The living and the dead: Variations on de anima

Angelaki - Journal of the Theoretical Humanities

Volumn 7, Issue 3, 2002, Pages 81-104

  Cooper, Melinda ^a  

^a MACQUARIE UNIVERSITY   (Australia)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 34247457455     PISSN: 0969725X     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1080/0969725022000032490     Document Type: Article

References (68)

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, 26-35.
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 Foucault's 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 Foucault's seminar work on biopower. To a large extent, I would suggest, Agamben misinterprets Foucault's 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 Foucault's understanding of "political techniques" in general with the sovereign model of constitutional power. He here claims that Foucault's 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 5-6) 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 défendre la societe": Cours au Collège de France (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997) 213-35).
9. Homo Sacer 2.
10. Means Without End 5-6;
11. "Absolute Immanence" 230.
12. Agamben takes up this question again in his latest book: L'Ouvert: De l'homme et de l'animal, trans. Joël Gayraud (Paris: Rivages, 2002) 26-31.
13. The Metaphysics 1041a 11, trans. John H. McMahon (New York: Prometheus, 1991) 163-64; trans. modified.
14. De anima II. 2 413b, trans. Hugh Lawson-Tancred (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986) 160.
15. On self-preservation, see De anima II. 4 416b, 168.
16. "De generatione animalium" I. 23 730b-731a in The Works of Aristotle, trans. Arthur Platt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1910).
17. "De generatione animalium" I. 23 731a.
18. De anima III. 2 426b7, 194.
19. The Metaphysics 1005b, 75.
20. The Metaphysics 1006a, 73.
21. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 1999) 65.
22. "On Sleep and Waking" 453b 24 in Aristotle on Sleep and Dreams, trans. David Gallop (Canada: Broadview, 1990) 57.
23. "De generatione animalium" V. I 778b.
24. "On Sleep and Waking" 454b 23, 63.
25. "De generatione animalium" V. I 778b.
26. "On Sleep and Waking" 454b, 61.
27. "De generatione animalium" II. 5 741a.
28. Xavier Bichat, Recherches physiologiques sur la vie et la mort (Paris: Flammarion, 1986) 202-03.
29. 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 Agamben's 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 154-59. For Agamben's fullest discussion of the concept of brain death, see Homo Sacer 160-65.
30. 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).
31. 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 L'affaire de la main volée: Une histoire juridique du corps (Paris: Seuil, 1993).
32. "On Potentiality" in Potentialities 177.
33. De anima 417a 2-5, 169.
34. "On Potentiality" 178.
35. In an essay on potentiality and bodies in Aristotle's thinking, Cynthia A. Freeland operates a similar revision of Aristotle's thought on potential life in relation to contemporary biomedical technologies. She argues that Aristotle's 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 Aristotle's Biology, eds. A. Gotthelf and J. G. Lennox (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987) 406.
36. The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1993) 35.
37. "Physica" II 199b in The Works of Aristotle, trans. R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye (Oxford: Clarendon,
38. "Physica" II 199b.
39. "De generatione animalium" IV. 4 770b.
40. For a detailed discussion of the relation between Marx and Aristotle, and the role of Aristotle's discussion of krematistike in the first book of Capital, see Éric Alliez, Les temps capitaux. Tome 1: Récits de la conquête du temps (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1991) 13-58.
41. The Nicomachean Ethics 1133a 20, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Boston: Reidel, 1975) 87.
42. The Nicomachean Ethics 1133b 17-28, 88.
43. "Physica" IV 220b, 221a.
44. Politics: Books 1 and 2 1257b 24, 14.
45. The Nicomachean Ethics 1133b 12, 88.
46. Politics: Books 1 and 2 I. 8 1257b 23, 14.
47. Such a movement has a truly peripheral or excessive status in Aristotle's 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 338a-338b in The Works of Aristotle: Volume II, trans. H. H Joachim (Oxford: Clarendon, 1962)). At issue, then, in Aristotle's 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, Différence et Répétition (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1969) 80). Whereas Aristotle's 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.
48. Politics: Books 1 and 2 I. 9 1257b 40-1258a10, 14-15.
49. Politics: Books 1 and 2 I. 10 1258b4-8, 16.
50. 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 father's, 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.
51. De anima II. 4 416a, 165.
52. "Physica" VIII, 205.
53. Karl Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Vierte Abteilung, Exzerpte-Notizen-Marhinalien, vol. 1 (Berlin: Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus, 1976) 163; my trans.
54. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1954) 54.
55. Capital 65-66.
56. See Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology: Part 1, trans. C. J. Arthur (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1970) 49-51.
57. Capital 152, 153.
58. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Rough Draft), trans. Martin Nicolaus (London: Penguin, 1973) 259.
59. 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).
60. For a more recent attempt to develop this reading of Marx in light of Foucault's concept of biopower, see Maurizio Lazzarato's analysis of the contemporary media: "Pour une redéfinition du concept de 'biopolitique,' " Futur Antérieur 39-40. 1: 69-84.
61. See James A. Thomson et al. , "Embryonic Stem Cell Lines Derived from Human Blastocysts," Science 282 (6 Nov. 1998): 1145-47.
62. For an overview of these, see Roger A. Pederson, "Embryonic Stem Cells for Medicine," Scientific American (Apr. 1999): 44-49.
63. "Ethics and Embryonic Cells," Scientific American (Apr. 1999): 47.
64. On this point, see A. Coghlan, C. Ainsworth and D. Concar, "Don't Expect Any Miracles: Special Report on Human Cloning," New Scientist (1 Dec. 2001): 4-6.
65. For further detail on this line of research see M. L. Springer et al. , "Not the Usual Suspects: The Unexpected Sources of Tissue Generation," Journal of Clinical Investigation 11 (June 2001): 1355-56.
66. Michael Le Page, "Virgin Embryos," New Scientist (1 Dec. 2001): 6.
67. On this point, see Eugene Thacker, "The Thickness of Tissue Engineering: Biopolitics, Biotech and the Regenerative Body," Theory and Event 3. 3 (1999): 1-16. 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 one's own cells) that is circular and proliferative" (4).
68. See Dorothy Nelkin and Lori Andrews, "Homo Economicus: Commercialization of Body Tissue in the Age of Biotechnology," The Hastings Center Report (Sept. 1998): 5-6.