Biopolitics culminates in genocidal logics

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.