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It is not a question of asserting that these dispositifs produce subjectivities in a purely top–down manner. These new modes of government are all the more effective in that they are adjusted to the needs felt by populations in contexts of “anomie” fostered by the neoliberalism. These strategies respond to a widespread feeling of isolation and the destruction of social ties to the detriment of the values of solidarity and cooperation. In other words, these public policies, even though they do not break with neoliberalism, seek to occupy a legitimacy vacuum created by neoliberalism. Thus, in the 2000s, in the midst of budgetary austerity, France experimented with a participatory security policy called “Voisins Vigilants” (Vigilant Neighbours), inspired by the American and British Neighbourhood Watch model (). In conjunction with municipal authorities, this involves organizing a network of volunteer neighbors who are willing to warn the authorities when criminal acts are committed in their neighborhood (). Sociability is thus mobilized to generate inter-surveillance aimed at discriminating against enemies from outside the community (). As  shows, this strategy intends to create “meaning” and “connection.” Through moments of exchange, the authorities try to give the inhabitants a sense of responsibility linked to their belonging to the territory. They also seek to stimulate solidarity practices in order to implement a safe public policy (). The state thus co-manages a particularly coercive sovereign-juridical field by promoting the myth of a citizen committed to the common good.

The redeployment of the State thus sees the reaffirmation of civic and moral duties. The term proactivity is indicative of a new type of subordination. Indeed, NMP necessitates investing and enlisting new agents, whose voluntary work is to be supervised like any salaried work. Thus, the guarantee of full citizenship implies that the individual, through their civic-mindedness, demonstrates their profitability. From the absorption of a positive anthropology initially external to neoliberal economicism, a utilitarianism emerges that is even more attuned to social functioning. In this context, communities and individuals are forced to mobilize the governmental agenda to ensure their survival. The policies of “doing better with less” draw a Sisyphean citizenship that imposes additional procedures punctuated by the culture of the project—strategies of visibilization and appropriation of a reasonable discourse are the obvious elements of this culture of proactivity. However, behind the tale of initiative-taking lies an “injunctive power” that attempts to stimulate the disposition of individuals to retroact (). Such a mode of government, destined to be enriched by contact with cyber-technologies and digital intelligence—whose functionalities are constantly increasing the hold and dispersion of the holoptic model—could quickly reveal its democratic limits. While some have seen in digital sharing systems, such as peer to peer, as the hope of a “new civilizational model” (), that is participatory and a-hierarchical, the emergence of rating systems evaluating the morality of Chinese citizens () shows, for example, that the cult of the proactive autonomous agent is a broad church of practices.

This dynamic “increasingly consists of bringing concerned actors to the table” in order to promote “a common understanding of public issues” (, 21). The NMP thus imposes the contemporary vision of a “state that makes capable” (). Public action turns toward a relational economy centered on communities. It is by generating new collective experiences that the procedural rationality of individuals can be guided. The state must play a catalytic role () by opening up spaces of interaction for the actors concerned. This is likely to change their habits of action and develop new worldviews (). This procedural strategy does not consider responsibility in the individualizing mode of neoliberalism (); on the contrary, it is precisely about stimulating interdependences. Far from “pure rationality,” it is the very idea of the “bounded rationality” of the participants that makes the regulator's role relevant as `reinventors.' In a managerial mode, the state would adjust itself to the “common sense” of the participants, ensuring that they take on new challenges in a positive way. However, as , 7) notes:

Rather than trying to control what public organizations or community groups do, they [i.e., reinventors] try to influence what their members want to accomplish. This is the essence of the empowerment deal […], it shifts the bureaucracy's power out into the community. Reinventors use community empowerment to share power with neighbourhood school, business associations and other community-based entities.

Like Thomas Paine, this harmonizing process is intrinsically linked to the Christian faith, which he describes as the first of the civic institutions in the United States. The prevalence of this moral sense refers to a new “physiognomy of servitude”: democratic man “compares himself individually to all those around him” (, 1, II, 18). The dispersal of power and the intensification of the interplay of gazes are both carriers of a security logic that weighs on the mind of each individual. Thus, the Protestant tradition of self-government is based on a strong ethnic and cultural homogeneity, which encourages social conformity (). The weight of community institutions is presumed to diffuse “subtle coercions” throughout the social body, ensuring the automatic functioning of power within a diversity of environments. Thus, on the one hand, the development of small, lively and decentralized communities would limit the uniformizing pressure of democracy. On the other hand, community embeddness would be a vector for the circulation of moral values. Each individual is governed in their community, each community is governed by its community of communities, and so on. It is on the reasonability of the common individual that government action can be connected. As , 354–55) notes: “The common man is not infallible; far from it. But he perceives more readily than the specialist the bearing of public choices upon the pattern of values cherished by the community.” Federalism would thus be a cooperative order that allows for adjustment to the naturalness of social functioning ().

This narrative has had international influence since the 19th century. In France, the “political culture of generality” inherited from the Revolution shaped a state structure marked by centralization, as well as the negation of intermediate bodies and local identities (). Nevertheless, from the Restoration onward, the affirmation of liberal ideas was part of (re)forming the state (). In 1863, while commenting on Nancy's decentralization project, Jules Ferry insisted on the need to institute a self-government in France (). For the jurist and future minister, decentralization—which multiplies local procedures and interactions—had normalizing properties. It was through the dynamics of social control and learning that decentralization generates that local life limits moral discrepancies without upsetting social ones. The coercive specter of decentralized power is as much about officials, who dominate without excess, as it is about the working classes, who are forced to adopt a level of reasonability in their actions. The territorialisation of power is therefore consistent with a security logic. By preventing the risks of oppressive oligarchical management and destabilizing popular discontent, territorialisation nevertheless guarantees the maintenance of an unequal social order. This shows how the American federal myth is invested with a hegemonic function. As Ferry (, 114) argued:

This local community also took a digital form. There was an extraordinary com- munity response, often spontaneous and bottom-up, as Facebook pages or WhatsApp groups based on neighbourhoods were set up. Neighbours called on elderly or shield- ing people and set up telephone networks. This kind of response was found in many of the diaries. In North-East Scotland, The Grampian Hub, coordinated police, local authority, emergency and other services including NGOs such as the Red Cross and volunteers. It involved 350 groups and 4000 individuals. Police officers were rede- ployed to staff telephone lines and put people in touch with relevant local services. Around 9000 people were supported with food boxes, shopping, prescription collection and so on (from a population of around 500 000). Indeed, there were many more volunteers than were needed by a ratio of about three volunteers offering themselves for each one needed in this area (from interviews with community leaders). However, rather than being just another example of “governmentality at a distance” it represented a spontaneous eruption of altruism and generosity. We could see it as opening 13 Governmentality Versus Community: The Impact of the COVID. a “space” for horizontal communications within the closing walls of the governmentality prison. In a village in Scotland, where SC lived, a “community hub” was organised through social media and coordinated by the resident Church of Scotland minister. This involved organising volunteers on a street-by-street basis delivering services such as prescription collection, shopping and dog walking. Twice as many people volunteered to help as needed, so most were never called upon. The community hub also organised a local food bank for those who needed it in the Church Hall and this included clothes, toilet paper, children’s games, plants and other things that might be in short supply donated by members of the local community. The local Facebook page expanded its membership and its remit from just being for “parents in the village” to including a much wider community and many more people now called the “Village Community Group”. Local social media sites became the way in which information was spread rapidly across the community. Local businesses were able to advertise their lockdown services in this way. With a population of 2700, the village community FB page attracted 2893 members - so the social media site was even big- ger than the community’s population. Whilst this formal style of horizontal organisation was built upon existing church and food bank structures, in other countries this generosity took a more informal turn. The Spanish diarist noticed: We have seen lots of very small initiatives (at neighbourhood level) to help the elderly with their shopping, holding conversations over the phone, etc. I think you get a sense of how fragile ageing is. ES also mentioned the informal support that blossomed in the residential blocks as healthier and younger people cared for older ones. SK noted that whilst in her residential neighbourhood, there had been interaction among neighbouring children, this disappeared with lockdown and local relationships dwindled to the next-door neigh- bour. Nevertheless, SK baked and delivered cakes to a neighbour during the period of stringent lockdown, by leaving them outside the door. In both Spain and Slovakia small acts of kindness were mentioned in relation to children’s birthdays. In Spain, ES describes collective (socially distanced) singing in the neighbourhood as people gathered on their doorstops to express birthday wishes. It’s very difficult to go through grim days sometimes but the 8pm applause always cheers me up, such an amazing singing of unexpected and improvised “neighbourliness”. This evening we all sang happy birthday to a young girl from the block in front. Our participant in China mentioned the activities of local restaurants delivering take away services, as happened also in many European cities. In the Scottish village, a local butcher provided a ready-made meals service for those who could not get out, which volunteers delivered. In the UK, Muslim and Hindu communities rallied similarly around their members. 13 Even under normal circumstances, neighbourhoods are traditionally more important for certain categories of people such as children and older people, who might be more locally restricted. Many of the children use the same playgrounds and attend the same kindergartens and primary schools locally. Parents in a locality might form clothes and toys exchanges, reinforcing these connections. This certainly seemed to be the case in the suburbs of Bratislava, where SK tells us: On Sunday I really had an urge to demonstrate our existence. I suggested to Jan that he draws a picture for Misha, his best friend neighbour. He drew a car...... put it in their mailbox. A great reason to leave the house! Misha loved it. So Jan drew another four pictures (cars and dinosaurs). In the meantime I baked a cake, so I packed some of it, and we went to give it to them. I also promised to another neighbour that I will share with her my old pregnancy clothes...... We just left it in front of the door, with some cake and strawberries. We exchanged messages via WhatsApp – she loves the clothes! I felt good. Perhaps because of the localism of children’s play networks, mothers in the neighourhood tended to organise into support and exchange groups under COVID conditions too. Some participants mentioned WhatsApp groups being created amongst local mothers to enable this. This reassertion of horizontal ties at a local level helped to create a “space” for social action. Diarists described how more people spent more time in the local community and the streets and walking paths were full of people walking, cycling or socialising (at a distance). The absence of traffic helped this, and social media shared information about new walks and features of the surrounding areas. Passed a group of people chatting (at a social distance) in the middle of the street. Normally it would not be possible due to all the cars (SC) Altogether then, local neighbourhoods were reinvented as arenas of social life. This might always have been the case for children, this was also increasingly the case for adults who could no longer go anywhere else. Furthermore, the neighbourhood became a focus of self-help organisation during the lockdown facilitated through social media. Even in China, the most repressive and controlling regime there was room to develop horizontal connections. Here, the courtyard acted as the focus of micro- social life. Our diarist (who was German) described the courtyards in the communal apartment blocks as becoming important meeting places: The courtyard is the place to meet other kids (some from the same kindergarten) and parents, the latter is also a relief for us as our social contacts are rather reduced now with some of our friends having old parents to take care of and thus keeping to themselves; others generally being more cautious than we are. The atmosphere in the courtyard is quite special and communal – more talk than usual. 13 C. Wallace et al. Governmentality Versus Community: The Impact of the COVID. Many people mentioned the importance of going for walks locally, interacting with neighbours outsides and enjoying the natural environment, including parks, woods, hills and cemeteries. Life slowed down and became more leisurely: The amount of sharing on our road of the most random of things has been lovely. It also seems that when people are out they are not as absorbed by their phones as they were previously. People are looking up and enjoying being outside as opposed to just scrolling as they walk. I suppose we are all enjoying being outside and immersing ourselves in the experience in a way that didn’t happen before (EN2). Lots of virtual support. Got to know lots more of my neighbours as a result. Very nice community feel to it and made some good friends. People sharing things on the community group. People seem more present when they’re outside dur- ing lockdown. Shift from no contact with strangers to lots more general friendly chat. (SE2)

We have raised the question of whether community represented an alternative to the increased governmentality of the coronavirus pandemic. The answer, based upon a small and specialised group of academics, suggests that whilst national community was strongly reinforced, and local communities did to some extent take over the surveillance of their members, the new kinds of local mobilisation also opened up spaces for horizontal lines of communication which went beyond simply an extension of governmentality. Compassionate communities emerged. However, these responses were very uneven across society, maybe reinforcing the advantage of already well organised localities. At the level of personal communities, the kind of surveillance taking place was supportive rather than repressive, although the limitations of digital communication may have limited the range of social connections and prevented the emergence of genuine critical discussion that comes with face-to-face communications

This paper has discussed how the new biopolitical governmentalities introduced under the COVID-19 regulations have affected communities at different levels. At the national level, community spirit was instrumentalised to confront the emergency by reinforcing national boundaries, flows of information and resources. There was a highly technocratic response in most countries. This celebration of the national community avoided the confrontation of other problems and silenced opposition as the inequalities generated by top-down imposed social isolation took a while to emerge. The growing body of evidence of widening inequalities both within and between communities (Cotofan et al., 2021; Bonacini et al., 2020) undermined the discourse of a national community where “we are all in it together”. The misery of dying alone in a care home, the explosive stress of locking up families for children and women and the compounded educational inequalities of keeping children out of school only emerged gradually once lockdowns ended. 13 C. Wallace et al. Governmentality Versus Community: The Impact of the COVID. At a micro level, locally spatialised communities were reinvented through necessity and often reinforced through self-help initiatives. Far from undermining spatialised relationships, digital media especially social media - tended to reinforce them as a response to emergency. Locality and place have become more important as a source social support. Online communications within localities have been used to mobilise community responses to the COVID emergency. Formal methods of mobilisation tended to build upon existing associations such as religious institutions, resilience infrastructure and mother-toddler groups, but informal responses were more haphazard and spontaneous. However, there was an eruption of community spirit around horizontal ties. In our view this was more than a form of governmentality at distance, but neither was it opposition or protest. It opened up a “space” for different lines of communication and some relief from the top-down governmentality. The forced turn towards localism during the first lockdown with radical lifestyle changes offered a glimpse into an alternative future that more neighbourliness, a slower pace of life, mindful appreciation of the surroundings and a low carbon foot- print could offer. Even if this was rapidly forgotten later, it allowed spaces to emerge in an otherwise the pervasive biopolitical governmentality.

Diaries showed that the territorialisation of vertical power at a national level was managed by building upon a sense of emergency with a need for exceptional responses. Frequently likened to a response to war or natural disaster, obedience was induced through a pervasive sense of fear and anxiety (Agamben, 2021). The diaries described how governments imposed stringent measures on populations’ daily behaviour and freedoms, which left them reeling. ES mentions that even the woods in her Spanish homeland were cordoned off with police tape to stop people from walking there. Many of the countries in which our diarists lived imposed overnight curfews. In Britain and the US the more liberal regimes under populist leaders (Trump and Johnson) at first rejected the strong lockdowns imposed on most European countries, but before long, restricting personal movement was seen as the only way to combat the disease. It seems that everywhere except for the same technocratic ideas for control were adopted – although to a lesser extent in Sweden. In the UK, the restriction of social life to “bubbles” relied more on self-policing through voluntary subjectivisa- tion but in other countries such as China or Spain, measures were enforced by real police on the streets. Our diarists reflected on the development of a “COVID nationalism” as each country developed variations on the response. They reported obsessively tuning into daily news broadcasts and learning of the lates regulations and death tolls as information horizons shrank. Diarists fervidly followed public broadcasts as the top-down vertical spread of power replaced the daily conversations and encounters that existed previously. Thus, there was a radical re-focus of the idea of national community with 13 C. Wallace et al. Governmentality Versus Community: The Impact of the COVID... daily top-down instructions controlling every day behaviour in the “thanatopolitics” of death and infection.

As horizontal communication links were severed or severely constricted, it emerged only slowly that the biopolitics of death among ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged populations were disproportionately high (Bertocchi & Dimico, 2020). The pre-eminence of national news sources and lack of opportunity to travel might have narrowed focus on the national experience. However, this call to an idealised national community, helped people accept the radical change in their lives and economic hardship (for some). It glossed over the widening inequalities between those who could work at home benefitting from living in high digital density households and those who lost their jobs and started to suffer real hardship or were more digitally excluded. Some of these tensions are evident in the diary from Slovakia. Different pressures are emerging – the voices of the large and strong are heard. Some say we should support banks, others point to large businesses, but I hear very little of caring about those who have fallen through the net – and are not covered by social assistance as we pushed so many people out in the past years. They managed (previously), because labour market was strong, but from day-to-day they lost their opportunities for temporary, black-market, migration jobs. One Roma settlement is in quarantine - they are short of food, and cannot leave the settlement... How is the government going to reach them? Hence, at a national level a territorialised community was reinforced through the erection of national borders and the focus on national resources. Furthermore, the call to solidarity and social cohesion meant that the idea of national community was continually reinforced. This helped to silence opposition and restrict channels of communication that might have led to alternative voices being heard – at least during the first lockdown.

[Allen, “Philoctetes Revisited: WHITE PUBLIC SPACE AND THE POLITICAL

GEOGRAPHY OF PUBLIC SAFETY,” Social Text 68, Vol. 19, No. 3, Fall 2001]

As a precursor to global governance, governmentality, according to Foucault’s initial account, poses the question of order not in terms of the origin of the law and the location of sovereignty, as do traditional accounts of power, but in terms instead of the management of population. The management of population is further refined in terms of specific problematics to which population management may be reduced. These typically include but are not necessarily exhausted by the following topoi of governmental power: economy, health, welfare, poverty, security, sexuality, demographics, resources, skills, culture, and so on. Now, where there is an operation of power there is knowledge, and where there is knowledge there is an ,operation of: power. Here discursive formations emerge and, as Foucault noted, in every society the production of discourse is at once controlled, selected,’ organized and redistributed by a certain number of procedures whose role is to ward off its powers and dangers, to gain mastery over its chance events, to evade its ponderous, formidable materiality.34 More specifically, where there is a policy problematic there is expertise, and where there is expertise there, too, a policy problematic will emerge. Such problematics are detailed and elaborated in terms of discrete forms of knowledge as well as interlocking policy domains. Policy domains reify the problematization of life in certain ways by turning these epistemically and politically contestable orderings of life into “problems” that require the continuous attention of policy science and the continuous resolutions of policymakers. Policy “actors” develop and compete on the basis of the expertise that grows up around such problems or clusters of problems and their client populations. Here, too, we may also discover what might be called “epistemic entrepreneurs.” Albeit the market for discourse is prescribed and policed in ways that Foucault indicated, bidding to formulate novel problematizations they seek to “sell” these, or otherwise have them officially adopted. In principle, there is no limit to the ways in which the management of population may be problematized. All aspects of human conduct, any encounter with life, is problematizable. Any problematization is capable of becoming a policy problem. Governmentality thereby creates a market for policy, for science and for policy science, in which problematizations go looking for policy sponsors while policy sponsors fiercely compete on behalf of their favored problematizations. Reproblematization of problems is constrained by the institutional and ideological investments surrounding accepted “problems,” and by the sheer difficulty of challenging the inescapable ontological and epistemological assumptions that go into their very formation. There is nothing so fiercely contested as an epistemological or ontological assumption. And there is nothing so fiercely ridiculed as the suggestion that the real problem with problematizations exists precisely at the level of such assumptions. Such “paralysis of analysis” is precisely what policymakers seek to avoid since they are compelled constantly to respond to circumstances over which they ordinarily have in fact both more and less control than they proclaim. What they do not have is precisely the control that they want. Yet serial policy failure-the fate and the fuel of all policy-compels them into a continuous search for the new analysis that will extract them from the aporias in which they constantly find themselves enmeshed.35 Serial policy failure is no simple shortcoming that science, and policy-and policy science-will ultimately overcome. Serial policy failure is rooted in the ontological and epistemological assumptions that fashion the ways in which global governance encounters and problematizes life as a process of emergence through fitness landscapes that constantly adaptive and changing ensembles have continuously to negotiate. As a particular kind of intervention into life, global governance promotes the very changes and unintended outcomes that it then serially reproblematizes in terms of policy failure. Thus, global liberal governance is not a linear problem-solving process committed to the resolution of objective policy problems simply by bringing better information and knowledge to bear upon them. A nonlinear economy of power/knowledge, it deliberately installs socially specific and radically inequitable distributions of wealth, opportunity, and mortal danger both locally and globally through the very detailed ways in which life is variously (policy) problematized by it.

The reading I give here of Deleuze and Guattari's work suggests that it is through open-ended attunement with the multiple forces of our life that we can unfold, rather than attempt to dictate or control, the responses that will best serve the evolving capacities of the interdependent life-forms of the communities to which we belong. Deleuze and Guattari's conception of an immanent ethics calls on us to attend to the situations of our lives in all their textured specificity and to open ourselves up to responses that go beyond a repertoire of comfortably familiar, automatic reactions and instead access creative solutions to what are always unique problems. My reading of their conception of ethics emphasizes its pragmatic efficacy for resolving the often-painful dissonance we experience as embodied human beings struggling to live good lives. Although progressive thinkers and activists have not yet achieved a world where change is no longer needed (despite some claims to the contrary), our concerns have shifted as the world changes, and theory has attempted—often with great success—to keep pace with these changes. With this book, I hope to contribute to such efforts by rendering a Deleuze—Guattarian approach to life accessible in light of questions about what it means to be human, normative and alternative conceptions of identity and subjectivity, and ethical and political questions about how we can live from day to day as well as work toward making the world a better place. Deleuze and Guattari's conception of doing theory is that of an intervention that can help one answer the question of "how one might live" rather than a representation of the world (May 2005, 1-25). Philosophy, in their view, is (or should be) an evolving force that affects and is affected by other forces as they play out over time; meaning unfolds and evolves through the differentiated becoming of the multiple forces of life. This perspective prompts a creative approach toward reading and writing theory as well as toward thinking. Arresting the dynamic force of concepts by restricting their meanings to past formulations overlooks how their meanings evolve in response to the shifting configurations of the life problems they address. Far from prompting an anarchic sloppiness, Deleuze and Guattari's approach invites tracking the subtleties of meaning that emerge when one attends to the texture of specific contexts. Concepts cannot mean in abstraction from life; their power can only unfold in relation to other concepts as well as the heterogeneous forces of life as evolution. Unfolding incipient meanings of concepts in ways that will suggest satisfying solutions to the problems life poses requires skillful attunement to the interrelations of words to other words as well as words and the material situations in and through which words mean. Deleuze and Guattari's conception of an immanent ethics and politics premised on affirming what is as well as unfolding what could become invites creative resolution of the obstacles that prevent us from our individual and collective thriving. Their life-affirming approach attends to what Susan McManus in a recent article terms the "affective register of subjectivity" in ways that prompt resolution of "nihilistic blockages in agency" (McManus 2007, 1-2) and instigates the belief in the earth and the invention of a new people for which Deleuze and Guattari call. Furthermore, their approach to ontology and doing theory suggests a constructive way of "mapping" a variety of projects against the background of a virtual whole that connects all projects promoting progressive change as well as individual and collective projects invested in living "good" (as in ethical) lives. This ability to provide a framework loose enough not to exclude disparate projects, and yet coherent enough to allow us to connect various kinds of progressive projects without assimilating those projects to specific theoretical paradigms, may provide impetus for the kind of joyous hybrid connections Rosi Braidotti calls for in her inspiring book, Transpositions (Braidotti 2006). Although it is impossible for any given path to affirm everyone equally, acknowledging the mutual implication of our unfolding projects as well as creatively thinking in terms of the larger wholes connecting us could help us find new solutions to how to live and work toward collective solutions.

Within the legal order the relations between individuals will resemble this logic where suffering is exchanged for more, but ‘legal’ suffering, because these relations are no longer regulated by the “culture of the heart” [Kultur des Herzens]. (CV 245) As Benjamin describes it, the “legal system tries to erect, in all areas where individual ends could be usefully pursued by violence, legal ends that can be realized only by legal power.” (CV 238) The individual is not to take law in his own hands; no conflict should be susceptible of being solved without the direct intervention of law, lest its authority will be undermined. Law has to present itself as indispensable for any kind of conflict to be solved. The consequence of this infiltration of law throughout the whole of human life is paradoxical: the more inescapable the rule of law is, the less responsible the individual becomes. Legal and judicial institutions act as avengers in the name of the individual. Even the possibility of forgiveness is monopolized by the state under the ‘right of mercy’. Hence the responsibility of the person toward the others is now delegated on the authority and justness of the law. The legal institutions, the very agents of (legal) vengeance exonerate me from my essential responsibility towards the others, breaking the moral proximity that makes every ethics possible.20 Thus I am no longer obliged to an other that by his/her very presence would demand me to be worthy of the occasion (of every occasion), because law, by seeking to regulate affairs between individuals, makes this other anonymous, virtual: his otherness is equaled to that of every possible other. The Other becomes faceless, making it all too easy for me to ignore his demands of justice, and even to exert on him violence just for the sake of legality. The logic of evil, then, becomes not a means but an end in itself:21 state violence for the sake of the state’s survival. Hence, the ever-present possibility of the worst takes the form of my unconditional responsibility towards the other being delegated on the ideological and totalitarian institutions of a law gone astray in the (its) logic of self- preserving vengeance. The undecidability of the origin of law, and its consequent meddling all across human affairs makes it possible that the worst could be exerted in the name of law. Even the very notion of crimes against humanity, which seeks to protect the life of the population, can be overlooked by the state if it feels threatened by other states or by its own population.22 From now on, my responsibility towards the Other is taken from me, at the price of my own existence being constantly threatened by the imminent and fatal possibility of being signaled as guilty of an (for me) indeterminate offence. In this picture, the modern state protects my existence while bringing on the terror of state violence – the law infiltrates into and seeks to rule our most private conflicts.

Despite the secrecy and security, the prisoners of Guántanamo Bay have attracted much attention. The more tragic cases of the “war on terror” are not to be found in such prison camps, rather they are to be found in the remote villages of Afghanistan and Pakistan. We may read about them in the unnoticed article every other week that reports of a drone attack “collaterally damaging” yet another sixty or seventy bodies in remote parts of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Such deadly airstrikes have also targeted Somalian villages suspected of harboring a few terrorists.38 Rarely is the morality of killing scores of innocent people to “get a few bad guys” questioned. More recently, on 4 September 2009, a German commander in the Kunduz province of Afghanistan called in an airstrike on two fuel tankers that were stolen by the Taliban. The immobilized tankers were surrounded by approximately one hundred Afghani villagers trying to get free fuel. When an F-15 jet dropped two 500-pound bombs, the crowd was immediately incinerated.39 Since the inception of the “war on terror” such news has become a weekly standard, meanwhile citizen-subjects look the other way under the assumption that they must have been bad guys. Still no inquiry has been made into the annihilation of (what is widely argued by locals to be) a remote Pakistani school and the school children in it by a Pakistani/US helicopter raid in 2006.40 What is important to keep in mind for our theoretical purposes is that such violence is not only perpetrated by those who pull a trigger or push a button. Instead, it has a background: actions, decisions, discourses, and practices conducted at the micro level by citizen-subjects. It is these citizen-subjects that state violence is carried out in the name of, and it is their bodies and wealth that is mobilized and put in danger to fight an enemy. It is this form of subjectivity that sovereign power capitalizes on when they conduct killings in remote places.41¶ My point here is that sovereign violence needs and capitalizes on sovereign subjects in order to produce deadly effects. The killing and violence itself may be conducted and administered by bureaucrats, but it requires citizen-subjects to mobilize the will and resources necessary for the sovereign violence.42 With apologies to Edmund Burke, his popular quotation could be rephrased as: All it takes for sovereign violence to kill is the citizen-subject to either applaud or enlist. Sovereign violence capitalizes on the fascistic desire found in the docile bodies of modernity: “For us to survive, those folks far away must die.” Of course, “those folks far away” have historically often been the colonial subjects of Europe. Where today smart bombs kill civilians in remote villages, colonial attempts to discipline natives included aerial bombardments of remote villages in faraway lands. In 1920, Winston Churchill, as British secretary of war, wrote a memo on the uncontrollable villages in Northern Iraq: “I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes. The moral effect should be so good that the loss of life should be reduced to a minimum.”43 Consistently, sovereign violence has been particularly brutal toward “inferior far away people.”

Given the preceding sketch Agamben gives of power and possibilities (the law's being in force without significance, the subtle reverse found in Kafka's work of this situation, Againben's praise of creatures without work), the questions arise: what ought we to do now? What form of resistance is possible for us? How should we act? What can we do? This is actually one of the major criti- cisms on Agamben's work, that in it, at least when read superficially, Agamben nowhere seems to formulate any explicit answer to the question of resistance. The Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, also one of Agamben's close friends, points out that Agamben was never directly involved in political struggles and he sees this as a great lack in his philosophy.' Agamben's work is often described as a radical passivity.1 This passivity can be seen both as a strength and a weakness of his work. Agamben's passivity is not a regular powerlessness, but seems to come close to (Mahayana) Buddhism, an exercise in doing nothing.4 This passivity also shows evidence of a radical paradigm shift in thinking about power and resistance, a movement that is often attributed to Foucault and whose traces can be found in Kafka avant la leltre. As is evident from the above, Agamben is fundamentally opposed to the tendency of metaphysical politics to attribute an identity to the human being, to allocate to him [or her] a work of his [or her] own. If the human being has no identity of his [or her] own and no activity of his [or her] own, then this also has consequences for our traditional view of actions as being fundamentally embedded within end-means relationships, as goal oriented in essence. Our views of activities and activism must therefore be thoroughly revised in line with our revision of the possibility of a transcendent work of man. Kafka's opera singing executioners or questioners Deleuze once defined power as the act in which the human being is cut off from its potentiality. But, Agamben states, 'There is, nevertheless, another and more insidious operation of power that does not immediately affect what humans can do - their potentiality - but rather their "impotentiality", that is, what they cannot do, or better, can nor do' (N, 13). Given that flexibility is the primary quality the market requires from us, the contemporary human, yielding to every demand by society, is cut off from his [or her] impotentiality, from his ability to do nothing. Just as we saw previously, politics is a politics of the act, of the human individual being at work. The irresponsible motto of the contemporary individual, 'No problem, I can do it', comes precisely at the moment 'when he [or she] should instead realize that he [or she] has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he [or she] has lost all control' (N, 44). This flexibility also leads to a confusion of professions and callings, of professional identities and social roles, because people are no longer in touch with their inability. Agamben sees an example of this in Kafka's Vie Trial. In the last chapter, just before his death, two men enter through Joseph K.'s door. They are his questioners/executioners, but Joseph K. does not recognize them as such and thinks that they are *[o)ld second-rate actors or opera singers?'5 Agamben argues that, in Katka's world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to impotentiality (CC, 31). Instead of making use of our possibility of 'not being', we fail it, we flee from our lack of power, 'our fearful retreat from it in order to exercise ... some power of being' (CC, 32). But this power we try to exercise turns into a malevolent power that oppresses the persons who show us their weakness. In Kafka's world, evil does not have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our lack of power. Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist; they can still not do. Those who are separated from their own impotentiality lose, on the other hand, first of all the capacity to resist. (X, 15) And it is evident, according to Agamben, from the example of Hichmann how right Kafka was in this (CC, 32). Eichmann was not so much separated from his power as from his lack of power, tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law (CC, 32). What should one do? A clash with activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of texts written by the T'iqqun collective. This French collective has written several political manifestoes and in 200S their compound was raided by the anti terrorist brigades. The charges were quite vague: belonging to an ultra left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu; using a radical discourse; having links with foreign groups; participating regularly in political demonstrations. The evidence that was found was not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these charges a tragicomedy and accuses French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he emphasizes another important political value of the T'iqqun collective. This collective embodies Foucaults idea of the non subject. One of the latter's greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer as an attribute that a certain group had over another, but as a relation that was constantly shifting. A second merit of Foucaults thinking was the idea of non authorship. The subject itself, its identity, is always formed within a power relation, a process that Foucault termed 'subjectivization techniques' In Foucault, the state attempts to form the subject via disciplinary techniques and the subject responds via subjectivization techniques: it internalizes the expectations of the state in the formation of its own identity. That is why Foucault rejects the idea of a subject and the idea of actorship, of attributing an act to a subject. Hence, as long as we continue to think in terms of a subject resisting oppressive power via deliberate action, we cannot liberate ourselves from power relations. The gesture Tiqqun instead is making is, according to Agamben, not one of looking for a subject that can assume the role of saviour or revolutionary. Rather, they begin with investigating the force fields that are operative in our society (instead of focusing on the subject). In describing these fields of force and the moment they become diffuse, new possibilities can arise that are not dependent on a subject. The discussion that followed this lecture provides a very clear picture of Agamben's position. Many activists present at the lecture asked what his theory entailed concretely with respect to the direction in which they should go. Agamben's constant reply was that anyone who poses this question has not understood the problem at all. I always find it out of place to go and ask someone what to do, what is there to be done? ... If someone asks me what action, it shows they missed the point because they still want me to say: go out in the streets and do this? It has nothing to do with that. (OT) Inactivity as active resistance to the state was hardly conceivable for many of the left wing activists present at Agamben's lecture at Tiqqun. Although the state acknowledges the anti-law tendencies in the writings of the Tiqqun collective, the activists present at Agamben's lecture failed to recognize this specific form of resistance. What Agamben attempted to show was that the power of the T'iqqun collective lay precisely in the fact that they did not prescribe any concrete actions but sought unexpected possibilities in 'being thus'. In that same sense, Agamben's analysis of Kafka's work should not be seen as a manual for activist freedom but as a description of small opportunities, of examples in which the power relation is diffuse and that we must attempt to recognize, create and use. Agamben shows us different possibilities and means for resistance, but these are not regular acts with a goal; rather, they are means without end. As Kishik pointed out, Agamben's work is an attempt to "*make means meet" (not with their ends, but with each other)'.7 One way to achieve this is through gestures. The gestures of the people in the Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafka's work, the shame of Joseph K. and the 'as not' in Kafka's 'On Parables' show us that there are other strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political situations.

Given the preceding sketch Agamben gives of power and possibilities (the law's being in force without significance, the subtle reverse found in Kafka's work of this situation, Againben's praise of creatures without work), the questions arise: what ought we to do now? What form of resistance is possible for us? How should we act? What can we do? This is actually one of the major criti- cisms on Agamben's work, that in it, at least when read superficially, Agamben nowhere seems to formulate any explicit answer to the question of resistance. The Italian political philosopher Antonio Negri, also one of Agamben's close friends, points out that Agamben was never directly involved in political struggles and he sees this as a great lack in his philosophy.' Agamben's work is often described as a radical passivity.1 This passivity can be seen both as a strength and a weakness of his work. Agamben's passivity is not a regular powerlessness, but seems to come close to (Mahayana) Buddhism, an exercise in doing nothing.4 This passivity also shows evidence of a radical paradigm shift in thinking about power and resistance, a movement that is often attributed to Foucault and whose traces can be found in Kafka avant la leltre. As is evident from the above, Agamben is fundamentally opposed to the tendency of metaphysical politics to attribute an identity to the human being, to allocate to him [or her] a work of his [or her] own. If the human being has no identity of his [or her] own and no activity of his [or her] own, then this also has consequences for our traditional view of actions as being fundamentally embedded within end-means relationships, as goal oriented in essence. Our views of activities and activism must therefore be thoroughly revised in line with our revision of the possibility of a transcendent work of man. Kafka's opera singing executioners or questioners Deleuze once defined power as the act in which the human being is cut off from its potentiality. But, Agamben states, 'There is, nevertheless, another and more insidious operation of power that does not immediately affect what humans can do - their potentiality - but rather their "impotentiality", that is, what they cannot do, or better, can nor do' (N, 13). Given that flexibility is the primary quality the market requires from us, the contemporary human, yielding to every demand by society, is cut off from his [or her] impotentiality, from his ability to do nothing. Just as we saw previously, politics is a politics of the act, of the human individual being at work. The irresponsible motto of the contemporary individual, 'No problem, I can do it', comes precisely at the moment 'when he [or she] should instead realize that he [or she] has been consigned in unheard of measure to forces and processes over which he [or she] has lost all control' (N, 44). This flexibility also leads to a confusion of professions and callings, of professional identities and social roles, because people are no longer in touch with their inability. Agamben sees an example of this in Kafka's Vie Trial. In the last chapter, just before his death, two men enter through Joseph K.'s door. They are his questioners/executioners, but Joseph K. does not recognize them as such and thinks that they are *[o)ld second-rate actors or opera singers?'5 Agamben argues that, in Katka's world, evil is presented as an inadequate reaction to impotentiality (CC, 31). Instead of making use of our possibility of 'not being', we fail it, we flee from our lack of power, 'our fearful retreat from it in order to exercise ... some power of being' (CC, 32). But this power we try to exercise turns into a malevolent power that oppresses the persons who show us their weakness. In Kafka's world, evil does not have the form of the demonic but that of being separated from our lack of power. Nothing makes us more impoverished and less free than this estrangement from impotentiality. Those who are separated from what they can do, can, however, still resist; they can still not do. Those who are separated from their own impotentiality lose, on the other hand, first of all the capacity to resist. (X, 15) And it is evident, according to Agamben, from the example of Hichmann how right Kafka was in this (CC, 32). Eichmann was not so much separated from his power as from his lack of power, tempted to evil precisely by the powers of right and law (CC, 32). What should one do? A clash with activists At the end of 2009, Agamben gave a lecture in honour of the presentation of a collection of texts written by the T'iqqun collective. This French collective has written several political manifestoes and in 200S their compound was raided by the anti terrorist brigades. The charges were quite vague: belonging to an ultra left and the anarcho-autonomous milieu; using a radical discourse; having links with foreign groups; participating regularly in political demonstrations. The evidence that was found was not weapons, but documents, for example a train schedule. Although Agamben calls these charges a tragicomedy and accuses French politics of barbarism6, in his lecture he emphasizes another important political value of the T'iqqun collective. This collective embodies Foucaults idea of the non subject. One of the latter's greatest merits is that he thought of power no longer as an attribute that a certain group had over another, but as a relation that was constantly shifting. A second merit of Foucaults thinking was the idea of non authorship. The subject itself, its identity, is always formed within a power relation, a process that Foucault termed 'subjectivization techniques' In Foucault, the state attempts to form the subject via disciplinary techniques and the subject responds via subjectivization techniques: it internalizes the expectations of the state in the formation of its own identity. That is why Foucault rejects the idea of a subject and the idea of actorship, of attributing an act to a subject. Hence, as long as we continue to think in terms of a subject resisting oppressive power via deliberate action, we cannot liberate ourselves from power relations. The gesture Tiqqun instead is making is, according to Agamben, not one of looking for a subject that can assume the role of saviour or revolutionary. Rather, they begin with investigating the force fields that are operative in our society (instead of focusing on the subject). In describing these fields of force and the moment they become diffuse, new possibilities can arise that are not dependent on a subject. The discussion that followed this lecture provides a very clear picture of Agamben's position. Many activists present at the lecture asked what his theory entailed concretely with respect to the direction in which they should go. Agamben's constant reply was that anyone who poses this question has not understood the problem at all. I always find it out of place to go and ask someone what to do, what is there to be done? ... If someone asks me what action, it shows they missed the point because they still want me to say: go out in the streets and do this? It has nothing to do with that. (OT) Inactivity as active resistance to the state was hardly conceivable for many of the left wing activists present at Agamben's lecture at Tiqqun. Although the state acknowledges the anti-law tendencies in the writings of the Tiqqun collective, the activists present at Agamben's lecture failed to recognize this specific form of resistance. What Agamben attempted to show was that the power of the T'iqqun collective lay precisely in the fact that they did not prescribe any concrete actions but sought unexpected possibilities in 'being thus'. In that same sense, Agamben's analysis of Kafka's work should not be seen as a manual for activist freedom but as a description of small opportunities, of examples in which the power relation is diffuse and that we must attempt to recognize, create and use. Agamben shows us different possibilities and means for resistance, but these are not regular acts with a goal; rather, they are means without end. As Kishik pointed out, Agamben's work is an attempt to "*make means meet" (not with their ends, but with each other)'.7 One way to achieve this is through gestures. The gestures of the people in the Oklahoma theatre and elsewhere in Kafka's work, the shame of Joseph K. and the 'as not' in Kafka's 'On Parables' show us that there are other strategies, aside from active resistance, to reverse political situations.

According to Agamben, study is an important strategy for living outside the law and making it inoperative. In what sense can study be a strategy? Study has a long tradition in Judaism as a form of resistance. In 586 BC, Jerusalem was plundered by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar and the temple of the Jews destroyed. Many Jews died and the rest were taken captive and brought to Babylonia. During the Babylonian exile, when they no longer had a temple and were forbidden to practise their faith, the Jewish people focused on the study of their holy books. After the Persian king Cyrus defeated Babylonia and issued a decree in 537 BC that the exiled Jews could return to their homelands and rebuild their holy sanctuaries, 40,000 Jews returned to rebuild the temple. But the religion of the Jews was already marked by exile and in 70 AD the temple was again destroyed, this time by the Romans. The temple was not rebuilt and study has since then become the true temple of the Jews. The Jewish religion is no longer focused on worship but on study. This gave the scholar a messianic significance (IP, 63). Talmud means ‘study’; the original meaning of Torah is not ‘law’ but ‘instruction’ Mishnan, the set of rabbinic laws, is derived from a root that has ‘repetition’ as its basic meaning. The study Agamben is aiming at does not have a predetermined goal: getting a degree and a good position in society, or getting some valuable insight that can be used to overthrow a political structure. Just as the strategy to close the door of the law was especially hard because the law does not prescribe anything and the task of the Messiah is paradoxical because there is no original structure of the law to restore, so study also lacks a transcendent meaning it can aim at, a goal it can set. As far as etymology is concerned, the word studium is closely related to a root that indicates a coffision, a shock or influence. Study and surprise are closely related in that sense. Whoever studies finds oneself shocked, amazed and is, in a certain sense, stupid (cf. studium, stupefying). On the one hand, study is undergone and, on the other, undertaken. Here Agamben sees a close affinity with Aristotle’s description of potentiality, which is passive on the one hand — an undergoing — and active on the other — an unstoppable drive to undertake something, to do something, to engage in action. Study is the place where undergoing and undertaking converge; it is a gesture (IP, 64). The rhythm of studying is an alternation between amazement and clarity, discovery and loss, doing and undergoing. This combination of undergoing and undertaking yields a kind of passive activity, a radical passivity. Something happens without seeming to happen. Agamben argues that study is pre-eminently unending. Study does not have an appropriate end nor does it desire it. This gives the scholar a woeful air. At first glance, the students in Kafka’s works seem to be of little use or significance. Nevertheless, Benjamin contends that they have a major role to play: ‘Among Kafka’s creations, there is a clan which reckons with the brevity of life in a peculiar way. The students who appear in the strangest places in Kafka’s works are the spokesmen for and leaders of this clan3° Agamben is in complete agreement with this view: [T]he latest, most exemplary embodiment of study in our culture is not the great philosopher nor the sainted doctor. It is rather the student, such as he appears in certain novels of Kafka or Walser. (IP, 65) It is precisely the apparent uselessness of the students and the hopelessness of study that plays such an important role in the strategy they develop with respect to power. Kafka’s useless students without Schrift So the students operating in Kafkas stories have an important characteristic: their studies seem to be useless. In Amerika, Karl sees a strange young man: He watched silently as the man read in his book, turned the pages and occasionally checked something in another book that he always picked up at lightning speed, often making entries in a notebook, his face always bent surprisingly low over it. Could this man be a student? He did seem to be studying. ... ‘You’re studying?’ asked Karl. ‘Yes, yes’, said the man, using the few moments lost to his studies to rearrange his books.3’ (...) And when wifi you be finished with your studies?’ asked Karl. ‘It’s slow going’, said the student. ... ‘[Y]ou can be happy about having given up your studies. I myself have been studying for years, out of pure single-mindedness. It has given me little satisfaction and even less chance of a decent future. 32 Karl explains his problems with Delamarche to the student. The student cannot really help him either; he does not offer Karl any insight in what he must do and even advises him to remain with Delamarche ‘absolutely33 Karl wonders where studying had got him — he had forgotten everything again.34 The most extreme example of a student, in Agamben’s view, is MelvillËs Bartleby, the scriber who stopped writing. According to Benjamin, Kafkas students have also lost the Schrift. This can mean either that they have stopped writing or that they have lost the Schrift in the sense of the Torah, the object of study. According to Scholem, the students have not lost the Schrift or the Torah, but they can no longer decipher it (cited in HS, 51). Nonetheless, Benjamin’s genius is apparent, according to Agamben, precisely in the fact that the students have lost the Schrift. Their commentaries on the Schrift, on the Law, are notes in the margin of a blank page.35 Study does not lead to an a priori determined goal; Kafka does not attach any promises to study that are traditionally attached to the study of the Torah. According to Agamben, the messianic tension of study is turned around here. Or better: it has gone beyond itself. Its gesture is that of a power that does not precede but follows its action, which it has left behind forever, of a Talmud that has not only announced the reconstruction of the temple but has already forgotten it. ‘At this point, study shakes off the sadness that disfigured it and returns to its truest nature: not work, but inspiration, the self-nourishment of the soul’ (IP, 65).36 Kafkas assistants are members of a congregation who have lost their house of prayer. His students have forgotten how to write, have lost the Schrift. Now nothing stops them on their ‘[u]ntrammeled, happy journey:37 The study of the horse Bucephalus But the most enigmatic example of the student in Kafkas work may be Alexander the Great’s horse Bucephalus, who happens to become a lawyer to the surprise of his colleagues. We have a new lawyer, Dr. Bucephalus. In his outward appearance there is little to recall the time when he was the warhorse of Alexander of Macedonia. ... I recently saw a quite simple court usher with the knowing eye of a little racetrack regular marveffing at the lawyer as the latter, lifting his thighs high, mounted step by step with a stride that made the marble clang. In general the bar approves the admission of Bucephalus. ... Nowadays, as no one can deny, there is no great Alexander. To be sure, many know how to commit murder ... and many feel that Macedonia is too narrow ... but no one, no one, can lead the way to India. Even in those days India’s gates were beyond reach, but their direction was indicated by the royal sword. ... Today ... no one shows the way; many carry swords but only wave them in the air and the gaze that tries to follow them grows confused. Perhaps, therefore, it is really best, as Bucephalus has done, to immerse oneself in law books. Free, his flanks unburdened by the loins of the rider, by quiet lamplight, far from the tumult of Alexander’s baffle, he reads and turns the pages of our old books.38 In his interpretation of this story, Werner Kraft concludes that law is set over against myth in the name of justice: instead of taking part in the mythical (pre-law) struggle, Bucephalus devotes himself to law.39 Benjamin sees this as a serious misunderstanding of Kafkas story. Indeed, the goal is to unmask mythical-juridical violence and human beings, like the horse Bucephalus, must tame the mythical forces at whatever cost (SE, 63). But, according to Benjamin, what is new about this ‘new lawyer what is new for the legal profession, is that he does not practice law but only studies it, reading in tranquil lamplight. Bucephalus is free: his flanks are no longer squeezed by Alexander the Great’s thighs and he is no longer carrying the latter on his back. The door to justice is not to employ law but to make it inoperative — not by practicing law (which would be a repetition of the mythical forces, given that law is in force without significance), but by doing nothing more than studying it. ‘The law which is studied but no longer practiced is the gate to justice Bucephalus’ strategy against law is thus study. Agamben remarks that it is decisive that the law that is not practiced but only studied does not itself become justice but only the door to it. The study of the law has no ‘higher purpose’ - that is why the law has become inoperative.4’ ‘That which opens the passage to justice is not the abolishment of the law but its deactivation and inactivity — that is, another use of the law’ (SE, 63). This is a law that is liberated from all discipline and all relation to sovereignty. Bucephalus depicts a figure of the law that is possible after its link with violence and power has been deposed, a law that is no longer in force and applied (SE, 63-64), just as the study of doorkeepers by the man from the country makes it possible to remain living outside the law. Agamben then outlines the following picture of the future: One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use, but to free them from it for good. (SE, 64)

Aalborg University, Department of Development and Planning AND Department of Town and Regional Planning Bent Flyvbjerg and Tim Richardson, “Planning and Foucault In Search of the Dark Side of Planning Theory”

3. Towards Foucault

Mitchell, professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle, “Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5, December 2004, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf

For Foucault, at least in the History of Sexuality and related texts, modern powers are more closely aligned to a bio-politics, a politics of life. This bio-politics emerges in the eighteenth century with the concerns for the health, housing, habitation, welfare and living conditions of the population. Such an observation leads him to place his concerns with health, discipline, the body, and sexuality within a more general horizon. Again the notion of bio-politics is quite complex. The idea of the population as a kind of ʻspecies bodyʼ subject to bio-political knowledge and power operating in concert with the individual body subject to disciplinary powers would appear central.11 No matter how bloody things were under the exercise of sovereign power with its atrocious crimes and retributions, it is only with the advent of this modern form of the politics of life that the same logic and technology applied to the care and development of human life is applied to the destruction of entire populations. The link between social welfare and mass slaughters can at times appear to be a fairly direct one. Of one of its first manifestations in German police science, Foucault argues, “it wields its power over living beings as living beings, and its politics, therefore has to be a bio-politics. Since the population is nothing more than what the state takes care of for its own sake, of course, the state is entitled to slaughter it. So the reverse of bio-politics is thanato-politics.”12 Despite such statements, there is a hesitation, a point of indeterminacy, in this relation between bio-politics and thanato-politics. Foucault seems to identify a puzzle or an aporia of contemporary politics, which he cannot resolve or which may itself be irresolvable. “The coexistence in political structures of large destructive mechanisms and institutions oriented to the care of individual life is something puzzling,” he states.13 But he immediately adds “I donʼt mean that mass slaughters are the effect, the result, the logical consequence of our rationality, nor do I mean that the state has the obligation of taking care of individuals since it has the right to kill millions of people.” After proceeding through this set of inconclusive negatives he avers, as if trying to defer the answer to the questions he poses: “It is this rationality, and the death and life game which takes place in it, that Iʼd like to investigate from a historical point of view.” One aspect of this historical investigation occurred in Foucaultʼs 1976 lectures. These lectures cover such concerns as the seventeenth-century historical-political narrative of the “war of the races,” and the biological and social class re-inscriptions of racial discourse in the nineteenth century.14 He concludes with the development of the biological state racisms and the genocidal politics of the twentieth century, including a radical analysis of the Nazi state and of socialism. From this perspective, there is a certain potentiality within the human sciences which, when alloyed to notions such as race, can help make Contretemps 5, December 2004 20 intelligible the catastrophes of the twentieth century. Such lectures seem to make the totalitarian rule of the twentieth century a capstone on the histories of confinement, internment and punishment that had made up his genealogical work. This thesis is perhaps close to the work of the first generation of the Frankfurt School and a certain reading of Max Weber. Here the one-sided development of rationality and application of reason to ʻmanʼ in the human sciences has the consequence of converting instrumental rationality into forms of domination. Bio-politics in this reading is the application of instrumental rationality to life. The dreadful outcomes of the twentieth century then result from this kind of scientization and technologization of earlier notions of race. There is also a similarity in this reading of Foucault and the work of Zygmunt Bauman.15 The latter presents the Holocaust as something that must be understood as endogenous to Western civilization and its processes of rationalization rather than as an aberrant psychological, social or political pathology.

Mitchell, professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle, “Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5, December 2004, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf

At some distance from these advances in biomedicine and biotechnology are the issues of life and death that are played in various arenas of international politics and human rights. These concern the effects of the break-ups of nation-states from Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union to Indonesia, the subsequent movement, detention, expulsion, processing, and mass death of refugees and illegal immigrants, and the conditions and forms under which military action, ʻpeacekeepingʼ and ʻhumanitarian interventionʼ are acceptable. They concern the international coalition against the polycentric network of terrorism. Detention camps are again becoming a feature of modern liberal-democratic states. On the one hand, the twentieth century gave us a name for the death of a whole people or ʻraceʼ, genocide. On the other, it sought to promote the universal rights of individuals by virtue of their mere existence as human beings. Bio-politics and thanato-politics are played out in war, in torture, and in biological, chemical and atomic weapons of mass destruction as much as in declarations of human rights and United Nationsʼ peacekeeping operations.

Mitchell, professor of sociology at the University of Newcastle, “Four Theses on the Powers of Life and Death,” Contretemps 5, December 2004, http://sydney.edu.au/contretemps/5december2004/dean.pdf

Fourth thesis: Bio-politics captures life stripped naked (or the zoē that was the exception of sovereign power) and makes it a matter of political life (bios). Today, we seek the good life though the extension of the powers over bare life to the point at which they become indistinguishable. In this formulation, the emergence of a government over life in the eighteenth century does mark a rupture in forms of rule, which the search for an ʻoriginary structureʼ of sovereignty cannot capture. For Foucault, the nature of this rupture is the displacement, articulation or re-inscription of sovereignty within a peculiarly modern form of politics, bio-politics. However, this capture of the government of the state by bio-powers is already present in the structure of sovereignty. It would be a mistake, in this sense, to view Agambenʼs quest for the structure of sovereignty, with its multiple thresholds, as ahistorical, that is, as insensitive to temporal thresholds. His thesis offers a kind of history of modernity. Here, the demonic character of modern states lies in the possibility that the thresholds that maintained bare life as a state of exception are breaking down. Zoē is entering into a sphere of indistinction with bios in modern politics. For Agamben the paradigm of modern politics—the new Nomos—is not the liberal governing of freedom, but the concentration camp. The camp is the material form of the stabilization of the state of exception, the excluded inclusion, both inside and outside modern political and legal ordering. Because the camp is established by law as a space of exception, it is subject to no order itself, only direct police command. It is thus a space of ordered disorder in which bare life enters into a zone of indistinction with legal order. While such views may appear to lead to a kind of radical condemnation of many instances of bio-politics, such as the attempt to develop humane processing procedures for asylum seekers, the idea of mapping zones of indistinction would seem to locate arenas of analysis and spheres of contestation rather than a site of dogmatic rejection. We have become used to a style of criticism in which liberal notions of the individual citizen have been revealed to be constituted through a series of exclusions (of women, the disabled, prisoners, the insane, the poor, the indigene, the refugee, etc). Note that Contretemps 5, December 2004 28 bio-power today holds the promise of extraordinary solutions to disability, criminality and insanity. The inclusion of women through their state of exclusion, also, would appear to raise interesting questions concerning sovereign violence given womenʼs historic biological relationship to the reproduction and care of human life. This relationship, itself excepted under the universality of law, is thus produced as bare life; and women are required to take responsibility for sovereign decisions. If we are to take Agamben seriously, this desire for inclusion may have the effect not simply of widening the sphere of the rule of law but also of hastening the point at which the sovereign exception enters into a zone of indistinction with the rule. Our societies would then have become truly demonic, not because of the re-inscription of sovereignty within bio-politics, but because bare life which constituted the sovereign exception begins to enter a zone of indistinction with our moral and political life and with the fundamental presuppositions of political community. In the achievement of inclusion in the name of universal human rights, all human life is stripped naked and becomes sacred. Perhaps in a very real sense we are all homo sacer. Perhaps what we have been in danger of missing is the way in which the sovereign violence that constitutes the exception of bare life—that which can be killed without committing homicide—is today entering into the very core of modern politics, ethics, and systems of justice.