From Machenschaft to biopolitics: A genealogical critique of biopower

Critical Horizons

Volumn 6, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 239-265

  Sinnerbrink, Robert ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

Agamben; Biopolitics; Biopower; Foucault; Heidegger; Modernity

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748943327     PISSN: 14409917     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1163/156851605775009447     Document Type: Review

References (86)

1. See M. Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley, New York, Vintage, 1980, pp. 135-157;
2. M. Foucault, "Society Must be Defended" Lectures at the Collège de France 1975-76, eds. M. Bretani & A. Fontana, trans. D. Macey, London, Penguin, 2003, pp. 239-264.
3. See also the course resumes for "Security, Territory, and Population" and "The Birth of Biopolitics" in Foucault, Ethics. Subjectivity and Truth. Essential Works of Foucault 1954-1984, ed. P. Rabinow, trans. R. Hurley, London, Penguin, 2000, pp. 67-71 and pp. 73-79.
4. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998, pp. 119-188;
5. Agamben, Means Without Ends. Notes on Politics, trans. V. Binetti & C. Casarino, Minneapolis & London, University of Minnesota Press, 2000.
6. M. Hardt & A. Negri, Empire, Cambridge, MA, & London, Harvard University Press, 2000, pp. 22-41 and pp. 364-367.
7. M. Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1991;
8. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad & K. Maly, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999.
9. See in particular, M. Foucault, "Governmentality" in The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality, ed. G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller, London, Harverster/Wheatsheaf, 1991, pp. 87-104,
10. and the helpful introduction by C. Gordon, "Governmental Rationality: An Introduction," in The Foucault Effect, Studies in Governmentality, pp. 1-52, which provides an overview of Foucault's Collège de France lectures dealing with, security, territory, population, governmental rationality, and neo-liberalism.
11. See also T. Lemke, "'The Birth of Bio-Politics': Michel Foucault's Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality," Economy and Society, vol. 30, no. 2, May 2001, pp. 190-207, for a thorough exegesis of Foucault's hitherto unpublished 1979 lecture on German and American neo-liberalism.
12. G. Agamben, Homo Sacer, pp. 119-1.88. See also Agamben's most recent reflections on the history of the state of exception as a paradigm of contemporary government:
13. G. Agamben, State of Exception, trans. K. Attell, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2004.
14. For more detailed discussions of Agamben's biopolitics see the collection of articles on Agamben in Contretemps 5, December 2004.
15. Cf. "Heidegger was always for me the essential philosopher.... But I recognize that Nietzsche prevailed over him.... 1 tried to read Nietzsche in the fifties, but Nietzsche by himself said nothing to me. Whereas Heidegger and Nietzsche - that was the philosophical shock!" M. Foucault, "The Return of Morality," Michel Foucault - Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings 1977-1984, p. 250.
16. See Agamben, Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life, pp. 59-61, and Agamben's remarks on the biopolitical basis of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism, pp. 152-153.
17. We should note in passing that these concepts should not be conflated, as happens with Foucault, or used synonymously for both Foucault and Agamben, as I shall argue presently.
18. See M. Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume 3, The Will to Power as Knowledge and as Metaphysics, trans. J. Stambaugh, D. F. Krell, F. A. Capuzzi, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1991.
19. M. Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. P. Emad & K. Maly, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1999.
20. We should note briefly the difference between Heidegger's earlier conception of Machenschaft and his later, post-metaphysical conception, of Ge-stell. Machenschaft includes humans as productive beings or representing subjects, while Ge-stell conceives of human beings as resources caught up in the totalising technological disclosure of reality.
21. Machenschaft means "that interpretation of beings as re-presentable and re-presented," which includes beings as "accessible to intention and calculation" as much as brought forth "through pro-duction and execution." Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, p. 76.
22. Contributions to Philosophy Ibid., p. 88.
23. Contributions to Philosophy Ibid., p. 88.
24. Contributions to Philosophy Ibid., p. 98.
25. See M. Heidegger, "The Question Concerning Technology" in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, trans. W. Lovitt, San Francisco, Harper & Row, 1977.
26. Heidegger, Nietzsche Volume 3, p. 61.
27. Nietzsche Volume 3 Ibid., p. 62.
28. Nietzsche Volume 3 Ibid., p. 174.
29. Nietzsche Volume 3 Ibid., p. 174.
30. Nietzsche Volume 3 Ibid., p. 175.
31. Nietzsche Volume 3 Ibid., p. 175.
32. The reference is to Ernst Jünger's concept of Totalmobilmachung; Jünger was a profoundly important source for Heidegger's thinking on technology, nihilism, modernity, and Nazism. See M. Zimmerman, Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity. Technology, Politics, Art, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1990, pp. 46-112.
33. Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity. Technology, Politics, Art Ibid., p. 176.
34. Heidegger's Confrontation with Modernity. Technology, Politics, Art Ibid., p. 181.
35. See M. Foucault, Discipline and Punish, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Pantheon, 1977,
36. and The History of Sexuality, Volume I: An Introduction.
37. For a defence of Foucault's account of productive power and its relationship to the subject see P. Patton, "Foucault's Subject of Power" in The Later Foucault. Politics and Philosophy, ed. J. Moss, London, Sage Publications, 1998, pp. 64-77.
38. For a more detailed reconstruction of Foucault's concept of biopolitics and the theme of governmentality see M. Dean, Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, London, Sage Publications, 1999.
39. See Lemke's discussion of Foucault's analysis of the pre-WWII German Ordoliberalen and the American Chicago School, a movement enormously influential on contemporary neo-liberal economic rationalism. T. Lemke, "The Birth of Bio-Politics': Michel Foucault's Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality." Economy and Society, vol. 30, no. 2, May 2001, pp. 190-207.
40. Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction, pp. 135 ff.
41. History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction Ibid., p. 136.
42. History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction Ibid., p. 137.
43. History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction Ibid., p. 139.
44. Foucault, "Society Must be Defended" Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, p. 246.
45. See H. Dreyfus, "Being and Power: Heidegger and Foucault" International. Journal of Philosophical Studies, 1996, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 1-16 and
46. T. Rayner "Biopower and Technology: Foucault and Heidegger's Way of Thinking," Contretemps 2, July, 2001. Both Dreyfus and Rayner emphasise the affinities and shared way of thinking evinced by Heidegger and Foucault but also overlook the important ways Foucault's analyses of power-knowledge and subjectivity are implicitly at odds with Heideggerian Seinsdenken, and, conversely, how Heidegger would, have found Foucault's Nietzschean genealogy far too ontic and nihilistic (forgetting the question of Being).
47. See Foucault's criticism of Heideggerian ontology as a questionable figure of the modern episteme that reinvokes a return to originary being in response to the retreat of 'man'. Foucault, The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. A. Sheridan, New York, Vintage, 1970, pp. 328-335.
48. While the young Foucault (in Madness and Civilisation) did flirt with a neo-Nietzschean aesthetic affirmation of the harbingers of a post-nihilistic age to come (Hölderlin, Nietzsehe, Artaud), the mature Foucault drops any such crypto-eschatological metanarrative underpinning his critical diagnoses of modernity. The same cannot be said of Agamben, as T shall argue presently.
49. See Foucault, "Governmentality," in The Foucault Effect, pp. 87-104,
50. and also M. Dean, Chapter 5, "Bio-Politics and Sovereignty" and Chapter 6, "Liberalism," in Governmentality. Power and Rule in Modern Society, pp. 98-130.
51. Lemke notes that Foucault's analysis of neo-liberalism links it with the rise of 'technologies of self' oriented towards an ethic of 'entrepreneurialism' and the minimalisation of political governance by the state: "Neo-liberalism encourages individuals to give their lives a specific entrepreneurial form. It responds to stronger 'demand' for individual scope for self-determination and desired autonomy by 'supplying' individuals and collectives with the possibility of actively participating in the solution of specific matters and problems which had hitherto been the domain of state agencies specifically empowered to undertake such tasks." Lemke, " The Birth of Bio-Politics': Michel Foucault's Lecture at the Collège de France on Neo-Liberal Governmentality," p. 202. As an instance of such technologies of the self, Lemke points to the rise of die 'self-esteem movement' in the United States, which applies neo-liberal rationality to the distinction between public and private, "heralding a revolution - not against capitalism, racism, the patriarchy etc. but against the (wrong) way of governing ourselves" p. 202. We recognise here a familiar instance of the orthodox neo-liberal ideology that has become hegemonic within Western liberal democracies. What is surprising is Foucault's uncritical analysis of these new forms of neo-liberal ideology as interesting new developments in modern governmental rationality and technologies of the self.
52. In this respect, Deleuze, Hardt and Negri, reject Foucault's 'ethical turn' and follow instead Foucault's pre-1976 emphasis on the critique of disciplinary society, extending this to a critique of biopower within contemporary 'societies of control'. See G. Deleuze, "Postscript on Control Societies" in Negotiations, trans. M. Joughin, New York, Columbia University Press, pp. 177-182.
53. See also Hardt and Negri's attempt to restore a materialist basis to Foucaultian biopolitics, Chapter 2 in Hardt & Negri, Empire, pp. 22-41.
54. "What does this new technology of power, this biopolitics, this biopower that is beginning to establish itself, involve?" Foucault, "Society Must be Defended," p. 243.
55. See J. Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy, trans. Julie Rose, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1999;
56. S. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject. The Absent Centre of Political Ontology, London & New York, Verso, 1999, esp. pp. 187-205.
57. See M. Foucault, "The Subject and Power," in Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, H. Dreyfus and P. Rabinow, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1983, pp. 208-226.
58. Cf. "The rallying point for the counterattack against the deployment of sexuality ought not to be sex-desire, but bodies and pleasures." Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I, p. 157.
59. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 187.
60. See A. Honneth, The Critique of Power. Reflective Stages in a Critical Theory of Society, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991.
61. As an example of this formalist generality, compare Foucault's claim that Nazism makes more explicit the basic operation of biopower to be found in most political states: "The final solution for the other races, and the absolute suicide of the [German] race. That is where this mechanism inscribed in the workings of the modern State leads. Of course, Nazism alone took the play between the sovereign right to kill and the mechanisms of biopower to this paroxysmal point. But this play is in fact inscribed in the workings of all States. In all modern states, in all capitalist States? Perhaps not. But I do think that... the socialist State, socialism, is as marked by racism as the workings of the modern State, of the capitalist State." Foucault, "Society must be Defended," pp. 260-261. In quasi-Hegelian fashion, racism is presented as a strategy of power that 'reconciles' the biopolitical imperative to manage life with the sovereign power to inflict death in the name of the biological preservation of the race. Important elements of Nazi ideology - such as anti-Semitism and the Judaeo-Bolshevist 'conspiracy' - are lost in this account.
62. See the recently published 1978 Collège de France lecture course, Sécurité, Territoire, Population, Paris, Seuil/Gallimard, 2004.
63. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 12.
64. Homo Sacer Ibid., p. 119.
65. Homo Sacer Ibid., p. 120.
66. Homo Sacer Ibid., p. 82.
67. Foucault, "Society must be Defended," p. 249.
68. Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume I, p. 141. This quasi-Marxist moment in Foucault's genealogical analysis, however, is undercut by the more Nietzschean, even Heideggerian, moments that foreground the contingent birth, of biopower as an ungrounded event of disclosure.
69. Citing Schmitt's dictum "Sovereign is he who decides on the state of exception," Agamben argues that the biopolitical threshold of modernity is crossed once the state of exception - the transformation of political and social beings into bare or naked life - becomes the norm, dissolving the form of state power and consolidating the biopolitical capture of bare life. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 11 and pp. 15-29.
70. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 148.
71. Homo Sacer Ibid., p. 122.
72. Heidegger included this passage in a draft version of the "Origin of Technology" essay, delivered on December 1, 1949. It was first cited by W. Schirmacher in Technik und Gelassenheit, Alber, 1983, p. 25. For an interpretation of Heidegger's remarks see J. Young, Heidegger, Philosophy Nazism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 171 ff.
73. See the essays on Benjamin, Heidegger, and Deleuze in Agamben's Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999.
74. Agamben's essay on Deleuze, "Absolute Immanence," concludes with the call for "a genealogical inquiry into the term 'life'" and provides a genealogical diagram contrasting transcendent (Kant, Husserl, Levinas and Derrida) and immanent (Spinoza, Nietzsche, Deleuze and Foucault) philosophies of life. Agamben, Potentialities, pp. 238-239. The 'mediating' figure in Agamben's genealogy of philosophies of life is none other than Heidegger, confirming my claim that the genealogical critique of biopower/biopolitics must begin with Heidegger (and Heidegger's reading of Nietzsche).
75. See C. Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz. The Witness and the Archive, trans. D. Heller-Roazen, New York, Zone Books, 1999.
76. Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 8.
77. Homo Sacer Ibid., p. 8.
78. Homo Sacer Ibid., p. 8.
79. Homo Sacer Ibid., p. 181.
80. Homo Sacer Ibid., p. 181.
81. For detailed, and contrasting, discussions of Agamben's biopolitics see C. Mills, "Agamben's Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life" and B. Neilson, "Potenza Nuda? Sovereignty, Biopolitics, Capitalism," both in the "Giorgio Agamben" issue of Contretemps 5, December 2004.
82. C. Mills, "Agamben's Messianic Politics: Biopolitics, Abandonment and Happy Life" Contretemps 5, December 2004, p. 42. Mills argues that critiques of Agamben generally miss the Benjaminian messianic dimension of his work "in which [Agamben] argues for the total overturning of the condition of abandonment, understood as imperfect nihilism, as the necessary condition for redemption from biopolitical capture" p. 42. The question is whether messianic politics is an adequate critical response to, or metaphysical retreat from, the normalisation of the 'state of exception' in biopolitical modernity.
83. G. Agamben, The Coming Community, trans. M. Hardt, Minneapolis, University of Minneapolis Press, 1993.
84. As J.-P. Deranty has argued, this is a political instance of the infamous Schellingian Absolute that devours all concrete differences, the theoretical and political 'night in which all cows are black'. See J.-P. Deranty, "Agamben's Challenge to Normative Theories of Modern Rights," Borderlands, vol. 3, no. 1, 2004.
85. Compare S. Critchley's Levinasian criticism of the "blockage" of the passage between ethics and politics in Derrida's deconstruction and Nancy's work on community. S. Critchley, The Ethics of Deconstruction, 2nd ed., Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Library, 1999.
86. See note 39.