«Biopolitica, immunità, comunità»
Nel giro de qualche anno —da quando Foucault ne ha riproposto il concetto— la categoria di ‘biopolitica’ ha conquistato un ruolo di primo piano nel dibattito teorico internazionale. E tuttavia a tale rilievo non sembra corrispondere una adeguata chiarezza categoriale. Lungi dall’aver acquisito un assetto definitivo, il concetto di biopolitica appare segnato da un’inquietudine che ne impedisce una stabile connotazione, un assestamento definitivo. Questo spiega la sua oscillazione tra due interpretazioni, e prima ancora tra due tonalità, non solo diverse, ma addiritura opposte: una radicalmente negativa (penso, in Italia, ai lavori di Giorgio Agamben) e l’altra, invece, marcatamente affermativa, quasi euforica (per essempio la galassia politico-culturale che fa riferimento alle tesi di Toni Negri).
«Il dono della vita tra communitas e immunitas»
Vorrei partire dalle due categorie alle quali da tempo sto lavorando, vale a dire quelle di «comunità» e di «immunità». Si trata di due categorie, di due concetti, di due termini legati da un rapporto fatto insieme di contrasto e di indissolubilità, di indissolubilità contrastiva, fuori dal quale ciascuno di essi finisce per perdere la sua significazione piú pregnante. Partiamo da quello di comunità. Ciò è resultato dalle mie ricerche è un vero e proprio ribaltamento della sua definizione corrente nel dibattito filosofico novecentesco. Mentre, infatti, tutte le filosofie comunitarie e neocomunitarie, di matrice tedesca o anglosassone, legano l’idea di comunità a quella di appartenenza, di identità e di proprietà […] il concetto originario di comunità ha un significato radicalmente differente.
«Interview with Timothy Campbell»
TCC:The theme of biopolitics figures prominently in contemporary thought originating in Italy, especially in the work of Giorgio Agamben, Toni Negri, and your own. What do you think accounts for this recurring interest in bíos and politics in Italy, and what distinguishes your discussion of biopolitics from both Agamben and Negri? RE: It’s true that Italy is perhaps the country in which Foucault’s reflections on biopolitics, which were left interrupted at the end of the 1970s, have been taken up again with greater breadth and originality (without of course overlooking the important contributions of Agnes Heller and Donna Haraway). Why? We might begin by observing that Italy is a country on the frontier, not only in a geographic sense, but also culturally, between different worlds, between Europe and the Mediterranean, and between North and South, with all of the richness and contradictions that comes with it. Italy is cut but also in a certain sense constituted by this fracture, that is by this socio-cultural interval. Perhaps the sensibility to a theme such as biopolitics may be linked to this liminal condition of the border for biopolitics is also situated at the intersection between apparently different languages such as that of politics and life, of law and of anthropology.
«Immunitarian Democracy» (Translation by Timothy Campbell)
Does “community” refer to democracy? If not, could it or is it too deeply embedded in the conceptual lexicon of the Romantic, authoritarian and racist Right? This is the question, one already asked by American neo-communitarianism, that is emerging again in Europe at the precise moment when, some, especially in France and in Italy, are risking thinking community anew. At issue is not only a legitimate question, but in some ways even an inevitable one, in which democractic culture deeply examines its own theoretical precepts and future. This doesn’t change the fact though that it’s the wrong question or that it’s badly put. Wrong or badly put because it takes as its term of comparison — in order to be related to the category of community - a concept, that of democracy that is utterly incapable of “understanding” it, not only because its modern meaning at least, arrives much later, but also because it is flatter and increasingly overwhelmed in a dimension that is entirely political and institutional.
«Immunization and Violence» (Translation by Timothy Campbell)
In a text dedicated to Kant as interpreter of the Enlightenment, Michel Foucault locates the task of contemporary philosophy in a precise stance. It concerns that taut and acute relation with the present that he names the “ontology of the actual.” How are we to understand the phrase? What does it mean to situate philosophy in the point or on the line in which the actual is revealed in the density of its own historical being? What does an ontology of the actual mean, properly speaking? The expression alludes above all to a change in perspective with regard to ourselves. To be in relation ontologically with the actual means to think modernity no longer as an epoch between others, but as a stance, a posture, a will to see one’s own present as a task. There is in this choice, something — let’s call it a tension, an impulse — that Foucault will call an éthos, which moves even beyond the Hegelian definition of philosophy as the proper time spent in thought, because it makes of thought the lever that lifts the present out of a linear continuity with time, keeping it suspended between deciding what we are and what we can become. Already in the case of Kant his support of the Enlightenment didn’t signify only remaining faithful to certain ideas, affirming the autonomy of man, but above all in activating a permanent critique of the present, not abandoning it in favor of an unattainable utopia, but inverting the notion of the possible that is contained within it, making it the key for a different reading of reality.
Sun, 04/27/2008
Dear Friends:
It turns out Critical Inquiry has not given us—or not yet—permission to post Roberto Esposito’s essay “Totalitarianism or Biopolitics? Concerning a Philosophical Interpretation of the Twentieth Century” in Tim Campbell’s translation. They hold the publishing rights. As we wait for a final decision, or for the print publication of the essay, I thought perhaps giving an idea of its contents might be useful to generate conversation or discussion. My summary will be sui generis, always already interpretative. I don’t claim otherwise.
Is a biopolitical democracy possible?, Esposito asks at the end of his essay. His response is: “in order to begin thinking in this direction, all of the old philosophies of history and all the conceptual paradigms that refer to them must be dismantled.” Two tasks then: the first one is a labour of deconstruction or rather perhaps of simple destruction concerning the “old philosophies of history.” The second one is the labour of thinking about the possibility of a biopolitical democracy. Why are both of them linked?
Regarding the second task, Esposito tells us that the biopolitical shift “cannot be reversed” in a context in which “the onset of life into dispositifs of power marks the eclipse of democracy, at least democracy as we have imagined it up until now.” If Esposito is right—the biopolitical shift is now a fact of life itself—, then either we continue to have a political horizon which is based on power on bodies or we reverse it, still within the biopolitical, to an application of power in favor of bodies. It seems to me this is the nature of the political act in this essay: how to move—how to make others move—from power on bodies to power in favor of bodies. For Esposito, at least in this essay, this would seem to delimit the horizon of political practice today.
Why does this task call for a thorough dismantling of the “old philosophies of history”? Because the old philosophies of history could not even think the biopolitical. They were beholden to the pretense that philosophy and only philosophy could “impart an overarching sense to a series of facts that would otherwise be meaningless.” Which of course implies that history is posited as always already endowed with a philosophical content. Philosophy could be the form of history because history is pre-assumed to be the content of philosophy.
Nietzsche, Esposito claims, who is incidentally also the first thinker of the biopolitical, undid those philosophical claims irreversibly from the point of view of philosophy itself. The Nietzschean critique moves in a direction that tends to show that “the decisive events of contemporary history—world wars, the emergence of technology, globalization, and terrorism—are in themselves philosophical powers that struggle to control and dominate the world; for the conquest of the predominant interpretation of the world and therefore of its ultimate meaning.” The doctrine of the will to power, in other words, by generalizing power outside the narrow conception of subjective agency indebted to Cartesian philosophy, undoes philosophy’s pretense to mastery. But, I think it is implicit in Esposito’s argument, this also means that any pretense to mastery is also lost for economics, political science, or sociology. There is no mastery but the mastery of events as they occur. Facticity is mastery.
Esposito examines some of the presuppositions and aporias that great discourses in the classical tradition, now redefined as the “old” tradition, embody. Say, Arendt, whose book on the origins of totalitarianism posits Western history as the process of depoliticization unleashed by “the originary loss of the Greek polis. Here then all of subsequent history is condemned to a process of depoliticization, which is certain to merge with the antipolitical drift of totalitarianism.” There is therefore, for Arendt, a homogeneous logic of history that we could perhaps reverse, if we find our way back to an understanding of the practice of the political that could resuscitate the practices of the polis. Otherwise we’ll just have totalitarianism as the endpoint of depoliticization.
But, Esposito says, there is no homogeneous logic of history. There are only discontinuous events, “horizontal and vertical breaks.”
The crucial question is then something like “What happens when an ‘outside’—life—bursts into politics, thereby breaking apart its presumed autonomy, shifting discourse onto a terrain that is irreducible to traditional terms such as democracy, power, and ideology.”
Well, life has burst into politics—and the administration of life now consumes the political, Esposito claims. This fact—diagnosed by Foucault explicitly for the first time—makes the old philosophies of history obsolete, and with them any possible thought on the abstract and disembodied discourse of equality and representation that characterized the modern theory of democracy. How do we think today, the double process of the “historicization of nature and the naturalization of history”? There is no return to the old political lexicon, Esposito claims.
“If we stop ourselves from representing modernity as a historicist might; if we reject the idea of a chronological succession between liberal-democratic and totalitarian regimes in favor of a different genealogical or topological representation, we see that the correct and conceptually important distinction isn’t the vertical one between totalitarianism and liberal-democracy, but the horizontal and transversal one between democracy and communism on one side—communism as the paroxysmal fulfillment of egalitarian democracy—and biopolitics on the other. Biopolitics in turn breaks off into two antithetical but not unrelated forms: Nazism, the biopolitics of the state, and liberalism, the biopolitics of the individual.”
So, “democracy had already come to an end in the 1920s and 1930s. It is no longer capable of being reconstituted, let alone exported elsewhere.”
“If we consider only the recent example of Italy, where the laws that have chiefly involved the opinions of the public are those that concern highway security, immigration, artificial insemination, and bans on smoking and drugs, we can begin to measure the direction of this paradigm shift: the model of medical care has become not only the privileged object, but also the form itself of political life, which is to say a politics that finds its only basis of possible legitimacy in life.”
This is no longer democracy—it is and will remain outside it.
In that context, is it possible to move toward a new theorization of equality? What could citizenship be for a biopolitical democracy?
But—outside Esposito—what if biopolitical democracy is a contradiction in terms. What if there can and will be no biopolitical democracy? Where does that leave us?
Again, this is my own summary, I take full responsibility for it, including possible errors in my understanding of Esposito’s essay.
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