The biopolitical state leads to the categorization, restricting, and purging of ‘foreign bodies’ leading into eugenics--a scientific racism that takes autonomy hostage.

In the light of the history of biological racism and eugenics in the 19th and 20th centuries, it is not surprising that many sociologists have expressed concerns about the contemporary resurgence of biological and genetic accounts of human capacities and incapacities.3 They have argued that, like previous appeals to biological nature, such developments will tend to generate a politics that individualizes human worth, essentializes variations in human capacities, reduces social phenomena to the aggregate of individual actions, and discriminates against, constrains or excludes those found biologically abnormal or defective. Thus they have warned of the dangers of a new determinism – ‘geneticism’ – based on a false but seductive mystique of the power of the genes, and entailing all sorts of discrimination on genetic grounds (Dreyfuss and Nelkin, 1992; Lippman, 1992; Nelkin, 1992; Nelkin and Lindee, 1995; Nelkin and Tancredi, 1994). Some have suggested that we face the real prospect of the rebirth of scientific racism grounded in the apparent objectivity of DNA sequences, and of a new eugenics fuelled not merely by the commercial interests of the biotech companies, but also by parental desires for a perfect child in an age of manipulated consumerism and reproductive choice (Duster, 1990; Hubbard and Wald, 1999; Rifkin, 1998). From such a perspective, the rhetoric that celebrates the potential of biomedicine and biotechnology to improve the health, welfare and quality of life of individuals obscures the threat that new biological practices of control will coerce, restrict and even eliminate those whose biological propensities are believed – by doctors, parents or perhaps even by political authorities – to be defective.

Some locate the wish to control the biological make-up of the population at the very heart of modernity. Thus for both Giorgio Agamben and Zygmunt Bauman the thanatopolitics of population purification is immanent within the very project of biopolitics: to manage the health of the ‘body politic’ inescapably requires the control and elimination of ‘foreign bodies’ (Agamben, 1998; Bauman, 1989). The National Socialism of the German Third Reich certainly exemplifies this link between the administration of life and the administration of death. For example, in a book of 1936 entitled Rassenhygiene als Wissenschaft und Staatsaufgabe, Ottmar von Verschuer asserts that politics should mean ‘giving form to the life of the people’ (von Verschuer, 1936: 8, quoted from Agamben, 1998: 148). Life itself, the vital reality of a people, must become the overriding responsibility and criterion that should guide the exercise of political authority. This requires a nationally organized and politically directed programme to improve the quality of the national stock and eliminate taints or weaknesses that might threaten it. Its tactics range from propaganda and education stressing the burden on the race imposed by those with defective constitutions, to eugenic legislation on marriage, the assessment of reproductive worth by experts working on behalf of the state, the prevention of those who are members of defective or inferior sub-populations from reproducing through sterilization or extermination. Once each life has a value which may be calculated, and some lives have less value than others, such a politics has the obligation to exercise this judgement in the name of the race or the nation. All the eugenic projects of selective reproduction, sterilization and incarceration follow. Indeed, Agamben asserts that ‘the camp’ is the ‘biopolitical paradigm of the modern’: when the collective body of the people becomes the principal resource for politics, the purging of defective individuals becomes an essential part of the care of life (Agamben, 1998).