Totalitarianism or biopolitics? Concerning a philosophical interpretation of the twentieth century

Critical Inquiry

Volumn 34, Issue 4, 2008, Pages 633-644

  Esposito, Roberto ^a  

^a Italian Institute for the Human Sciences   (Italy)

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EID: 61349178568     PISSN: 00931896     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1086/592537     Document Type: Review

References (19)

1. See Augusto Del Noce, L'Interpretazione transpolitica della storia contemporanea (Naples, 1982).
2. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1957; New York, 1973),
3. and Jacob Leib Talmon, The Origins of Totalitarian Democracy (London, 1952).
4. See François Furet, Revolutionary France, 1170-1880, trans. Antonia Nevill (Oxford, 1992)
5. and The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, trans. Deborah Furet (Chicago, 1999).
6. See Raymond Aron, L'Opium des intellectuels (1955; Paris, 2002),
7. Democracy and Totalitarianism: A Theory of Political Systems, ed. Roy Pierce (1968; Ann Arbor, Mich., 1990),
8. and Power, Modernity, and Sociology: Selected Sociological Writings, trans. Peter Morris, ed. Dominique Schnapper (Brookfield, Vt., 1988).
9. See Marcel Gauchet and Gladys Swain, Madness and Democracy: The Modern Psychiatric Universe, trans. Catherine Porter (Princeton, N.J., 1999),
10. La Révolution des pouvoirs: La Souveraineté, le peuple, et la représentation, 1789-1799 (Paris, 1995),
11. and La Révolution des droits de l'homme (Paris, 1989);
12. and Claude Lefort, Writing: The Political Test, trans. David Ames Curtis (Durham, N.C., 2000)
13. and La Complication: Retour sur le communisme (Paris, 1999).
14. Esposito here is referring to Foucault's discussion of biopoltics as it appears in the seminar from 1975-76 entitled "Society Must Be Defended." Recall that for Foucault, biopolitics names a technology of power that is to be distinguished from the mechanisms of discipline that emerge at the end of the eighteenth century. This new configuration of power aims to take "control of life and the biological processes of man-as-species and of ensuring that they are not disciplined, but regularized." The biopolitical apparatus includes "forecasts, statistical estimates, and overall measures.... In a word, security mechanisms have to be installed around the random element inherent in a population of living beings so as to optimize a state of life." As such, biopolitics is juxtaposed in Foucault's analysis to sovereignty, leading to the important distinction between them: "It is the power to make live. Sovereignty took life and let live. And now we have the emergence of a power that I would call the power of regularization, and it, in contrast, consists in making live and letting die." Biopolitics thus is that which guarantees the continuous living of the human species (Michel Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-76, trans. David Macey, ed. Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana [New York, 2003], pp. 246-47). - TRANS.
15. See Ernst Nolte, Der europäische Bürgerkrieg, 1917-1945: Nationalsozialismus und Bolschewismus (Berlin, 1987).
16. See Emmanuel Lévinas, "Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism," trans. Seán Hand, Critical Inquiry 17 (Autumn 1990): 62-71.
17. Esposito is drawing on the distinction in Greek between zoē and bios as employed most famously by Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer. Agamben writes: "The Greeks had no single term to express what we mean by the word 'life.' They used two terms that, although traceable to a common etymological root, are semantically and morphologically distinct: zoē, which expressed the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods), and bios, which indicated the form or way of life proper to an individual or group" (Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen [Stanford, Calif., 1998], p. 1). - TRANS.
18. See Carl Schmitt, Die geistesgeschictliche Lage des heutigen Parlamentarismus (Munich, 1923).
19. See Roberto Esposito, Terza persona: Politica della vita e filosofia dell'impersonale (Turin, 2007).