The inversion of exceptionality: Foucault, Agamben, and "reproductive rights"

South Atlantic Quarterly

Volumn 107, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 55-70

  Deutscher, Penelope ^a  

^a NONE

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 60950452559     PISSN: 00382876     EISSN: 15278026     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/00382876-2007-055     Document Type: Review

References (25)

1. Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the College de France, 1975-76, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 243-44.
2. Foucault cautions, "The impression that power weakens and vacillates here is in fact mistaken; power can retreat here, re-organize its forces, invest itself elsewhere ... and so the battle continues." Michel Foucault, "Body/Power," in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977. ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 56. Translation modified.
3. Michel Foucault, "Power and Sex," in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984, ed. Lawrence D. Kritzman, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 114. Translation modified.
4. One can consult Michel Foucault's 1973 piece, written in collaboration with Alain Landau and Jean-Yves Petit for the Nouvel Observateur, "Convoqués à la PJ," in Foucault, Dits et écrits, 1954-1988, vol. 1, 1954-1975, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 2001), 1313-15. Foucault was in solidarity with a group (whose membership included medical practitioners) supporting abortion, the Groupe de l'information sur la santé.
5. The question can be added to Ewa Plonowska Ziarek's work on the reduction of women's bodies to bare life. In addition to regretting the omission in Agamben's work of considerations of slavery and of the rape of women, suggesting more generally that Agamben omits a consideration of both race and gender implications in his concept of bare life, Ziarek has proposed an analysis of the early-twentieth-century British radical suffragette movement and particularly its hunger strike strategies, whose stakes can be understood as a reappropriation by feminists of the woman's body reduced to bare life. See Ewa Plonowska Ziarek, "Bare Life on Strike: Notes on the Biopolitics of Race and Gender," SAQ 107:1 (2008): 89-105.
6. Foucault states: "What might be called a society's 'threshold of biological modernity' is situated at the point where the species has become the stakes of its own political strategies. For millennia, man remained what he was for Aristotle: a living animal with the additional capacity for a political existence; modern man is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being [sa vie d'être vivant] in question." Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Random House, 1978), 143.
7. Translation modified. "Ce qu'on pourrait appeler le 'seuil de modernité biologique' d'une société se situe au moment où l'espèce entre comme enjeu dans ses propres stratégies politiques. L'homme, pendant des millénaires, est resté ce qu'il était pour Aristote: un animal vivant et de plus capable d'une existence politique; l'homme moderne est un animal dans la politique duquel sa vie d'être vivant est en question." Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 188.
8. Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone Books, 1999), 135.
9. Andrew Norris is discussing the neomort: "Here the reassertion of rights is simply not an option. We must decide whether a neomort - a body whose only signs of life are that it is 'warm, pulsating and urinating' - is in fact a human being at all, an agent or a thing." Norris, "Introduction: Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's "Homo Sacer", ed. Norris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 1-30, 14.
10. Thomas Carl Wall, "Au Hasard," in Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, 31.
11. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 131.
12. Article 2 of the Enabling Act (Ermächtigungsgesetz) states: "Laws enacted by the government of the Reich may deviate from the constitution as long as they do not affect the institutions of the Reichstag and the Reichsrat. The rights of the President remain." Gesetz zur Behebung der Not von Volk und Reich (Law to Remedy the Distress of the People and the Nation), Reichstag, March 23, 1933, www.bpb.de/publikationen/ 04962540304433072098131403597315,9,0,Beginn-der- nationalsozialistischen- Herrschaft.html#art9 (accessed June 26, 2007).
13. Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 12.
14. See Judith Butler, "Indefinite Detention," in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 51. Butler writes: "In the name of a security alert and national emergency, the law is effectively suspended in both its national and international forms. And with the suspension of law comes a new exercise of state sovereignty, one that not only takes place outside the law, but through an elaboration of administrative bureaucracies in which officials now not only decide who will be tried, and who will be detained, but also have ultimate say over whether someone may be detained indefinitely or not."
15. Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001 (USA Patriot Act), 107th Congress, H.R. 3162, public law 107-56, October 24, 2001. See http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/bdquery/z?d107:HRo3162:@@@L&summ2=m& (accessed June 26, 2007).
16. Roe et al. v. Wade, District Attorney of Dallas County, 410 U.S. 113 (1972), October 11, 1972. See www.conlaw.org/cites2.htm (accessed June 27, 2007).
17. Mary Poovey, "The Abortion Question and the Death of Man," in Feminists Theorize the Political, ed. Judith Butler and Joan Scott (New York: Routledge, 1992), 244.
18. Seewww.conlaw.org/cites2.htm.
19. In Britain, abortion was a crime from 1803 onward, still illegal under the 1861 Offences against the Person Act. Through the twentieth century, increasingly broad exceptions were granted by the following: the Infant Life (Preservation) Act of 1929, which allowed term-limited abortions to protect the woman's life only; the Bourne Ruling of 1938, which extended the exception to include psychological grounds; and the Abortion Act of 1967, which consolidated the legality if there was a threat to the physical or mental health of the mother or existing children and if certified by two doctors. The Australian law was first governed by the British 1861 act. Despite its widespread availability (under an assortment of exceptions, including economic, social, and medical grounds, and usually with time limits), abortion has not been fully legalized in any state except the Australian Capital Territory, which passed the Abolition of Offence of Abortion Act in 2002. See 1861 Offences against the Person Act, OAP, 24 & 25 Vict., c. 94;
20. Infant Life (Preservation) Act of 1929, 1929, 19 & 20 Geo., c. 34 5;
21. and Crimes (Abolition of Offence of Abortion) Act 2002 (Act 2002 no. 24), September 9, 2002, www.legislation.act.gov.au/a/2002-24/20020909-2735/pdf/2002- 24.pdf (accessed June 26, 2007).
22. Michele Le Doeuff, Hipparchia's Choice: An Essay Concerning Women, Philosophy, Etc., trans. Trista Selous (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 247. Translation modified. Le Doeuff stresses that women's control of their own fertility is not enshrined as a fundamental right. Though there have been changes to French abortion law since the publication of Hipparchia's Choice, the conditional nature of its legality has persisted.
23. Agamben, State of Exception, 7.
24. See www.conlaw.org/cites2.htm.
25. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 6-7.