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國立臺灣大學文學院外國語文學系暨研究所 碩士論文
Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures College of Liberal Arts
National Taiwan University Master Thesis
凌駕生命與死亡的權力：
傑佛瑞．尤金尼德斯《中性》中的 生命政治、酷異與種族化主體
Power Over Life and Death:
A Biopolitical Analysis of Queer and Racialized Subjects in Jeffrey Eugenides’ Middlesex
黃亦敏 Yee-Min Huang
指導教授：廖勇超 博士 Advisor: Yung-Chao Liao, Ph.D.
中華民國 106 年 8 月 August 2017
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Acknowledgements
First of all, I would like to express my deepest gratitude and admiration to my advisor, Professor Yung-chao Liao, who has been extremely kind and patient toward me, and has offered me generous support when my study seemed to have reached a dead end. Without his intellectual guidance and those countless enlightening sessions during which we shared and discussed our interpretations of the text and theories, the completion of this thesis would not have been possible.
My sincere appreciation also goes out to my defense committee members, Professor Chun-yen Chen and Professor Nai-nu Yang, whose advice and feedback on my analysis of Middlesex have greatly benefited me by helping me clarify my arguments and inspiring me to think further beyond the scope of prevailing theories.
Many, many thanks to my wonderful friends for giving me spiritual support in one way or another. I owe a great deal to C, who constantly checks up on me to make sure that I am alive and well, and tells me that it is okay to be in the middle. I am grateful to my roommate Y as well, for always bringing me food and putting up with my temper. And to E, thank you for being there when I need you.
Last but not least, I wish to thank my parents and my brother. The past few years for me had been a bumpy ride filled with ups and downs, and it was your endless love that carried me through.
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中文摘要
本論文以傑佛瑞．尤金尼德斯所撰之《中性》為文本，探究書中著墨的酷異與 種族化主體。透過研讀傅柯與阿岡本對生命政治的剖析，本文認為《中性》一書記載 的三代移民家族史揭露了掌權者如何操作生死，治理臣服於其的主體。值得注意的是，
生命政治不僅積極干預整體人口的出生與健康，同時也具有撲殺、放逐有害個體，為 社會除惡的權力。由書中角色們在美國及歐洲的境遇可知，即使身處不同國度，施政 邏輯仍依循雙極進行：一方面以「生」為本，致力提升人口數量與素質，確保國家繁 盛，一方面又以「死」為手段，淘汰國家負擔和隱患，去蕪存菁並有效且全面地控管 生命。
本文共分三章闡釋《中性》描寫的生命政治主體。一、分項研究傅柯、阿岡本 以及姆邊貝論述之生命／死亡政治，試圖爬梳此權力自十九世紀進入當代的形式和流 變。二、以書中的他者角色為主軸，分析生命權力在移民身分和性／性別偏異的身體 上之運作。三、著重討論種族主義──生命政治在當代的形變之一，推崇生命的同時 也放任或蓄意導致他族的死亡。有別於以「生」為主旨的第二章，第三章轉向主體之 死，探討生命權力如何處置無用的種族化或移民主體。
當代政治的治理手段凌駕生命與死亡，在主體的四周布下天羅地網，但本文強 調，《中性》的主角卡爾最終看似黯然妥協，實則透過保持「中性」、「中立」的身 體／身分反抗生命權力──亦即，卡爾的存在本身便是主體逾越的終極體現。
關鍵字：生命政治，傅柯，阿岡本，酷異主體，種族主義，雙性，《中性》
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Abstract
This thesis examines the lives of queer and racialized subjects in Jeffrey Eugenides’
novel, Middlesex. Based on the biopolitical concepts developed by Michel Foucault and advanced by Giorgio Agamben, this thesis argues that Middlesex, through the immigrant saga it depicts, parallels a family history with the mechanisms of a biopolitical regime to expose the underlying workings of power upon the living and dying of its subjects. Biopolitics defines a power over not only the biological processes, or life, of a population, but also the social and physical deaths of subjects that have been deemed by the authorities as risky, harmful, and therefore killable. As Middlesex has shown through depictions of lives in the U.S. and Europe as lived by its characters, the authority adopts a bipolar technology that simultaneously supports life for economic productivity and prosperity, while exposing disposable bodies to danger in the name of national security to enact an infinite control over individual bodies at the level of population.
This thesis is divided into three chapters. The first chapter explores biopolitical concepts in works of Foucault, Agamben, and Achille Membe, tracing a genealogy of this form of power that has come to dominate the modern experience. In the second chapter, aspects of the lives of immigrant and sexually deviant characters, who are situated outside the norm in Middlesex, are teased out and analyzed in conjunction with the mechanisms through which biopower operates. The third chapter continues to analyze the novel by turning to racism, a modern biopolitical construct that not only makes live, but let die or makes die as well. In contrast to the previous chapter, which investigates the circumstances of survival, this chapter shifts the focus to shed light on the ways biopower constrains or kills unlivable and undesirable lives, particularly racialized or immigrant subjects foreign to the nation.
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While it remains debatable as to whether the novel’s ending suggests a compromise with the ineluctable power over life and death, the narrator Cal has indeed arrived at a “middle sex” and a “middle ground” that establish his very existence as the ultimate form of transgression.
Keywords: biopolitics, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, queer subjects, racism, intersex, Middlesex
doi:10.6342/NTU201703931 Table of Contents
Acknowledgements ... ii
中文摘要... iii
Abstract ... iv
Introduction ... 1
Literature Review... 3
Methodology ... 8
Chapter 1: Exploring the Concept of Biopolitics ... 13
A History of Biopolitics ... 13
A Foucauldian Investigation ... 17
Giorgio Agamben’s Meditation ... 28
Biopolitics and the Politics of Death ... 31
Achille Mbembe on Necropolitics ... 33
Biopower and the Sex/Gender System ... 35
Chapter 2: Looking Through the Queer Body ... 38
Cal’s Intersexual Body ... 41
The Freakish Body ... 48
Chapter 3: Biopolitics, Racism, and the Immigrant ... 54
On Racism and Biopolitics ... 54
Life as an Immigrant ... 69
Conclusion: A Return to Middlesex ... 80
Works Cited ... 85
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Introduction
When asked about the social significance of literature, Jeffrey Eugenides replied, “The main purpose of literature, as it always has been, is to map human consciousness at a certain time, remembering your thoughts. . . . [T]hat is what novels are: a mental picture of a certain era” (Eugenides, “Novel”). Nearly a decade after the publication of his debut novel, The Virgin Suicides, Eugenides presented another enticing work that drew upon his life as a third- generation Greek immigrant in Detroit’s affluent Grosse Pointe suburbs. Published in 2002, Eugenides’s second novel Middlesex was based on his own life experiences. Coming from a family that had to strive for the upper middle-class status and growing up as one of the “ethnic”
kids in a private school, at an early age Eugenides became conscious of class and of his Greek identity. Although these differences tended to be less pronounced as time passed by, still he developed a keen sense of self-awareness, which is evident in the sensibility of his novels. For him, novels are “a mental picture of a certain era”: they summon forth the thoughts and sentiments of a people by reflecting on how certain individuals conduct themselves and how their lives can be lived under the complex arrangement of control in a specific time.
Eugenides’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Middlesex records the historical genealogy of the Stephanides family, whose immigrant journey begins as the Great Fire sweeps over Smyrna. Driven out of their house on the slope of Mount Olympus in Asia Minor, first- generation Stephanides, Lefty and Desdemona, who are brother and sister as well as husband and wife, flee the burning city to build a new life under the industrial clouds of 1920s Detroit, bringing to the robust land not only their Greek heritage but also a gene pool “polluted” by their consanguineous marriage. Unexpected and undetectable, the mutation in blood remains hidden within the second generation amid the clamor of the Motor City. Like their awkwardly Americanized predecessors, Milton and his wife Tessie (who is also his second cousin)
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continue to pursue the capitalist American dream despite the country’s intense attempts at assimilation and exclusion. Their children Chapter Eleven and Calliope may find themselves even more removed from their ancestral roots, being two generations away from Greece, yet what has been carried across the Atlantic—the incestuous bloodline—is inherited by Calliope (later self-renamed as Cal), who is born with a recessive gene mutation in the fifth chromosome that determines his intersexuality. Raised as a girl but later self-identified as a man, the autodiegetic narrator recounts his passage from Calliope to Cal, unfolding a family saga that spans over four decades of birth, death, and rebirth.
For the Stephanides, living and dying are markers of time that nourish their family tree and prefigure the advent of a new generation, but for the state, they are merely numerical data to be processed. The immigrant and queer subjects depicted in the novel are populations especially in need of management as their foreignness and strangeness pose threats to the integrity of society. The purpose of the management is to utilize their lives to enhance national development, and to overlook their deaths to ensure social well-being. Juxtaposing poetic, mythological narratives of Greek-American diasporic life with records of historical events and regulations, Eugenides creates a metaphoric parallel reflecting the double deployment of power that works on and through individuals—a biopower that invests in life, coupled with a necropower that governs death. To explore how Middlesex’s characters reveal modern administration of people and population requires an understanding of these two sides of power.
Being the ultimate power over life, biopolitics, drawing from the Foucauldian interpretation, supervises and disciplines the body by imposing regulatory controls over the population, differentiating itself from traditional modes of government authority with its intervention and preservation of the lives of citizenry, and enacting “a power whose highest function was perhaps no longer to kill, but to invest life through and through” (Foucault,
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History of Sexuality 139).1 The two axes of modern state regulation—“an anatomo-politics of the human body” and “a biopolitics of the population”—constituted the organization of biopower which is both “anatomic and biological, individualizing and specifying, directed toward the performances of the body, with attention to the processes of life” (139). The ineluctable side of this injunction to live is the exposure of some populations to death.
Expanding on Foucault’s biopolitics, Giorgio Agamben in Homo Sacer uses the word
“thanatopolitics” to refer to the fatal aspect of this power over life.2 In contemporary forms of sovereignty, it now involves the operations of biopower and a power over death to determine whom to make live and whom to let die. Following the theoretical frameworks above, this thesis investigates how a double deployment of power governs immigrant and queer subjects, and argues that the recurrent cycle of birth, death, and rebirth in the Stephanides family demonstrates the control enforced by authoritarian regimes of normativity upon othered bodies, with the aim of exploring the limitations of such power as well as the possibilities of resistance offered in the novel. Before the discussion proceeds further, studies related to Middlesex need to be traced for a more comprehensive understanding toward the main concerns of current scholarship in the field.
Literature Review
Previous researches on Middlesex have concentrated on three major topics: first, examination of the intersexual body using medical and sociocultural discourses; second, emphasis on transgression and border-crossing as the key themes of the novel; third, analysis
1 Further references to The History of Sexuality by Foucault will be abbreviated to HS.
2 The topic will be discussed in the first chapter of this thesis.
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of ethnic and racial issues from biopolitical perspectives. All of these topics constitute an integral aspect addressed in the novel—living with a liminal or even marginal identity and body.
Scientific and sociocultural discourse are two intertwined aspects in reading the bodies and subjectivities in Middlesex, Olivia Banner writes, because the application of genetic discoveries in the text serves as an imaginative twist to traditional immigrant narratives that are central to the American experience (845-50). While some studies are more engaged in genetic discourses,3 in “Retrospective Sex,” Rachel Carroll draws on Judith Butler’s assertion in Gender Trouble and proposes that Middlesex gives voice to the “‘incoherent’ or
‘discontinuous’ gendered beings” who “fail to conform to the gendered norms of cultural intelligibility” (188). Therefore, according to Carroll, it is only through the novel that the individuals can speak for themselves and be heard. In a similar vein, Sarah Graham follows Butler’s interpretation of the “unthinkable, abject, unlivable” body in Bodies that Matter and understands the body of the narrator Cal/Calliope as one that inhabits “the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the [intelligible] domain” (16). Graham further analyzes Cal’s intersexual body and states that while his body is considered repulsive and abjected, its ambiguous otherness is also indispensable to the consolidation of the intelligible body (16).
This Othering process takes gender normalization as its reference point, but sociocultural control of individuals also involves the marginalization and exclusion of deviant bodies characterized by class and ethnic differences. Sharon E. Preves analyzes sociocultural responses to intersexuality and observes, in a Butlerian fashion, that intersexual bodies are
“quite literally queer or ‘culturally unintelligible,’” for they threaten the binary sex/gender paradigm of the homophobic, xenophobic culture and therefore cannot escape pathologization (523-24). Such acts of rendering bodies abnormal, or “enfreakment,” as a means of taming the
3 Please see Sharon E. Preves (2002), Catherine Harper (2007), Angelika Tsaros (2010), and Viola Amato (2016) for more genetics-related analyses of the novel.
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Other is the object of analysis in Graham’s article “‘See Synonyms at MONSTER’: En- Freaking Transgender in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex.” Detecting the novel’s intention to tame its uneasiness “about sexual ambiguity by associating such hybridity with monstrosity and freakery,” she argues that regardless of its seeming celebration of multiplicity, the novel is complicitous with an exploitative social strategy of distorting the intersexual body into a
“synonym for monster” (2). Hence, Graham concludes that Cal’s status as a freak is established to help “confirm the viewer/reader’s own sense of normalcy” (17). But the analysis here indicates that Graham not only fails to embrace sexual and gender diversity,4 but is unaware of the diversity of viewer/reader identities. Moreover, in privileging Cal’s sexual ambiguity over his other freakishness, she risks fetishizing the freak, or in Sara Ahmed’s terms, “stranger fetishization,” through which the stranger is stripped of all sociohistorical relations and is replaced by his “figure” as the fetishistic object (5).
In addition to focusing on Cal’s ambiguous, intersexual body, the second concern in Middlesex scholarship focuses on problems of transgression and border-crossing. To begin with, various forms of transgression and border-crossing have long occupied the center of analytical attention regarding Middlesex. The multiple crossing-overs in the novel—sexual, racial, ethnic, and national—received almost unanimous consent from scholars concerning the failure to subvert normative discourses.5 Trendel points out that using “the middle” as a metaphor is dubious in Middlesex, in which the middle ground signaled in both the title and at the ending of the novel fails to call forth a space of transgressive hybridity, but represents a return to normativity that promises a “middle rooted cosmopolitan way” (3). Similarly, although Debra Shostak perceives the various metaphors of “the middle” that Eugenides deals
4 Please see articles by Tracy Hargreaves (2005) and Zachary Sifuentes (2006) for critiques on Graham’s perspective.
5 Please refer to Judith Roof (1996), Hargreaves (2005), Graham (2009), Carroll’s “Retrospective Sex”
(2009) and Rereading Heterosexuality (2012), Banner (2010), Aristi Trendel (2011), and Stephanie Hsu (2011).
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with in the text as pushing beyond boundaries of imaginable figures in an attempt to “rescue the hermaphrodite from the position of the strange” (391), she contends that this “third space”
is merely a Utopian fantasy (386-87). In treating this middle territory, Samuel Cohen takes a more critical turn and sees it as an open wound completely abandoned in the novel’s ending in favor of a “healing closure,” revealing an America traumatized by the events of 9/11 (376). A stance in contrast to the above studies is the optimism presented by Francisco Collado- Rodriguez. For him, the hybridity of the hermaphrodite as well as Cal’s racial and national ambivalence challenge categorical identity while opening up “a borderland or ‘third space’
where mixed races and intersex identities can coexist” (6). Transgressive or not, this much disputed space of theoretical concerns adds to the debate between social constructivism and biological essentialism.6 Black, in her critical work Fiction Across Borders, finds in the novel both a textual middle ground that produces its “crowded style,” an “ethics of border crossing”
that engages with, instead of invading, imaginations of alterity, as well as a middle ground of the multiple and even contradictory identities of the “crowded self” generated by Cal’s
“middlesex” (14, 137). Arguing against Kenneth Womack and Amy Mallory-Kani’s adaptationist reading which approaches the literature as a reflection of human behavior and experiences, Black shifts emphasis away from the biological factors to interpret the textual and identity middle grounds as demonstrating the constant pull between essentialism and post- structuralism.
Aside from topics regarding the intersexual body and border-crossing identities, the third topic inspects ethnic and racial issues alongside biopolitical concepts. Scholars such as Ann Laura Stoler (1995), Rey Chow (2002), and Patricia E. Chu (2013) have argued that Foucauldian biopolitics is possibly the most adequate theory in investigating racial citizenship
6 On the debate, please see Banner (2010), Shameem Black (2010), Hsu (2011), Carroll (2012), and Oren Gozlan (2014).
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in contemporary governmentality, since it scrutinizes the way the state promises some populations access to life while denying it to others, and exposes the relation between cultural production and biological reproduction that often goes unexamined by ethnic literature writers and critics. Chu, in her biopolitical analysis of American ethno-racial novels, considers modern power as that which categorizes and biologizes human existence. She further maintains that ethnic novels have been biopolitical in the sense that they assist in the conceptualization and construction of ethnic identity and political solidarity, as well as the exploration of the subjective development of marginalized ethnic individuals. Informed by this association of ethnic novels with literary biopolitics, Chu detects in Eugenides’s Middlesex a turning away from traditional ethnic literature paradigm: instead of endorsing an essentialist cultural or historical identity, the novel presents a white immigrant character who no longer gains narrative voice from ethnicity, but from its intersexual body empowered by new genomics.
Stephanie Hsu is also concerned with the relation between ethnicity and biopolitics in Middlesex. She illustrates how social differences and immigrant assimilation in the text can be traced back to the non-reproductive, intersexual body of Cal, and points to ethnicity’s
“biometric function” that serves to mediate biopower onto the multiple border-crossing body (89). In other words, ethnicity’s newly developed “biopolitical capacity” has now surpassed race and sexuality as the most powerful determinant of subjectivity. Besides Chu’s and Hsu’s discussions which focus mainly on Cal/Calliope’s intersexual body, literature on the biopolitical reading of Middlesex has been scarce. Few scholars writing on the novel have given exclusive attention to instances of authoritative interventions or exclusions, or to biopower’s management that extends beyond the human body to include aspects of gender, sexuality, and death—although these forms of control are increasingly being incorporated into the mechanisms of modern state power and embodied by the characters who must juggle multiple minority identities, living simultaneously as the massacre survivor, the refugee, the Greek-
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American, the racialized, the incestuous, the hermaphrodite sex worker, the freak, and/or the queer.
Methodology
With human life as its central object, biopower supervises the capital and ideological productivity of a population (Edelman 176), operating by “making live” to ensure future prosperity while exerting its power to “let die” over potential risks that may threaten social security, and in the case of the novel, gender and sexuality normativity. The array of multilayered identities in Middlesex merits a closer look into how populations are stratified, how they are managed so they can be put to their best possible use and, when they fail to comply, how they are conveniently neglected or even sentenced to social death. To examine these issues, the main approach of this thesis is Foucauldian in orientation, coupled with Agamben’s theorization of bare life for a more comprehensive discussion.
In Foucault’s analysis, biopolitics is a modern form of power that puts life at the center stage. Aimed at the optimization of life, biopolitics denotes a means of exercising control that shifts from a strategy of “deduction,” or deprivation, implemented by traditional sovereign power, to one that works “to incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimize, and organize the forces under it” (HS 136). This transformation, according to Foucault, marks a historical rupture with the sovereign past: biopolitical governmentality expresses not the will of the monarch, but is designed to discipline the human body as well as to regulate the social body in order to maximize economic productivity, to maintain political subjugation, and above all, to achieve a state of internal equilibrium through risk control measures. And it is for the sake of life and security that modern racism exercises “the death-function in the economy of biopower,”
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using biological rhetoric to justify state-sanctioned killing (Society Must Be Defended 258).7 In contrast to the injunction to make live, the demand to neglect or to kill some members of society for the well-being of the entire population constitutes the flipside of biopolitics—the politics of death, often referred to as “thanatopolitics” or “necropolitics.”
Although Foucault’s writings on biopolitics are scattered across years of his works and therefore lacks a consistent theoretical structure, his concept has inspired much scholarly responses that reexamine and analyze the relation between life and politics.8 A critical appropriation of the Foucauldian idea is found in Agamben’s Homo Sacer. In this meditation on sovereignty and its subjects, Agamben diverges from the historical caesura Foucault has observed by reestablishing the connection between biopolitics and sovereignty, maintaining that sovereign power is in itself biopolitical: “the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power” (6). According to Agamben, life comes in two forms: zoe, meaning biological existence, which is the simple fact of living, and bíos, indicating political life or life as a citizen. Only when a person is acknowledged legal status can he become a proper member of society; otherwise, he is reduced to the mere physical existence of the homo sacer that can be killed with impunity but not sacrificed. Taken into a double exception, the homo sacer is included in the juridical order solely through his exclusion from both the human law and the divine law. As Agamben explains, the homo sacer “belongs to God in the form of unsacrificeability and is included in the community in the form of being able to be killed” (82).
Unpunishable and unsacrificeable, the figure of the homo sacer constitutes a bare life which is
“not simply natural reproductive life, the zoe of the Greeks, nor bíos, a qualified form of life,”
7 Further references to Society Must Be Defended will be abbreviated to SMBD.
8 In addition to Agamben (Means without End 1996; Homo Sacer 1998), other scholars contributing to the large body of knowledge on biopolitics following Foucault have refined and advanced the concept across various dimensions, including Anthony Giddens (Modernity and Self-Identity 1991), Ferenc Fehér and Agnes Heller (Biopolitics 1994), Didier Fassin (“The Biopolitics of Otherness” 2001), Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (Empire 2000, Multitude 2004), Roberto Esposito (Bíos 2008), Judith Butler (Precarious Life 2006; Frames of War 2009), as well as Butler and Athena Athanasiou (Dispossession 2013).
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but an existence in “a zone of indistinction and continuous transition between man and beast, nature and culture” (109; emphasis in original). For Agamben, the logic of inclusion and exclusion that takes life as its object provides the foundation of Western politics, underlying Roman laws, Nazi concentration camps, and contemporary institutions of refugee camps and asylums. Therefore, in Agamben’s articulation, the biopower inherent to civilized society in the modern era does not signal a new form of political rationality as Foucault argues; it is instead a “generalization and radicalization” of an ancient practice of power that exposes its subjects to violence (Lemke 53).
With biopolitics being a prominent field of academic inquiry, its interplay with gender appears to be a relatively new branch of study that is yet to be fully articulated beyond Foucault’s texts. Upon completion of this thesis, The Biopolitics of Gender (2016) by Jemima Repo is possibly the only work that examines the techniques of biopower in order to trace a genealogy of gender from its emergence in the 1950s and 1960s to the neoliberal present. In addition to rereading lectures in which Foucault developed an analysis of biopolitics (SMBD;
Security, Territory, Population 2007; The Birth of Biopolitics 2008), Repo draws heavily on Will to Knowledge, the first volume of The History of Sexuality, to study how sexuality became a biopolitical apparatus, and to enable a critique of the current form of biopower that utilizes gender as an instrument. The book begins with the birth of gender in the 1950s as a new apparatus, and concludes with the way this biopolitical genealogy of gender challenges feminist politics, calling into question the liberal connotation that gender possesses by inspecting the role biopower plays in the alteration of deployment target from sexuality to gender, and asking how gender has come to take the domination over life and the living body as its objective.
Examining the mechanisms that seek to maximize and optimize the overall utility of a population through a biopolitical control of life, this research will mainly draw on Foucault and Agamben to analyze Eugenides’ Middlesex. From descriptions of the inter-national/intersexual
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body and sex reassignment surgeries to Cal’s ambiguous national/sexual identity and his frequent invocation of genetic terms in the narrative, the novel can be read along the paths of Foucauldian discussions on the biopolitical intersections of sex, gender, and sexuality. In addition to Cal’s in-betweenness, this liminality is also cast upon other characters in the novel, who can be refugees, immigrants, sex workers, sexual deviants, or criminals. They are those people standing on the slippery edge of a politics aiming for optimal life; they are the population living in a wasteland where a deeply-rooted American dream drives their urge for physical and financial wellbeing, yet also where dying socially or biologically has become far too common to be worth noticing. This death is the paradoxical effect of biopower, a “letting die” or even a “making die” that, in Eugenides’s novel, is embodied by warfare, diaspora, displacement, disability, and casualty. Adopting Foucauldian biopolitics and Agamben’s concepts of the homo sacer and thanatopolitics as primary approaches toward Middlesex, this research hopes to unravel the complexity of modern power through examining how multiple technologies and techniques of power interact to frame the life and death of certain individuals within the novel’s biopolitical context.
This research is organized into three chapters, with the first chapter presenting a theoretical analysis on politics of life and death, whereas the remaining chapters offer a biopolitical inquiry into queer and racialized populations. Delving into the biopower over life, this research begins with a chapter that examines biopolitical concepts in writings ranging from Foucault’s “Birth of Social Medicine,” History of Sexuality, and Society Must Be Defended, Agamben’s Homo Sacer, to the article in which Membe identifies a “necropolitics” of death, and The Biopolitics of Gender by Repo, to elaborate on the connections not only between biopolitics and the politics of death, but also between this double-sided power and the subjects under control, while taking into consideration whether these discourses compromise or accentuate each other to lay the groundwork for upcoming discussions. Chapter two examines
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aspects of the lives and deaths of immigrant and sexually deviant characters, who are situated outside the norm in Middlesex. More specifically, this chapter looks into the way life should be lived by the queers and immigrants governed by biopower in the novel, posing questions such as: How is the life of the Stephanides regulated and disciplined? How does biopower inform the gender and sexual apparatuses that brought Cal to Dr. Luce’s clinic and prompted his subsequent running away from home? What conflicts are generated between the exertion of biopower and queers/immigrants? The third chapter focuses on racism, a modern biopolitical construct, with attention to those bodies subject to an exclusionary violence that kills with impunity, namely the foreign and the racialized. This chapter asks: How are individuals rendered as disposable? How does the death, or near death, of some populations augment the wellness of others? How do those labeled as killable conduct their lives within a liminal socio- political space in which they are neither alive nor dead? The concluding chapter will briefly discuss the ending of the novel. What is the significance of Cal’s eventual reconciliation with his multiple identities? Is resistance or revolution against biopower and its negative side possible through Eugenides’ design of a middle ground? In reading Middlesex and exploring these questions, this thesis hopes to contribute to the growing literature on the dynamic relationships of biopolitics, the queer, and the immigrant.
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Chapter 1: Exploring the Concept of Biopolitics
A History of Biopolitics
Before Foucault introduced a relational and historicized analysis of biopolitics, the flow between life and politics had been assumed to be unidirectional—the naturalist finds life at the basis of political action, whereas conversely for the politicist, the governance of life itself as an object constitutes the aim of politics (Lemke 3-4). In an integrated examination on the disputed definitions of biopolitics and its gradual systematization in the west into a prolific field of research, Thomas Lemke looks to late-19th century Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) for a rudimentary model of biopolitical thinking. Gaining ground in Germany at the turn of the century, this school of philosophy critiqued the anti-life processes of rationalization and modernization to advocate the reevaluation and re-centering of life. Among its most notable members are Arthur Schopenhauer, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Henri Bergson, who used life as a criterion for the distinction between what should be desired—“the healthy, the good, and the true” that encourages life—and what should be avoided—“the
‘abstract’ concept, ‘cold’ logic, or the soulless ‘spirit’” that suppresses life forces (9).
Conceiving human life in terms of both biological existence and “lived experience” (Erlebnis), the philosophers revolted against Enlightenment rationalism and mechanistic materialism in favor of intuition, immediacy, as well as spontaneity to restore life back to an authentic and creative state (9). This insistence on life rather than reason, Lemke writes, formulated the discursive core of a politics that emerged in the 20th century.
For Swedish political scientist Rudolf Kjellén, who first used the word “biopolitics” to define the similarity he observed between social struggles and the struggle for existence in
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nature, the state is a biological entity, a “super-individual creature[s]” that establishes and rules over itself (qtd. in Lemke 9). Therefore, in his organic theory of the state as a living being asserting “ethnic individuality,” the natural outcome of political development is the nation- state (qtd. in Lemke 10). In the view of Kjellén and many of his contemporary scholars, the state is not so much a democratic construct subjected to the collective will of its people as the source and the receiver of its organic powers, providing foundations for laws, norms, and institutions to guarantee its survival, while strengthening its health through natural selection.
When the state comes to be perceived as an original form of life that holds absolute supremacy over its subjects, and when social phenomena are explained in conjunction with biological analogy, it is inevitable that organicist ideology, with its Social Darwinist implications and dependence on biological laws, will become the stepping stone to racism (10).
Although the notion of a genetically pure population may have outlived Nazism and survived World War II, by the second half of the 20th century, the heyday of racist biopolitics had long past. Eugenic measures were removed from the center of scientific research, nor could biopolitology, the study that attributes political behaviors to biological factors, garner substantial attention outside the United States (15-21). In the early 70s, biopolitical theories diverged from naturalism to embrace a politicist mindset: the foundation of sociopolitical systems was no longer built on an overarching natural law; instead, this new politics attempted to exert power over natural life through placing biological processes under examination (23).
After the exhaustion of two world wars, humankind was faced with a depleted Earth rife with pollutions, contaminations, diseases, and environmental disasters. It was in this atmosphere that ecocentric biopolitics advocated measures aimed at the preservation and conservation of nature. From the introduction of Earth Day, the founding of Greenpeace, to the formation of anti-nuclear groups that remain active thus far, environmental concerns have continued to mobilize mass social movements worldwide. As German political scientist Dietrich Gunst
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observes, this new form of biopolitical approach now focuses on “questions about life and survival” (qtd. in Lemke 24) by promoting policies directed at curbing environmental crises and ameliorating sociopolitical problems that would jeopardize human existence. In relation to global issues such as overpopulation, food shortage, and resource depletion, Gunst proposes a
“life-oriented politics” (qtd. in Lemke 24) with an ecological awareness which informs the economic and political fabric of society. However, Lemke points out, subsequent to the demand for an “ecological world order” was another surge of eugenics and racism in Germany (24).
Right-wing activists held “two undesirable biopolitical trends” culpable for the “sullying of the gene pool”—overpopulation and the “mixing together of all races and genealogical lines”—
stating that biopolitics, being the tendency of future politics, must ensure the genetic quality and purity of the human race (qtd. in Lemke 25).
In addition to an ecological focus that preserves biodiversity and natural equilibrium for future generations, the 70s also saw the emergence of technocentric biopolitics. During the decade, biotechnology made several discoveries, announcing the application of horizontal gene transfer (the movement of genetic materials across species), prenatal diagnosis, and most notably among other advances in reproductive technologies, in-vitro fertilization which gave birth to the first test-tube baby. As a response to the quantum leap in biotechnological research, technocentric biopolitics functions by regulating and monitoring scientific practices in order to guarantee bioethical principles have been enforced. When technological and scientific development compromised the presumed stable boundary between nature and culture, as Lemke puts it, the discipline “intensified political and legal efforts to reestablish that boundary”
(26). Lemke then draws from the interpretation of German sociologist Wolfgang van den Daele to further explain the problem of the fragile border:
Biopolitics responds to the transgression of boundaries. It reacts to the fact that the boundary conditions of human life, which until now were unquestioned
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because they lay beyond the reach of our technical capabilities, are becoming accessible to us. (qtd. in Lemke 27)
While ethical and moral constraints may be the most formidable obstacles for biotechnological innovations, those standards also serve as a reminder for what humanity is, making reality checks to ensure that no research is out of line and constantly asking, “Just because we can, should we?” (Van den Daele, qtd. in Lemke 27). Contrary to the naturalist position eventually occupied by eco-centric biopolitics with its appeal for the implementation of new policies that cater to environmental changes, the technocentric version roots firmly for a development- oriented politics that adapts the natural world to meet human needs and desires.
Regarding a more comprehensive definition of biopolitics that incorporates both naturalism and politicism, Lemke follows philosopher Volker Gerhardt in understanding the field as a set of actions targeted at the security, reinforcement, and protection of the human species (29). In this sense, the individual has become an “object of the life sciences” (Gerhardt, qtd. in Lemke 29), to the extent that every personal choice must serve the interests of biopower and that freedom turns out to be conditional upon its compliance with such power. The objective of these actions is the promotion of life, yet when the right to life and biotechnological interventions begin to override the individual, the question of biopolitical legitimacy emerges.
Who decides on the policy that rules over life? Who has the authority to privilege one life as more worth living than the other? How is life assessed, and by whom? For Lemke, the question of “we” the political subject unveils the fundamental indistinction between life and political discourses that neither naturalists nor politicists acknowledged. Whereas previous intellectuals held on to a clear-cut, a priori division, it is biopolitics that lays out “the borderland in which the distinction between life and action is introduced and dramatized in the first place” (Thomä, qtd. in Lemke 31; emphasis in original). The distinction, which in the classical political world constituted the origin for forms of governance, was revealed by biopolitics not as the root but
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as “an effect of political action” (31-32). The presumed stable border that once kept the natural and the biological on one side, and society and politics on the other, has collapsed in the advent of scientific breakthroughs and new technologies seeking to modify life. Biopolitics therefore by no means operates solely on the basis of life or serves life’s purposes; rather, as the core of this political practice, life is simultaneously the subject and the object of control.
A Foucauldian Investigation
Although Lemke assigns the origin of a biopolitical model to a philosophy of life that formed around the late 19th-century, Foucault and Agamben have argued an earlier date. In the years between 1973 and 1975, Foucault develops a multifaceted interest in the medicalization of society. He investigates the genealogy of psychiatry in two lecture series he gives at the Collège de France (Abnormal; Psychiatric Power), and later in his 1974 lecture “The Birth of Social Medicine,” he traces the historical evolution of a society that has begun to organize itself into a medical framework since the end of the 18th century. Although at the time of the lecture Foucault has yet to advance his theorization of the term “biopolitics,” he emphasizes the biopolitical correlation between capitalist society and its socialization of body as labor force, stating that its “control over individuals was accomplished not only through consciousness or ideology but also in the body and with the body” (“Birth of Social Medicine” 137). To probe into this growing concern with the corporeal and the subsequent expansion of medical and sanitary systems, Foucault points to three fields of study: first, a biohistory centering upon the interplay between biosphere and the development of human civilization; second, the “network of medicalization” through which society exercises a tightening grip on the biological, physical, and mental dimensions of its human subjects; third, the economy of health that proposes a
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positive relation between the nation’s financial prowess and the physical well-being of its people (135). All three aspects underline the fact that modern medicine cannot be discussed without considering the rationale behind its inclusion into social practices as a technology of managing the human body. Despite variations in medical strategies adopted by governments over time, Majia Nadesan observes in Foucault’s argument that “they tend to cohere around security problematics posed to, and by, the vitality, fecundity, and productivity of the population” (93). As Foucault explains in “The Birth of Social Medicine,” medico-scientific management of the people prevailed solely as a guarantee of national security until the late 19th century at the height of modern capitalism, when extracting maximum labor power became the primary agenda for the state to achieve political and economic success: “For capitalist society, it was biopolitics, the biological, the somatic, the corporal, that mattered more than anything else. The body is a biopolitical reality; medicine is a biopolitical strategy” (137).
Foucault’s work on the formation of social medicine takes 19th-century Germany, France, and England as models for analysis, presenting a three-step process that moves from the systematization and monitoring of somatic health, the implementation of public hygiene, to the institution of welfare medicine for the poor. Foucault traces the first instance of the concept “science of the state” (Staatswissenschaft) to Germany (137), where since the 17th century knowledge about natural resources possessed by the country as well as the living conditions of its populations has been studied to enact more effective modes of governance.
Following the mercantilist mindset that predominates 18th-century Germany and coupling national wealth and power with population productivity, state medicine is developed and exerted by the “medical police.” This newly founded authoritarian system is targeted at standardizing medical protocols, subjugating medical practitioners to administrative supervision, and incorporating those professionals into the organization of the state through appointing them as medical officers. While state medicine mainly operates from above,
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Nadesan notes that power apparatuses function also via ideological interpellation, referring to the multiplication of literature aimed at instilling into the educated class the responsibility to stay physically healthy during the era. In Foucault’s words, such “imperative of health” is “at once the duty of each and the objective of all” (“The Politics of Health” 170).
The second stage of social medicalization was urban medicine. Large city in France in the late-18th and 19th centuries was “a jumbled multitude of heterogeneous territories and rival powers” in urgent need of a unified authority consistent in regulating the rapidly expanding economic activities within the city and forceful enough to suppress revolts led by the proletarian underclass (“Birth of Social Medicine” 142-43). The lack of a coherent metropolitan vision exacerbated the social consequences of industrialization and urbanization—from overcrowding, pollution, diseases, squalor, visible poverty, immorality, to crime—all those downsides of civilization wound up in feelings of fear and anxiety induced by the city. As Foucault describes, it was
an urban fear, a fear of the city, a very characteristic uneasiness: a fear of the workshops and factories being constructed, the crowding together of the population, the excessive height of the buildings, the urban epidemics, the rumors that invaded the city; a fear of the sinks and pits on which were constructed houses that threatened to collapse at any moment. (144)
Amidst the chaos and the panic that reflected a “politico-sanitary anxiety” produced by the urban machine (144), the idea of public hygiene appeared. The main objectives of urban medicine included analyzing city spaces, especially those “zones of congestion, disorder, and danger” deemed responsible for disease outbreaks (147); organizing and controlling the circulation of air and water; and the redistribution and sanitary surveillance of city spaces. Here instead of the attempt to heal or strengthen the human body, this medical practice provided “a medicine of things” intended to remedy the city (150). Under the public health apparatus,
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administration over the salubrity and insalubrity of urban environments must be enforced for the city, or even the entire nation, to attain economic and political stability.
The last phase of social medicine, labor force medicine, takes English Poor Law as example. A tax-supported and state-funded welfare program, the law was established in the 19th century to guarantee the health and wealth of the upper-class through providing medical treatment for the destitute. This medical legislation, which created “an officially sanctioned sanitary cordon between the rich and the poor” (153), declared the inauguration of an intricate system of control that extended well into the 1870s, when John Simon set up the Health Service and the Offices for the “protection of the entire population without distinction” (154). The institutions claimed to offer “nonindividualized care” directed toward every social class, and concerned the environmental sanitation and living conditions of city inhabitants (154), sharing similar strategies with the Poor Law as well as the aforementioned French urban medicine. But again, just like its predecessors, the underlying logic of English social medicine was far from philanthropic; rather, it was a medical control operating at the collective level upon the bodies of underprivileged groups “to make them more fit for labor and less dangerous to the wealthy classes” (155). To achieve these ends in a nation characterized by class antagonisms, three medical systems were designed to correspond to different social ranks: a medical welfare for the underclass; an administrative medicine that ensured the health and safety of the general public; and for those higher up the social pyramid, a private medicine providing quality medical care.
It was precisely due to the complex mechanisms involved in balancing between the subjection of the people to compulsory medicalization, and the appeasement thereafter offered in return, that led to Foucault’s conclusion that the English system exceeds German state medicine and French urban medicine in terms of scope, efficiency, and efficacy. This does not suggest that labor force medicine simply replaced the other two dimensions in the evolution of
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social medicine, Nadesan remarks, as national security relies heavily on an abundant workforce and productivity growth. But one can tell from this genealogy of social medicine and what Foucault later examined in Security, Territory, Population that the medical apparatus bespeaks the governmental technologies of its time and adjusts accordingly, as exemplified by the general shift of its concern from disciplinary problematics to an emphasis on securitization (Nadesan 96-97).
“We need to cut off the King’s head,” Foucault declares, warning about “the great trap we are in danger of falling into” when we analyze sovereign power (Power/Knowledge 121;
SMBD 34). Instead of offering generalized claims about state apparatuses, institutions, and ruling classes, Foucault attempts to avert systematized discourses and directs his analytical focus toward “the techniques and tactics of domination” (SMBD 34); in other words, Foucault is discussing the capillary network of power and control mechanisms that have seeped into the lives of unsuspecting political subjects. The great trap that we must proceed with caution, that Foucault censures, is the juridico-political theory of sovereignty which can be dated back to Medieval Roman law and its later reactivation in the mid-Middles Ages. Centered on mechanisms of royal power, this theory fulfilled a quadruple function: it pointed to a specific power structure that founded the feudal monarchy; it served as the principle facilitating the establishment and legitimacy of sovereignty; it has also been deployed as a weapon to either curb or consolidate the aristocracy in social struggles by both sides since the 16th and 17th centuries, especially during the Wars of Religion; and finally, it took on a different role in the 18th-century call for a turning away from authoritarian absolute regimes and presented an alternative model that embraced parliamentary democracies (SMBD 35). This theory, while being “the theory we have to get away from if we want to analyze power,” is necessary for it is “coextensive with the general mechanics of power,” as Foucault emphasizes, it characterizes not only traditional sovereign practices but also any feudal-type social structure based on a
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sovereign/subject relationship (35). It therefore demonstrates the fundamental mechanisms through which power operates, and is pertinent to any social body that depends on the execution of stratified, top-down forms of power.
As Foucault clearly explains, “the sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring” (HS 136). Sovereignty had as its symbol the sword that guards its holder from harms by exposing others to death with the “right to take life or let live” (136, emphasis in original); but it was also a power of extraction (prélèvement), Foucault adds, a means of appropriation through which the monarch gained authority over the wealth, goods, time, labor, and ultimately, the life of its people. Sovereignty was most powerfully founded upon the absolute authority over life and death, yet from the 18th century onward with the rise of classical political philosophy, the right derived from Roman patria potestas (paternal power) declined, so that the sovereign was to exert the power only to protect himself from external threats. It seemed, on the one hand, that the unconditional right to kill had been diminished, but on the other hand, this enabled the sovereign to legitimately wage wars against his enemies or to directly execute rebels in the name of defending the state.
Consequently, although sovereign right was restricted, the monarch nevertheless possessed an
“indirect” power over the life and death of his subjects by jeopardizing their life without
“directly proposing their death” (HS 135). In this sense, the significance given to life and to death appears asymmetrical and paradoxical.
According to Foucault, sovereign power represented essentially the right to seizure, for it concerned not the bodies nor the lives of its subjects, but the economic and political competence of its territory. The theory of sovereignty was, in Foucault’s word, “a theory which can found absolute power on the absolute expenditure of power, but which cannot calculate power with minimum expenditure and maximum efficiency” (SMBD 36). Rather than the
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inevitable displacement and appropriation of time and labor involved in the production of commodities, sovereignty put exclusive emphasis on material and monetary acquisitions, coercing its people into an arbitrary and unidimensional domination through force. Sovereignty proved itself capable of justifying the physical existence of monarchy, yet it failed to constitute coherent and consistent systems of surveillance. Where sovereignty reached the limit of its control, a new type of power arose.
In the 1975-1976 lecture series entitled Society Must Be Defended, Foucault further elaborated on the inadequacies of the theory of sovereignty, and introduced a new model of power—disciplinary power. This novel form of non-sovereign power emerged around the 17th century during the bourgeois era. Foucault found the earliest instances of this kind of power within Christian monasteries, where the allocation of space for segregation and surveillance, everyday examinations of conscience, and the rigid monastic timetable enforced to ensure productivity were all key characteristics of disciplinary power. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this power expanded, reaching into five major social institutions: the school, the army, the hospital, the factory, and the prison (Tammelleo 240). Following the expansion, it served as a legal instrument that conduced to the success of industrial capitalism while penetrating into the corresponding social body for more comprehensive control and monitoring. Disciplinary power presupposed a mechanism incompatible with its sovereign predecessor, focusing primarily on achieving “minimum expenditure and maximum efficiency” within a material matrix of coercion and constraint aimed at the individual body (SMBD 36). The new mechanism of power enabled the further extraction of time and labor from bodies by adopting a thorough surveillance of the subjects and aiming for “an increase both in the subjugated forces and in the force and efficacy of that which subjugated them” (35-36). In other words, unlike the theory of sovereignty that revolved around the physical well-being of its ruler, disciplinary
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power was based upon utilitarian principles and took as its objective the extortion and perpetuation of labor forces.
Under the control of this individualizing power, bodies were treated as machines that required a set of intricate procedures to optimize their performance, maximize their utility, standardize and homogenize their experiences as a way of conforming them to norms of behavior, and finally, to render them docile and manipulable. All these were effected through practices Foucault identified as “disciplines: an anatomo-politics of the human body” aimed at training individuals into subjects of society (HS 139; emphasis in original).
The forms of discipline which were mostly implemented through institutions—
including the school, the army, the hospital, the factory, and the prison—started to penetrate the entire social organism at the turn of the 19th century. According to Foucault, near the end of the 18th century, power over life evolved into a bipolar technology that, on the one hand, managed individual subjects in accordance with an anatomical model, and on the other hand, governed the population based on biological processes. The latter technique did not assume a mechanical body but exploited the “species body” by manipulating those processes of life pertaining to conditions of “propagation, births and mortality, the level of health, life expectancy and longevity” through “an entire series of interventions and regulatory controls:
a biopolitics of the population” (HS 139; emphasis in original). Regulatory mechanisms were organized and developed within this framework, which treated individuals as mere biological examples to facilitate a comprehensive management over the population at the level of species.
What Foucault terms “biopolitics” is a non-disciplinary power “applied not to man-as- body but to the living man, to man-as-living-being . . . to man-as-species” (SMBD 242). In contrast to the disciplinary, anatomo-politics that focuses on infiltrating a multiplicity of men
“to the extent that their multiplicity can and must be dissolved into individual bodies” for surveillance, drilling, employment, and punishment, biopower is a regulatory mechanism that
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approaches bodies not in terms of their specificity, but instead operates them on the level of generality, perceiving them as a “global mass” whose life, death, and well-being as a population determine the prosperity and security of the nation (242). While the individualizing, disciplinary power established in the 18th century no longer functioned as the primary governmental technique with the emergence of the regularizing, massifying logic, nevertheless, as Lemke suggests, “‘individual’ and ‘mass’ are not extremes but rather two sides of a global political technology” that exercises infinite control over both the individual body and the social body (38). In other words, biopolitics did not replace disciplinary power; instead, starting in the 19th century, individualizing means that prevailed as the major technology defining power over life was complemented by a new strand of politics which is centered upon life, upon the entire human race.
In this light, the lives of subjects are administered by two parallel series of measure:
“the body-organism-discipline-institutions series, and the population-biological processes- regulatory mechanisms-State” (SMBD 250). The task of the latter system to predict, identify, and ameliorate risks that may occur in a population characterizes one of the objective of Foucault’s bipolar technology, which is “to establish a sort of homeostasis . . . by achieving an overall equilibrium that protects the security of the whole from internal dangers” (249).
Organized around the micro-processes that rectify corporeal behaviors through institutions and the macro-mechanisms that employ control over biological processes and operate at the state level, this power over life, in the course of history has increased the scope and variety of political interventions. In contrast to the sovereignty that reigned with a sword, modern politics features a power fixated on life, a biopower “whose highest function was perhaps no longer to
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kill, but to invest life through and through” (HS 139). But how did life become the center of political discourse? How was it integrated into mechanisms of control?9
Following mercantilist principles that flourished for two and a half centuries, capitalism arose in the 18th century, demanding a change in strategies of control and calling for a more intricate type of power that not only guards or “polices” life, but fosters and enhances it to boost fertility and productivity rates. The capitalist need for an upward-sloping labor supply led to “the entry of life into history,” or more specifically, “the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques” (HS 141-42). In addition, with technological and medico-scientific innovations targeting the prolongation of life and lowering the risk of death, systems of power and knowledge were increasingly justified in their supervision and intervention over life processes, as Foucault assures, “[f]or the first time in history . . . biological existence was reflected in political existence” (142). When life became a constant possibility and when the randomness of death could be minimized, power began to gain access to the living body. From then on,
“[w]estern man was gradually learning what it meant to be a living species in a living world”
(142), pointing to a transformation in the nature of governance characterized by a growing concern with political existence, with biological life, and with forces that dominate conditions of living and dying.
9 In Security, Territory, Population, Foucault provides another theorization of biopolitics. He defines biopower as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power” (16). Aimed at the 17th-century development of “the state of (military-economic) competition” and “the Wohlfahrt state (of wealth- tranquility-happiness),” it was a power fundamentally concerned with “the management of state forces”
(474). To improve the nation’s economic and military competence, police system was built with a two-fold purpose: on the one hand, patrolling target areas and inflicting punishments for social security; on the other hand, “reducing the infant mortality rate, preventing epidemics and lowering the rates of endemic diseases, intervening to modify and impose norms on living conditions (whether in the matter of diet, housing, or town planning), and adequate medical facilities” based on a health policy shaped by the composition of its population (474). This “management of state forces” through the formation of a national medical police, according to Foucault, marks the earliest instance of biopower.
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Such transformation signals the moment in which a society reaches its “threshold of modernity,” Foucault declares, in response to Aristotle’s political naturalism:
what might be called a society’s “threshold of modernity” has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on 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 in question. (HS 143)
In Aristotle’s polis, animality is a presupposed condition of human beings, and political existence is only an “additional capacity” that seeks to transcend animality; whereas in modern politics, this animality, or the biological life of man, has become the primary aim of control.
While Foucault follows Aristotle’s theory in identifying modern man as a zoon politikon, he also proposes a “biological redefinition of political subjectivity” (Palladino 115), emphasizing the shift from the discursive, deprivative control of sovereignty to a focus on the anatomical facts of the living human body.
What the “additional capacity” of man places “in question” is the biological life of the human species. As modern politics takes to nurture life, the deductive power of sovereignty also begins to “align itself with the exigencies of a life-administering power and to define itself accordingly,” presenting itself as “simply the reverse of the right of the social body to ensure, maintain, or develop its life” (HS 136). Death thus becomes the counterpart of a pro-life political system, and with that all the negative connotations it carried back in sovereign times are dispelled by a biopower “bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them”
(136). Under biopolitical regimes, death functions not as a force that deducts or deprives, but is incorporated into an entire mechanism dedicated to the management of biological life.
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Giorgio Agamben’s Meditation
In Agamben’s deployment of biopolitics, power over life is not a western invention developed several centuries ago, but an underlying structure of sovereignty. What Foucault defined as the historical caesura that marked the turn from classical to modern politics is simply an extreme extension of sovereign power. For Agamben, analyses of traditional juridico- institutional power and biopower
cannot be separated, and that the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original—if concealed—nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. (Homo Sacer 6; emphasis in original)
Accordingly, there was never a “birth of biopolitics” as Foucault asserts. From the very beginning of western history, politics has revolved around the figure of bare life. Challenging Foucault’s understanding of the Aristotelian man who has an “additional capacity” for political existence, Agamben renders problematic the clear-cut distinction between biological life and politics, and argues that politics is itself structured around the inclusion and exclusion of life.
He draws on Aristotle’s definition of the polis, “born with regard to life, but existing essentially with regard to the good life,” to reveal the fundamental opposition implied in the concept “life”
(7). The phrase distinguishes between two forms of life—“life” as a natural biological entity, and a politically qualified “good life”—the distinction of which presupposes first of all the inclusion of the former by the latter, yet it also entails an “inclusive exclusion” of biological life before proper life is achieved in the polis (7). In Greek, life is consisted of two components:
zoe, “the simple fact of living common to all living beings (animals, men, or gods),” and bios,
