body.92 This line of research raises some provocative questions about the processes of cellular regeneration, suggesting that the latent potentialities of adult cells are more complex than previously thought, capable of dedifferentiation, migration and transformation into a multitude of different cell lineages. In recent experiments, bone-marrow-derived cells have been returned to something like their embryonic state of multiple, non-exclusive potentiality, and subsequently differentiated to produce muscle, endothelium, liver, heart and neuronal cells. These results seem to indicate that the pluripotence characteristic of embryonic stem cells remains present in adult cells and responsible for tissue regeneration throughout life. Perhaps the depersonalized embryonic tissue that other researchers seek to generate using the controversial cloning techniques could be directly derived from the adult donors own tissues. Even more telling, for our purposes, is the fact that Advanced Cell Technology (ACT), the company responsible for the recent human clone, has also been experimenting in creating human embryos through parthenogenesis, in which an unfertilized egg develops as if it were fertilized.93 When it occurs spontaneously in mammals, parthenogenesis results either in a dead embryo or an ovarian tumour. In recent experiments, however, human eggs were induced to parthenogenic growth up until the blastocyst stage. Here, then, ACT hopes to have found a source of embryonic tissue that doesnt involve cloning and is incapable of developing into a human, thereby escaping the forthcoming US ban on all human cloning. And no matter what the feasibility of these most recent experiments in parthenogenesis, they indicate a technological ambition that is common to all stem cell research. With or without the use of embryos, the aim is to regenerate the body from its own tissues through a process of auto-generation that at once confirms the wholeness of the body as a therapeutic aim, while producing a tissue that has been radically divested of all claims to personhood.94 How, in Aristotelian terms, could we account for the curious potentialities of this tissue? In the Generation of Animals, Aristotle defines the foetus as a potential living organism. Here, however, we have an embryonic tissue capable of multiple differentiation, but excluded, through technical means, from the possibility of actualizing into an organic body. This is a tissue that cannot be defined as living in the organic sense of the term. It is without face. Yet neither is it capable of death, understood as the cessation of form. In culture, cells can be multiplied from cells ad infinitum, through a process of homogeneration in which genesis has become indistinguishable from growth, and both encounter no

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essential limit. Long after the death of their donors, the immortalized stem cell-lines will continue to proliferate in the data-banks their death can only be the effect of an external interruption. Enigmatic, also, in Aristotelian terms, is the fact that the potential alterations of this tissue are no longer held to the rule of organic non-contradiction that would commit them to one cell lineage over another, one function over another. Their power of multiple and non-exclusive differentiation could be likened to the monstrous growths the problems of excess and deficiency which Aristotle encounters as accidental epiphenomena in the world of natural generation. In short, the production of this tissue could only be described by Aristotle as a kind of counter-natural generation, a material parthenogenesis in which potential undergoes an excessive multiplication. In their dedifferentiated but pluripotent state, the tissues of the body seem to have acquired an accumulative potentiality that is not without its commercial promise. In economic terms, the various regenerative technologies that are being developed in the field of stem cell research should perhaps be understood in relation to insurance. The case of umbilical cord blood, a rich source of unmanipulated stem cells, offers an insight into the possible commercial uses of cultured stem cells in the years to come. Since the late 1980s, when techniques were first developed to process and freeze umbilical cord blood, private companies have been offering the services of cord blood banks to parents who wish to store their childrens stem cells for future therapeutic use.95 Such services are advertised as a kind of insurance policy, although what is on offer here is not so much a financial compensation for bodily loss but rather a direct source of biological regeneration that can be preserved for use at any time in the future. Recent experiments in stem cell cultivation are attempting something even more unsettling the production, from the adult body, of a regenerative tissue whose promise lies in the future it can accumulate for us. As potential consumers of these technologies, we are being invited to insure against our death by speculating on our bodys capacity for accumulative growth. Of course, what the biotechnology companies are speculating on are all of our futures. In the bio-economics of cell technologies, two circuits can be distinguished one that returns to and feeds into the circuit of organic (re)production where stem cell therapies are consumed as a private source of regeneration, an individual insurance policy; and one that operates purely in the field of speculation, capitalizing on the multiple potentialities of this strange biological tissue whose life is never fully realized in the present, but remains always to come. It is clear that the disruptive effects of stem cell technologies are of an entirely different order to those encountered in earlier technologies of transplantation. Organ and blood donation technologies remain within the incisions of the organic body while suspending and relocating its potential functions. Stem cell technologies, on the other hand, involve an attempt to inhabit and control the process of cellular differentiation before the birth of organic form; to modulate the growth of the body, as it were, from within, according to another temporality. What is at issue here is not so much the isolation and transplantation of an absolutely potential life, the donor organ, but rather a kind of in vivo definitization of the bodys potentialities. Such a development is inaccessible to Agamben, who continues to work within the ambit of Aristotles theory of natural generation, even while he isolates an absolute potential and suspends the formal limits between singular and universal, species and genus, in a neuter threshold, allowing for the movement of infinite exchange without appropriation a philosophy of organ transplantation. Agambens understanding of exchange doesnt encompass the excessive movement which Aristotle found so unnerving in the process of exchange-for-interest the notion of an accumulative genesis from within exchange, a genesis whose growth would be without limit. It is no accident, I would suggest, that Aristotle encountered such a movement in relation to the economic problem of usury. For Marx, rereading Aristotle in the context of a market economy, it was this notion of definitized growth that characterized the peculiar generative power

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of value in capitalism. Perhaps the challenge presented by the new biological forms of production lies in the necessity of thinking through Marxs formula for capital not only on the abstract level of financial speculation but also as a temporality that has begun to inhabit the very matter of our biology. What we are confronted with here are the ambiguities of an exploitation that is regenerative in the widest sense of the term and promises nothing less than a capitalization of survival.
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understanding of political techniques in general with the sovereign model of constitutional power. He here claims that Foucaults later work pursued two divergent lines of enquiry the political, totalizing technologies of the state and the individualizing technologies of the self. Yet Foucault was never able to theorize their convergence, he argues. If Foucault contests the traditional approach to the problem of power, which is exclusively based on juridical models (What legitimates power?) or on institutional models (What is the State?), and if he calls for a liberation from the theoretical privilege of sovereignty in order to construct an analytic of power that would not take law as its model and code, then where, in the body of power, is the zone of indistinction (or, at least, the point of intersection) at which techniques of individualization and totalizing procedures converge? (Homo Sacer 56) As this passage makes clear, Agamben assumes that totalizing procedures must be thought according to the juridical model of sovereign power. In the 1976 seminar, however, Foucault defines his task as the elaboration of a model of power that would be at once totalizing and individualizing, and yet irreducible to the premises of sovereign constitutional right. He here defines biopolitics as a probabilistic exercise of power that targets the contingent event in a statistical population (Il faut dfendre la societe: Cours au Collge de France (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997) 21335). 9 Homo Sacer 2. 10 Homo Sacer 6. 11 Means Without End 56; Homo Sacer 10506. 12 Means Without End 6. 13 Homo Sacer 9. 14 Absolute Immanence 230. Agamben takes up this question again in his latest book: LOuvert: De lhomme et de lanimal, trans. Jol Gayraud (Paris: Rivages, 2002) 2631. 15 The Metaphysics 1041a 11, trans. John H. McMahon (New York: Prometheus, 1991) 16364; trans. modified. 16 De anima II.2 413b, trans. Hugh LawsonTancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 160.

notes
I am grateful to the Angelaki reviewers Diane Morgan and Alexander Garca Dttmann for their comments on this article. I would also like to acknowledge the continuing support of Lucette Cysique, Franoise Duroux and Mitchell Dean. 1 Means Without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minnesota: U of Minnesota P, 2000) 7. 2 Absolute Immanence in Potentialities, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 232. 3 Politics Books 1 and 2 1252b 30I.7, trans. Trevor J. Saunders (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995). 4 Politics Books 1 and 2 1252a, 2635. 5 Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1998) 7. 6 Means Without End 3. 7 History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random, 1978) 188. 8 Agamben proposes a very selective reading of Foucaults work on biopower, one that relies heavily on the last part of the History of Sexuality, Volume 1. This chapter is in no way representative of Foucaults seminar work on biopower. To a large extent, I would suggest, Agamben misinterprets Foucaults interrogation of power, though a full exploration of this matter is beyond the scope of the present article. Something of an insight into his misreading can be gleaned from the first chapter of Homo Sacer, where he conflates Foucaults

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17 On self-preservation, see De anima II.4 416b, 168. 18 De generatione animalium I.23 730b731a in The Works of Aristotle, trans. Arthur Platt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910). 19 De generatione animalium I.23 731a. 20 De anima III.2 426b7, 194. 21 The Metaphysics 1005b, 75. 22 The Metaphysics 1006a, 73. 23 Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999) 65.
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sion of the concept of brain death, see Homo Sacer 16065. 36 On the ambiguous legal status of the brain-dead body, see Nora Machado, Using the Bodies of the Dead: Legal, Ethical and Organisational Dimensions of Organ Transplantation (Vermont: Ashgate, 1998). 37 The juridical philosopher Jean-Pierre Baud, in a study which looks at the paradoxical legal status of the body parts and fluids produced by contemporary biotechnologies, comes to a similar conclusion to Agamben. He argues that in the absence of an intermediate zone between the person (assumed to be whole and not dead) and the thing, the frozen organ or blood sample can only be considered a res nullius in legal terms. See Laffaire de la main vole: Une histoire juridique du corps (Paris: Seuil, 1993). 38 Remnants of Auschwitz 15556. 39 On Potentiality in Potentialities 177. 40 De anima 417a 25, 169. 41 On Potentiality 178. 42 Pardes in Potentialities 215. 43 In an essay on potentiality and bodies in Aristotles thinking, Cynthia A. Freeland operates a similar revision of Aristotles thought on potential life in relation to contemporary biomedical technologies. She argues that Aristotles belief that there are no bodies alive purely potentially stems from contingent facts about his world and its technology, and not from logical or conceptual reasons. That is, I do not doubt that he would regard the eye, cornea, heart, or kidney in a donor bank as purely potential organs. So also would frozen sperm (or, for that matter, eggs) count as potential reproductive residues. In the event of advances permitting the deep-freeze of whole persons we could have ice-boxes full of bodies potentially alive. See Aristotle on Bodies, Matter and Potentiality in Philosophical Issues in Aristotles Biology, eds. A. Gotthelf and J.G. Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 406. 44 The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 35. 45 Remnants of Auschwitz 156. 46 Absolute Immanence 232.

24 On Sleep and Waking 453b 24 in Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams, trans. David Gallop (Canada: Broadview, 1990) 57. 25 De generatione animalium V.I 778b. 26 On Sleep and Waking 454b 23, 63. 27 De generatione animalium V.I 778b. 28 De generatione animalium V.I 779a. 29 On Sleep and Waking 454b, 61. 30 De generatione animalium II.5 741a. 31 De generatione animalium II.5 741a. 32 Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (Paris: Flammarion, 1986) 20203. 33 Absolute Immanence 23132. 34 Absolute Immanence 232. 35 Remnants of Auschwitz 154. Throughout Remnants of Auschwitz, Agamben compares the figure of the Muselmann in the Nazi concentration camps to the neodead produced by contemporary life-support technologies. [I]n the camp, he writes, the Muselmann like the body of the overcomatose person and the neomort attached to life-support systems today not only shows the efficacy of biopower, but also reveals its secret cypher, so to speak its arcanum (156). In this article, I am developing my reading of Agambens concept of bare life solely in relation to contemporary biomedical technologies. However, it would be possible to pursue the connection Agamben has established here by looking in more detail at the biomedical experiments carried out in the concentration camps. On this subject, see Homo Sacer 15459. For Agambens fullest discus-

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47 De generatione animalium II.5 771b. 48 Physica II 199b in The Works of Aristotle, trans. R.P. Hardie and R.K. Gaye (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962). 49 Physica II 199b. 50 Physica II 199a. 51 Physica II 199b. 52 De generatione animalium IV.4 770b. 53 For a detailed discussion of the relation between Marx and Aristotle, and the role of Aristotles discussion of krematistike in the first book of Capital, see ric Alliez, Les temps capitaux. Tome 1: Rcits de la conqute du temps (Paris: ditions du Cerf, 1991) 1358. 54 The Nicomachean Ethics 1133a 20, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Boston: Reidel, 1975) 87. 55 The Nicomachean Ethics 1133b 1728, 88. 56 The Nicomachean Ethics 1133a 1923, 87. 57 The Nicomachean Ethics 1133a 2728, 88. 58 Physica IV 220b, 221a. 59 Physica IV 223b. 60 Politics: Books 1 and 2 1257b 24, 14. 61 The Nicomachean Ethics 1133b 12, 88. 62 Politics: Books 1 and 2 I.8 1257b 23, 14. 63 Such a movement has a truly peripheral or excessive status in Aristotles thinking. Of the two understandings of the infinite that Aristotle proposes in De generatione et corruptione, for example, neither corresponds to the kind of movement he encounters in exchange-for-interest. The movement of coming-to-be or genesis, he writes, must be infinite and either circular or rectilinear. The most perfect movement is infinite and circular. Less perfect movement, such as the coming to be of human generations, the son from the father, is infinite but rectilinear. In both cases, however, movement is essentially limited or centred an eternal return of sameness (De generatione et corruptione II.10 338a338b in The Works of Aristotle: Volume II, trans. H.H Joachim (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962)). At issue, then, in Aristotles discussion of the two kinds of exchange, is the distinction between the finite-unlimited and the limited-infinite, as Deleuze puts it in Difference and Repetition (Gilles Deleuze, Diffrence et Rptition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969) 80). Whereas Aristotles whole corpus assumes the priority of infinite but limited movement, the finite-unlimited opens up into a very different current of philosophy. It is significant that the Epicurian philosopher Lucretius, who in many ways takes up the art of krematistike as a general theory of creation, insists on the fact that the universe has no limits and is born of the smallest of movements of excess the clinamen. 64 Politics: Books 1 and 2 I.9 1257b 401258a10, 1415. 65 Politics: Books 1 and 2 I.10 1258b48, 16. 66 Such a generation goes counter to all the fundamental premises of coming to be as outlined by Aristotle in De generatione et corruptione. According to this treatise, which carefully distinguishes between coming to be (genesis), growth and alteration, the lives of all living things are measured by a certain period (II.10 336b). Their growth, understood as an expansion of magnitude, is limited in time. It is this limit to growth that introduces the living thing into the successive time of generation, where the perishing of paternal form gives way to the coming-to-be of the same, in the son. The time of generation is necessarily rectilinear and irreversible for though your coming-to-be presupposes your fathers, his coming-to-be does not presuppose yours (II.10 338b). But in the movement of exchange-forinterest, Aristotle comes up against a substance that never stops growing, oblivious to death and generational time. This substance is homogenerative father and son to itself, though the son has taken on the generative role with respect to the father. 67 De anima II.4 416a, 165. 68 De generatione animalium II.5 741a. 69 Physica VIII, 205. 70 De generatione animalium II.5 741a. 71 De generatione animalium IV.4 770b771a. 72 Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Vierte Abteilung, Exzerpte-Notizen-Marhinalien, vol. 1 (Berlin: Institut fr Marxismus-Leninismus, 1976) 163; my trans. 73 Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954) 54.

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74 Capital 6566. 75 Capital 80. 76 Capital 167. 77 Capital 168. 78 See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part 1, trans. C.J. Arthur (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) 4951. 79 Capital 153. 80 Capital 149. 81 Capital 150. 82 Capital 15051, fn. 2.
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Unexpected Sources of Tissue Generation, Journal of Clinical Investigation 11 (June 2001): 135556. 93 Michael Le Page, Virgin Embryos, New Scientist (1 Dec. 2001): 6. 94 On this point, see Eugene Thacker, The Thickness of Tissue Engineering: Biopolitics, Biotech and the Regenerative Body, Theory and Event 3.3 (1999): 116. Thacker writes that tissue engineering (TE), which is closely linked to stem cell technologies, is in the process of constituting a unique biomedical normativity which is based on the notion of the body as regenerative and as self-healing In TE the biomedical body only returns to itself in a spiral which simultaneously moves upwards (an infinitely reproducible body) and downwards (an expendable body) (6). He adds that TE involves an economy of auto-generation (the generation of tissues from ones own cells) that is circular and proliferative (4). 95 See Dorothy Nelkin and Lori Andrews, Homo Economicus: Commercialization of Body Tissue in the Age of Biotechnology, The Hastings Center Report (Sept. 1998): 56.

83 Capital 152, 153. 84 Nobody not even a musician of the future can live upon future products (Capital 166). 85 Capital 153. 86 Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973) 259. 87 This is the reading of Marx that has been developed most forcefully by Italian autonomist thinkers. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan and Maurizio Viano (South Hadly: Bergin & Garvey, 1984). For a more recent attempt to develop this reading of Marx in light of Foucaults concept of biopower, see Maurizio Lazzaratos analysis of the contemporary media: Pour une redfinition du concept de biopolitique, Futur Antrieur 3940.1: 6984. 88 See James A. Thomson et al., Embryonic Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Blastocysts, Science 282 (6 Nov. 1998): 114547. 89 For an overview of these, see Roger A. Pederson, Embryonic Stem Cells for Medicine, Scientific American (Apr. 1999): 4449. 90 Ethics and Embryonic Cells, Scientific American (Apr. 1999): 47. 91 On this point, see A. Coghlan, C. Ainsworth and D. Concar, Dont Expect Any Miracles: Special Report on Human Cloning, New Scientist (1 Dec. 2001): 46. 92 For further detail on this line of research see M.L. Springer et al., Not the Usual Suspects: The

Melinda Cooper Department of Sociology Division of Society, Culture, Media and Philosophy Macquarie University NSW 2109 Australia E-mail: mcooper@scmp.mq.edu.au