From Myth to Life

The "Dark Side" of Biopolitics. Notes to Agamben's Homo sacer, 2023

This paper discusses Giorgio Agamben's reading of Michel Foucault's biopolitics and biopower. Agamben intertwines Foucault's biopolitics, Hannah Arendt's insights on the distinction between the political realm and the sphere of biological life, Carl Schmitt's notions of "sovereignty" and "exception", and Walter Benjamin's syntagma "bare life" 2. While examining Agamben's use of the notion of biopolitics and the distinction between the two Greek words for life, zoé and bios, this paper will not study Agamben's employ of Carl Schmitt's, Hannah Arendt's 3 , and Walter Benjamin's theorizations on politics, sovereignty, and bare life. On the contrary, it will focus on Agamben's broad use of the concept of biopolitics, which he employs to address the outbreaks of violence against foreigners and citizens, and what he describes as the steady normalization of the state of exception that started at the dawn of the modern age.

In this paper, I focus on the prefix ‘bio’ that identifies biopolitics as a specific political rationale and form of organisation, to consider how several influential approaches to biopolitics construe the relationship between life and politics.

The question of life has been in the centre of attention since the inception of Western philosophy: the Pre-Socratics search for the essence of life-the basic principle (like "water" in the case of Thales, for instance) that gives rise to and sustains everything; Aristotle sees life's basic principle, psukhē, as its capacity for "self-nourishment, growth and decay" (Aristotle, De Anima 2.1.412a15), while simultaneously distinguishing between bios, the "good" life of citizens, and zoē, biological, vegetative life common to all organisms as well as gods; for Immanuel Kant the problem of life primarily appears in the form of the question of human as a living subject that engages with life as an object of thought. Such an ontological enquiry, driven by a double focus on the essence or principle of life ("life in itself") on the one hand, and its boundaries of articulation (that which delimits the living; boundaries between the living and non-living, human and non-human, and between species), on the other, as philosopher Eugene Thacker (2008) argues, forms the ground for the philosophy of biology. But in the history of philosophy we may also find a different kind of engagement with life: that which evades the distinction between the essence of life and the living, leading to further divisions, and instead, focuses on a critical, creative, and rigorous practice of asking "What relations are precluded in such-and-such a division, in such-and-such classification [of life]?" (Thacker 2008, 141). It is in this way that Thacker understands biophilosophy: an investigation of life that pays attention to what transforms life instead of a twofold question of the basic principle and boundaries of articulation; an investigation that looks at life as a multiplicity, that traverses binaries, avoids anthropomorphisation, and pays attention to the issues of relations, their dynamics and mechanisms of exclusion, which demonstrate the ethical side of this primarily ontological enquiry. Apart from process philosophies (e.g. of Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Gilles Deleuze) that Thacker (2015) discusses, thus understood biophilosophy can be found in the work of feminist philosophers and theorists: Claire Colebrook (e.g. 2010), Elizabeth Grosz (e.g. 2013), Patricia MacCormack (e.g. 2012), and Rosi Braidotti (e.g. 2006). There, life is often conceptualised as a material force, an intensity, a form of dynamism, inventiveness, creativity, but also a potential for destruction and idleness that extend beyond the organic. The problem of life also comes to the fore in cultural studies of science, medicine and technology: for instance, as feminist scholar Sarah Franklin (2000) demonstrates, the late modern cultural understandings of life itself have been transformed by way of scientific advancements and their popularisation into the idea of life as "bits" of genetic information, being yet another version of the "basic principle" or essence. Thus reconfigured life became quickly both personalised, as in individualised medical therapies forged on genetic signatures, and globalised, as in new universalisms like panhuman genomes, and ready to be instrumentalised and capitalised upon as such (Franklin 2000; Åsberg 2005). Nature, detraditionalised, became in the 20 th century equal to biology, which by the millennial turn became genetics and reprogrammable information, only to return as a backdrop for life itself in the decades after at the centre of discussions on the climate change and ecological crisis. In the present essay we argue for biophilosophy as a queerfeminist and posthumanities methodology that attends to the question of life by focusing on multiple differences and

2017

Walter Benjamin warned in 1940 of a certain inconspicuous threat to political thinking, not least of all to materialism, that takes progress as an historical norm. Implicit in this conception is what he describes as an empty continuum of time along which the prevailing tradition chronicles its own mythic development and drains everyday life of genuine historical experience. The myth of progressive history advances insidiously today in consumeristic and technocratic attempts at reconciling cultural imagery with organic nature. In this dissertation, I pursue the contradictions of such images as they crystallize around the natural history of twenty-first century commodity society, where promises of ecological remediation, sustainable urban development, and climate change mitigation have yet to introduce a true crisis of historical experience to the ongoing environmental crisis of capitalism. A more radical way of seeing the cultural representation of nature would, I argue, penetrate its mythic determination by market forces and bear witness to the natural-historical ruins and traces that constitute, in Benjamin's terms, a single "catastrophe" where others perceive historical continuity. I argue that Benjamin's critique of progress is instructive to interpreting those utopian dreams, ablaze in consumer life and technological fantasy, that recent decades of growing environmental concern have channeled into the recovery of an experience of the natural world. His dialectics of nature and alienated history confront the wish-image of organic abundance with the transience of its appropriated expression in the commodity-form. Drawing together this confrontation with a varied literature on collective memory, nature, and the city, I suggest that our poverty of experience is more than simply a technical, economic, or even ecological problem, but rather follows from the commodification of history itself. The goal of this work is to reflect upon the potentiality of communal politics that subsist not in rushing headlong into a progressive future but, as Benjamin urges, in reaching for the emergency brake on the runaway train of progress.