Biopolitics is bare life

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.