Qualifying Exam: Biopolitics

Theories of biopolitics posit a particular relationships between life, biology, and

politics. How is the relationship between these three areas/domains conceptualized
within these theories? How does death (necropolitics, thanatopolitics) figure in
theories of biopolitics? What ways are offered for moving beyond or affirming
biopolitics?
I begin by summarizing a short story that will frame my discussion of biopolitics in this
essay.1 Ursula K. Le Guins philosophical fiction The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas"
(1973) begins by describing the first day of summer in the city of Omelas. We find the residents
celebrating the Festival of Summer, but it seems that every day is a reason to celebrate in
Omelas, as joy and pleasure are the norm. There is no king over the city; it seems that the
residents govern themselves. There are no slaves, swords, or soldiers. Its citizens feel no guilt,
but a sense of victory. As Le Guin writes: A boundless and generous contentment, a
magnanimous triumph felt not against some outer enemy but in communion with the finest and
fairest in the souls of all men everywhere and the splendor of the world's summer: this is what
swells the hearts of the people of Omelas, and the victory they celebrate is that of life (3).
However, not everyone experiences such joy in Omelas. As the celebration of life continues
outside, we find a small windowless room in the basement of one of the citys beautiful
buildings, its door locked. In the room sits a child of about 10 years, who is feeble-minded,
emaciated, covered with sores as a result of having sit in his/her own excrement. The child lives
in constant terror, and no one visits, except for those who periodically bring the meager amounts
of food and water on which the child survives. Le Guin explains:
1 I first encountered the story in anthropologist Elizabeth Povinellis work Economies of
Abandonment (2011).

They all know it is there, all the people of Omelas. Some of them have come to see it,
others are content merely to know it is there. They all know that it has to be there.
Some
of them understand why, and some do not, but they all understand that their
happiness,
the beauty of their city, the tenderness of their friendships, the health of
their children, the
wisdom of their scholars, the skill of their makers, even the abundance of
their harvest
and the kindly weathers of their skies, depend wholly on this child's
abominable misery.
(5)
Le Guins tale profoundly resonates with the uncomfortable paradox that led me to the
readings for this exam: how, in order to protect and enhance certain lives, others are negated to
the point of death. Michel Foucault introduced his concept of biopolitics in 1976 in both The
History of Sexuality, Vol. 1 and his lecture series at the Collge de France Society Must Be
Defended. Foucaults work will serve as the foundation for this discussion of biopolitics. The
term itself was not new. As Thomas Lemke (2011) notes, the meaning of the biopolitics over the
past century has diverged significantly depending on which part of the term is emphasized: life
or politics. One one side, there are those who take life and biology as the basis for political
action and behavior, for example, theories that view the state as a form of life or those that posit
human political decisions as manifestations of our biological make up. The other end of the
spectrum takes biopoitics to mean the transformation of life into an object of politics, for
example, the regulation of life processes and biotech innovations (3). Lemke concludes that
neither side can account for the relational and historical dimensions of life and politics because
they take each as separate domains: Life is not only the object of politics and external to
political decision-making; it affects the core of politics (4). This nebulous, messy, and dynamic
relationship between life and politics is at the core of Foucaults biopolitics, and hence his work
is the starting point for this discussion.

Foucaults Biopolitics
Foucault uses the term biopower to describe the transformation in the basis for
governance in the West, beginning in the 18th century, from the sovereigns right to take life or
let live, to the social body's right to foster life or disallow it to the point of death. ((1976a, 136138). Biopower, he notes, is situated and exercised at the level of life, the species, the race, and
the large-scale phenomena of the population, which was made possible by the development of
statistics (137). In The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1, Foucault identifies two forms of biopower:
an anatomy-politics of the human body, or disciplinary power, and regulatory controls, which
he calls a biopolitics of the population (139).
Whereas before the emergence of biopower, biological life could be separated from
politics, this new form of power places [mans] existence as a living being in question, and,
therefore, there is no life that is excluded from the realm of biopolitics, which subsumes the
biological existence of the population under its domain (1976a, 142). In other words, modern
politics is a matter of life itself. What is the life that is at stake in (Foucaults) biopolitics?
Didier Fassin (2009) argues that for Foucault, Issues of life as such did not interest him. Neither
life as bios nor life as zoe was his main concern, but rather the way in which impersonal living
beings were turned into populations and individuals, how governmentality and subjectification
shaped our modern vision of the world and of humanity (47). Drawing on Foucaults statement
that biopolitics was addressed to a multiplicity of men (1976b, 243), Eugene Thacker argues:
biopolitics has to be understood not just in terms of the individual body or the population, but as

a governance of life itself and a notion of life itself that is principally characterized by
circulation, flux and flow (2009, 134). The life that biopower seeks to manage is always more
than mere biological existence. However, contemporary theorists of biopolitics, as we shall see,
disagree as to what exactly the life in biopolitics includes.
As noted above, for Foucault, biopower not only fosters life, but also negates it to the
point of death. Sovereign power, according to Foucault, relies on the capacity to kill. With
biopower, however, the extermination of life presents itself as the counterpart of a power that
exerts a positive influence on life (1976a, 137). In Society Must Be Defended, Foucault asks:
Given that this powers objective is essentially to make live, how can it let die? How can the
power of death, the function of death, be exercised in a political system centered upon
biopower? (1976b, 254) According to Foucault, it is here that racism intervenes. Racism is
what divides the lives that will be fostered from those that will be disallowed to the point of
death or killed, which includes political/social death (256). He sums up the logic this way:
The more inferior species die out, the more abnormal individuals are eliminated, the
fewer degenerates there will be in the species as a whole, and the more I as a
species rather than individual can live, the stronger I will be, the more
vigorous I will
be. I will be able to proliferate. The fact that the other dies does
not mean simply that I
live in the sense that his death guarantees my safety; the
death of the other, the death of
the bad race, of the inferior race (or the degenerate
or the abnormal) is
something that will make life in general healthier:
healthier and purer (255).
Racism, as used here, is not necessarily against those of a certain colors or ethnicity - it is against
those who are abnormal. With racism, death becomes the the core of biopolitics, a mechanism
that allows biopower to work (1976b, 258).

Following Foucault, a number of theorists have revised or extended the concept of biopolitics.
For the most part, they can be divided into those who emphasize the making live of biopolitics
and those who stress letting die or killing dimension (thanatopolitics). I will focus my
discussion on four of the most prominent revised theories of biopolitics and their conceptions of
life, death, biology, and politics.
Hardt and Negri
Philosophers Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt (2000) take a Post-Marxist approach in
revising Foucaults biopolitics. Central to their argument is their claim that politics and capitalist
production have merged into one global imperial system, which they call Empire. Empire is not
located in any one nation but operates in part through effectively "stateless" actors: multinational
corporations and institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade
Organization. Today, they argue sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of
national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule, that is, capital
accumulation (2000, xii).
The collective political subject produced via global capitalism is what Hardt and Negri
call the multitude. In this system, the Empire becomes the paradigm of biopower, since it not
only manages the global labor population, but also aims to manage interactions and social life
(xv). In accordance with Foucaults paradox of making live and letting die, the Empire is
continually bathed in blood, but always dedicated to peace a perpetual and universal peace
outside of history (ibid.).

Hardt and Negri take issue with Foucaults biopolitical theory because it does not fully
account for the role of capitalist accumulation in relation to both life and politics. While
Foucault acknowledges the importance of biopower to capitalist accumulation, they argue that
.In fact, if at this point we were to ask Foucault who or what drives the system, or rather, who
is the bios, his response would be ineffable, or nothing at all. What Foucault fails to grasp
finally are the real dynamics of production in biopolitical society (2000: 28).
The relationship between life, politics, and capital is clarified with their concept of
biopolitical production: in the biopolitical sphere, life is made to work for production and
production is made to work for life (32). Furthermore, contemporary capital production
includes immaterial labor, that is, the production of language, subjectivity, affects, and desire,
and the production of relations and subjects, as the constitution of the world (ibid.). Hence,
from this perspective, capital is productive of life itself. Life here is not only biological
existence, but includes social life all (immaterial) elements such as language, subjectivity, affects
and desire. These are all productive for capital. There is no naked life, outside of politics
because, they claim, nothing escapes money, (32). Hardt and Negri are overall optimistic about
the capability of the multitude for resistance; immaterial labor also produces networks and social
ties, and facilitates communication. Because of their emphasis on the productive aspects of
biopower, its destructive tendencies are rarely discussed in their work. In Multitude (2004), they
write: More important than the negative technologies of annihilation and torture, then, is the

constructive character of biopower. Global war must not only bring death but also produce and
regulate life. (20). In the final section of my response, Ill return to the affirmative aspects of
their argument.
Nikolas Rose and Molecular Biopolitics
Sociologist Nikolas Rose offers another hopeful version of biopolitics. In earlier work on
neoliberalism and governmentality, Rose argued that the new subjects of advanced liberal
democracies are expected to be active individuals seeking to enterprise themselves to
maximize their quality of life through acts of choice, according their life a meaning and value to
the extent that it can be rationalized as the outcome of choices made or choices to be made
(1996, 58). Since then, his work on the subject of government has turned towards biomedicine,
which, he argues, is the dominant lens through which subjects have come to see themselves.
Contemporary biopolitics, accordingly, has led to a certain degree of biologization of the
human soul (2007, 25), and its subjects have increasingly come to see themselves as somatic
individuals who experience, articulate, judge, and act upon ourselves in part in the language of
biomedicine . . . our corporeality, now at the molecular level, is the target of our judgments and
of the techniques that we use to improve ourselves (2007: 26). Political/social life (bios) has
now been folded into the biological (zoe). Biomedicine today views and understands life at the
molecular level, and thus, biotechnologies can act upon and transform life itself" (2007: 12).
Rose deviates in several significant ways from Foucaults biopolitics. For Foucault,
biopolitics operated on the population, while Rose claims that the biopolitics of the 21st century
is concerned with the individual, which substitutes for the population. Rose also minimizes the

thanatpolitical paradox in Foucaults work. While biopower, today, certainly has its circuits of
exclusion, letting die is not making die. This is not a politics of death, though death suffuses and
haunts it . . . it is a better of the government of life (70). He acknowledges the differential value
assigned to forms of life, for example, the vast differences in life expectancy between nations.
Certainly a case of letting die, but Rose cannot reconcile it with a biopolitical rationale the
fact that a person in Malawi has a life expectancy of 39, he argues, does not improve the
(somatic) quality of a population to meet national objectives. Because Rose privileges
biomedicine as the framework for contemporary politics, he does not consider other rationales
for letting die (for example, national security), nor that there are regions without access to the
resources required to enterprise themselves via biomedicine.
In his critique of Rose, Bruce Braun notes that perhaps his molecular biopolitics should
be seen as a form of biopolitics within globalization that is specific to the zone of liberal peace
in the affluent spaces of the West (2007, 25). Furthermore, he asks whether the
molecularization of life that frames Roses biopolitics might enable new forms of power over the
bodies of those in the global South who are seen as emergent biosecurity threats. Biosecurity,
according to Braun, combines biopolitics with geopolitics and renders molecular life virtual, that
is, a future to come that is already with us, but which remains ungraspable (17). This
virtuality justifies interventions in the present to pre-empt future biological risks and to protect
life itself.
Agamben and Bare Life

In Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), Italian philosopher Georgio
Agamben (1995), Italian philosopher Georgio Agamben argues that Foucaults theory does not
fully account for the relationship between sovereign (juridical) power and biopolitics, nor does it
account for the exclusion of populations from the realm of politics altogether because they are
denied human status (for example, Jews under the Nazi regime). Agambens political theory is
complex and consists of other conclusions regarding the law and exception. For the purposes of
this analysis, however, I will focus on the relation of life, death, and politics in his theory.
Agamben reconciles the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics and explains
the existence of lives that are excluded from the law and its protections through homo sacer, a
figure in Roman law who was expelled from society and could be killed with impunity but not
sacrificed. In the body of homo sacer, he explains, the ancient world finds itself confronted
for the first time with a life that, excepting itself in a double exclusion from the real context of
both the profane and the religious forms of life, is defined solely by virtue of having entered
into an intimate symbiosis with death without, nevertheless, belonging to the world of the
deceased (1995:61). In contrast to Foucaults biopolitical system, where bare life and political
life were collapsed into life itself, Agamben interprets the figure of homo sacer as representing
bare life, (zoe), someone who is alive in the biological sense but socially and politically dead,
without recourse to any legal protections. Bare life is both excluded from the law but also
included by existing only in relation to it.
In a further revision to the Foucaults thesis, Agamben argues that sovereignty,
accordingly, consists of the capacity to exclude lives from political status and legal recourse, to
render them bare life, and that this sovereign act is the foundation of biopolitics. The state of

exception, or sovereign suspension of the law, is the foundation of Western political systems. If
today there is no longer any one clear figure of the sacred man, Agamben concludes, it is
perhaps because we are all virtually homines sacri (115). If the contemporary biopolitical system
is one in which the state of exception has become the rule, he is arguing, then each one of us can
be killed without impunity.
By suspending the law, sovereign power can turn entire populations to bare life,
rendering them socially dead, and exposing them to biological death. Regarding the Nazi
Regimes extermination of Jews, he notes:
The Jew living under Nazism is the privileged negative referent of the new biopolitical
sovereignty and is, as such, a flagrant case of a homo sacer in the sense of a life
that
may be killed but not sacrificed. The truth . . . is that the Jews were exterminated
not in a
mad and giant holocaust but exactly as Hitler had announced, as lice, which is
to say, as bare life. The dimension in which the extermination took place is neither religion nor
law, but biopolitics. (2005, 68)
Agamben thus declares the concentration camp as the paradigm for contemporary biopolitics; the
politics of life becomes a politics of death.
In Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (2004), Judith Butler critiques
Agamben for failing to attend to the disproportionate distribution of vulnerability across the
globe. That is, as Agamben notes, we are all vulnerable to being rendered bare life, certain
populations are more likely to suffer this fate than others. While Butler does not designate her
recent work on vulnerability and precarity as a theory of biopolitics, it resonates with this
literature, since it concerns how certain forms of life are recognized as living, while others are
never recognized and are extinguished or pass away unnoticed. In line with Foucaults
biopolitics, she argues that these non-lives are not grieved, because their deaths are considered

necessary to protect the lives of the living (31). She is not concerned with an ontological
definition of life itself but instead the conditions that determine what counts as a life (bios).
For Butler, the border between what counts as a life (bios) is determined by whether that life is
grievable, worthy of protection:
Without grievability, there is no life, or, rather, there is something living that is other than
life sustained by no regard, no testimony, and ungrieved when lost. The
apprehension of grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of precarious
life.
Grievability precedes and makes possible the apprehension of the living being
as
living, exposed to non-life from the start. (2010, 15)
The political exclusion of the ungrievable render them to a state of precarity, as she calls it, and
they are cast as threats to human life as we know it rather than as living populations in need of
protection (31).

Other theorists have also proposed that contemporary biopolitics depends on the
distribution of death. In his essay Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe rejects the notion of politics as
the exercise of reason and freedom, instead concerning himself with forms of sovereignty whose
aim is the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction of
human bodies and populations (14). Drawing from Hegel, Mbembe concludes that politics is
the work of death, that is, humans only become political subjects in the struggle and work
through which he or she confronts death (15). Drawing from Franz Fanons description of the
spacing of colonial occupation, Mbembe concludes that necropolitics works through
spacialization, by delineating boundaries and zones of abandonment: In this case, sovereignty
means the capacity to define who matters and who does not, who is disposable and who is not

(27). It seems, therefore that one of main operations of contemporary biopolitics/thanatopolitics

is to determine and maintain the border between those lives that count as lives, and those who do
not.

In Economies of Abandonment, Elizabeth Povinelli describes the biopolitical as not a

space of life but a spacing of life, not a living difference but a difference within the living (2011,
109). Her interest is in these spaces of social abandonment or zones of exception, and Povinellis
work stands out because it engages with the neoliberal (or late liberal) order to understand
specifically how neoliberal ideology and policies facilitate the letting die of biopolitics.
Referencing Mbembes Necropolitics, and his description of colonial slaughter, Povinelli
proposes that:
late liberal power does not exercise itself through the spectacular display of drawn and
quartered bodies, nor through the biological racism of German National
Socialism.
Neoliberalism works by colonizing the field of value reducing all social
values to one
market value exhausting alternative social projects by denying them
sustenance. When
the state does kill it often does so through secret detention centers
outside the reach of
habeas corpus (134).
The letting die of late liberal biopolitics, therefore seems unremarkable, since theses lives are
already devalued and ungreivable.
Esposito and Immunity
Italian philosopher Roberto Esposito offers another paradigm or internal logic for
contemporary biopolitics, attempting to understand the relationship between life and politics and
why biopolitics so easily becomes a politics death. In Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy, Esposito
proposes immunization as the paradigm from which we can understand contemporary biopolitcs.

The immunity paradigm describes the need for individuals to protect or exempt themselves from
the demands of the community. Life and politics, therefore, are not separate domains, but two
constituent elements of a single, indivisible whole that assumes meaning from their interaction
(45). To attain immunity in the biomedical sense, one has to be exposed to a form of the
pathogen from which it will be protected, as Esposito notes: it saves, insures, and preserves the
organism, either individual or collective, to which it pertains, but it does not do so directly,
immediately, or frontally; on the contrary, it subjects the organism to a condition that
simultaneously negates or reduces its power to expand (46). Hence, immunity requires both the
preservation of life as well as its negation. This relationship brings together both the biopolitical
and thanatopolitical tendencies of contemporary politics. In this way, the negative (that is, those
individuals and population that transgress societal order and norms), become positive and
productive.
Regarding the case of the Nazi regime, Esposito notes that the immunity paradigm
explains how the mass killings could be viewed as beneficial to the health of the nation:
The disease against which the Nazis fight to the death is none other than death
itself. What they want to kill in the Jew and in all human types like them
isn't life,
but the presence in life of death: a life that is already dead because it is
marked
hereditarily by an original and irremediable deformation; the
contagion of the
German people by a part of life inhabited and oppressed by
death. (137)
What was singular about the Nazi case, according to Esposito, was the complete
biologization of politics; therefore, he notes, what had one been an analogy or metaphor
now was take literally: the Jews didn't resemble parasites; they didn't behave as bacteria
they were bacteria who were to be treated as such. (117) Esposito sees the potential for

a biopolitics that is affirmative of life by examining and countering the dispositifs of

Nazi thanatopolitics.
Affirmative Biopolitics?
Several of the theorists discussed thus far have also been concerned with positing
an affirmative biopolitics that would counter its thanatopolitical tendencies. In general,
most target what Foucault identified as one precondition for biopolitical killing: a
normalizing society (1976b, 256).
Esposito sees the potential for a biopolitics that is affirmative of life by examining
and countering the dispositifs of Nazi thanatopolitics. Esposito identifies the reduction of
the self to the body and the complete biologization of life as one of enabling dispositifs of
the Holocaust. Therefore, he argues that we must find a conception of the human that is
not reducible to the biologized body. We must also counter the normalization of life.
Drawing from Canguillem and Spinoza, Esposito proposes a view of the norm that is not
dependent on a fundamental, universal standard: Norm and life cannot mutually
presuppose one another because they are part of a single dimension in continuous
becoming (185). With an immanent norm particular to each form of life, the norm is
no longer what assigned rights and obligations from the outside to the subjectbut rather
the intrinsic modality that life assumes in the expression of its unrestrainable power to
exist. (185).
I will use the personal tense for the remainder of this response because imagining
a less destructive politics truly is personal to me. Comprehending Esposito's proposal,
described in part above, is so challenging to me, I believe, precisely because the

dispositifs that enabled so much death during the Holocaust remain so hegemonic today,
that to imagine otherwise is almost unthinkable. Yet, we must continue to try to imagine
otherwise.
Agamben offers a similar affirmation of life in relation to the norm. In The
Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-life (2013), Agamben asks whether there
is a form of life that is not in relation to a rule. Agamben writes that the Wests
undeferrable task: how to think a form-of-life, a human life entirely removed from the
grasp of the law and a use of bodies and of the world that would never be substantiated
into an appropriation. That is to say again: to think life as that which is never given as
property but only as a common use (xxi). Agamben turns to Franciscan monasticism as
an example of this relation to the rule - the rules emerged from the monastic form of life
instead of determining it. It will be interesting to see how Agamben develops this theory
further in his next book, which will be his last in the series that began with Homo Sacer.
To live a life that is not in relation to external norms and rules would require a
radical reconcepcion of Foucauldian biopolitics, which depends on that relationship to
distribute life and death. Hardt and Negri, however, see the affirmative within the
biopolitical order, specifically in the multitudes potential to establish global democracy.
I am less convinced. Both Mbembe and Murray point to the figure of the suicide bomber
as one who achieves freedom by confronting death. In such circumstances, Mbembe
argues, the discipline of life and the necessities of hardship (trial by death) are marked
by excess . . . Far from being an encounter with a limit, boundary, or barrier, it

isexperienced as a release from terror and bondage (79). I hope that death is not the
only way to envision a life less beholden to biopower.
To return to The Ones Who Left Omelas LeGuin closes the story with an
enigmatic, poetic scene. Every so often, after an adolescent boy or girl witnesses the
suffering on which their happiness depends, he or she does not go home, but instead
keeps walking until they exit the city. The same happens every so often with an older
man or woman, who leaves after a day of silence. LeGuin closes her tale:
Each alone, they go west or north, towards the mountains. They go on. They leave
Omelas, they walk ahead into the darkness, and they do not come back. The place
they go towards is a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city
of
happiness. I cannot describe it at all. It is possible that it does not exist.
But they
seem to know where they are going, the ones who walk away from
Omelas.
(1973, 7)