Biopolitics and the Infected Community: Foucault, Sartre, Esposito, and Butler
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Fast Capitalism ISSN 1930-014X Volume 13 • Issue 1 • 2016 doi:10.32855/fcapital.201601.009 Biopolitics and the Infected Community: Foucault, Sartre, Esposito, and Butler Bradley Kaye When Michel Foucault enumerated the various ways that bio-politics emerges he pinpointed it as an outgrowth of patria potestas or the paternalistic power over life. It was the father in Roman Society who had the ability to “dispose” of the lives of slaves and children. Theorists have reacted to Foucault’s insights with the most important extension of this work done by Roberto Esposito and Giorgio Agamben. Agamben locates the origins of bio- politics in Ancient Roman Law, and his thesis is that every life must remain sacred in order to counter-act the degradation of “disposable” life. Early on in Foucault’s career in his “experience book” History of Madness he was writing in direct response to the existentialist politics of Jean-Paul Sartre expressed so eloquently in Being and Nothingness. Foucault’s immediate political engagements were in direct response to the notion that agency could only be construed by utilizing a Cartesian conception of the Subject. A critique of Sartre was still very much in his mind later on in his life when he began to unravel bio-politics later on in his work on sexuality. Michel Foucault’s praxis is a non-totalizing theory that must be placed in conversation with his entire oeuvre. If philosophers take biopolitics to its conclusion and “cut off the head of the king” as Foucault said had never been done in political theory, it becomes a powerful rebuttal to the tiresome political theory of the “philosopher kings” who want nothing more than to whisper sweet nothings into the ear of the sovereign. Can political theory be something more than a simplistic love/hate relationship with the state? Can it be something other than the dysfunction of party hacks filling the proletariat with fear of this or that pseudo-controversy; caught between the pettiness of the petit-bourgeoisie, and the boorishness of the proletariat there needs to be a different way to understand political discourse. Can there be a community where its telos is something else besides a fantasy that ends with everyone becoming millionaires at the end. Can there be an understanding that liberalism as it currently stands also messes with the working class; in reading the full quote from Deleuze in Anti-Oedipus; “Why do people fight for their servitude as if it were their salvation, crying more taxes less bread” is not a cry for social-democracy and liberal party politics but full anarcho-communism. There is no “essence” to be revealed beneath the surface level of false consciousness and faulty ideas. One major concern with this line of thought is that it can be Occidentalist in nature. Did the Aztecs experience sacred life in the same way as the Romans? Does the Japanese Emperor have the same sacred meaning for the Japanese people as the Pope for the followers of the Catholic Church? These are major concerns and to think that all states operate the same way is to have a homogenized view of history. Can there be a multi-cultural pluralistic method to uncover a universalist ground to ontology? It seems that this is the major impasse of leftist political theory over the last forty to fifty years. Every time a political theorist discovers what amounts to a universal principle of the “being of beings” one is immediately labelled a Eurocentric, or Masculinist, or limiting the question to being merely a homogenous totality. One begins to discern from this impasse that totalities are akin to state power that place limitations on the plurality of differences and thereby territorialize the being of beings. Can theorists think in other terms? We can think of the thing in itself but only as an abstraction because our approach is always muddled. As human beings we have emotions, impulses, and our attention tends to be distracted. Prolonged research over lengthy periods of time is a luxury of a few scholars and Page 121 Page 122 BRADLEY KAYE yet, we turn to these scholars who have devoted their lives to these questions to better understand the long view of history. There are some aspects of biopolitics that are new to contemporary capitalism but there are latent kernels sprinkled throughout Western History that have become manifest as time passes and tropes solidify into the meta- narrative mythos of what passes as Universal History. In understanding the primacy of state power over life, Foucault traces this back to the Roman family structure which became the Western template for governmentality. In this family structure Father had the right to kill any wives, children, or slaves and the sovereign when posed with direct danger could have the right to kill his subjects. Therefore, these sub-human lives were considered disposable (a point that Giorgio Agamben has brilliantly exposed in his analysis of “bare life” as disposable life in most of his works). However, Foucault claims that this direct power to take lives has been sublimated and redirected externally elsewhere. Now, when the sovereign has an attack on power, where the sovereign’s life is in danger, it is within the state’s power to kill the subjects by redirecting their energy into war. It is not direct killing of the subjects by the sovereign, but a redirecting of libidinal energies into the fascism of total war. It was no longer considered that this power of the sovereign over his subjects could be exercised in an absolute and unconditional way, but only in cases where the sovereign’s very existence was in jeopardy: a sort of right of rejoinder. If he were threatened by external enemies who sought to overthrow him or contest his rights, he could then legitimately wage war, and require his subjects to take part in the defense of the state; without directly proposing their death, he was empowered to expose their life: in this sense, he wielded an indirect power over them of life and death. (Foucault, 1978, 135) The state is analogous to the paternalistic family structure, the Roman “Father” looking after its subjects for their own good, disposing of life at any time. There are also ways that the creeping state presence in a bureaucratic Western society creates repressive social modalities that eventually bring every aspect of society under its regulating gaze via the normative aspects of legal state apparatuses. The father’s no has become the yes of consumerism. I will try to construct a viable set of ideological alternatives by juxtaposing the differences between Michel Foucault and Jean-Paul Sartre. In bio-politics risk is spread out over the entire population as: Wars are no longer waged in the name of a sovereign who must be defended; they are waged on behalf of the existence of everyone; entire populations are mobilized for the purpose of wholesale slaughter in the name of life necessity: massacres have become vital. It is as managers of life and survival, of bodies and the race, that so many regimes have been able to wage so many wars, causing so many men to be killed. (Foucault, 1978, 137) As life is exposed it becomes “bare life” increasingly informed by the naked question of survival. In the seventies there was a push towards nuclear disarmament a major question that still lingers, and Foucault presses the issue by saying: “The atomic situation is now at the end point of this process: the power to expose a whole population to death is the underside of the power to guarantee an individual’s continued existence.” (ibid.) Now that his lectures have been published we can see in Society Must be Defended; Security, Territory, Population; The Birth of Biopolitics; and elsewhere how his research on this issue was shaped by textual references within the canonical traditions of philosophy, in particular by many of the Enlightenment Period political philosophers such as Hobbes and Bentham. His work also stems up to the Nazi thinkers and the American neo-liberal capitalist reactions to the rise of Fascism bred by a total and complete paranoia of any state intervention into daily life. All of that has been in the name of biopolitics. Is there an anti-essentialist dimension to even biopolitics? It is hard to pigeon hole Foucault as a philosopher of the institutional aspects of power when he says point blank: “One needs to be nominalistic, no doubt: power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society” (Foucault, History of Sexuality Volume 1, pg. 93). When I talk with even learned scholars about Foucault there is still a weird idea that he only talks of institutional aspects of power. Discipline and Punish was a political intervention at a particular moment in the early seventies when the prison population was spiraling out of control and my hypothesis is the state was criminalizing minor drug offenses and locking people away as a tactical maneuver to suppress the resistance that had gained popularity in the sixties and seventies which was when the Rockefeller Drug Laws began to take effect; this is also when the problem of prison overcrowding became a major problem which required a move towards prison abolition. History of Madness was written in the early sixties at the beginning of psychoanalysis as a serious medical discourse and psychiatry with talk therapy was starting to gain traction as a widely accepted social phenomenon.