Debating Biopolitics: New Perspectives on the Government of Life [1 ed.] 1800887965, 9781800887961

Table of contents :
Front matter
Copyright
Contents
Contributors
Foreword
Introduction
PART I Genealogies
1. Subjectivity in Foucault and Agamben: the enigma of sovereignty and biopolitics
2. Fear, the sovereign, and authority: Roberto Esposito and the escape from the Hobbesian State
3. Governing according to nature: Jean Bodin on climates, humours, and temperaments
PART II Dimensions
4. Glenn Gould’s mastery of not-playing: style and manner in the work of Giorgio Agamben
5. Biopolitics of time in Foucault and Agamben
6. Identities on the border
PART III Practices
7. Governing by prevention: neoliberal management of sexual health in France
8. Biopolitics of authoritarianism. The case of Russia
9. Biopolitics, New Materialism and Latin-American constitutionalism: a linguistic encounter?
10. The two faces of biopolitical theory: genealogies and current approaches
Index

Citation preview

Debating Biopolitics

Debating Biopolitics

New Perspectives on the Government of Life

Edited by

Marco Piasentier Research Fellow in Political Science, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Jyväskylä, Finland

Sara Raimondi Assistant Professor in Politics and International Relations, Faculty of Politics and International Relations, New College of the Humanities at Northeastern, UK

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi 2022

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2022939163 This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781800887978

ISBN 978 1 80088 796 1 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80088 797 8 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents List of contributorsvii Forewordviii Mika Ojakangas and Sergei Prozorov Introduction1 Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi PART I

GENEALOGIES

1

Subjectivity in Foucault and Agamben: the enigma of sovereignty and biopolitics Sara Dragišić

12

2

Fear, the sovereign, and authority: Roberto Esposito and the escape from the Hobbesian State Vappu Helmisaari

30

3

Governing according to nature: Jean Bodin on climates, humours, and temperaments Samuel Lindholm

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PART II

DIMENSIONS

4

Glenn Gould’s mastery of not-playing: style and manner in the work of Giorgio Agamben Katarina Sjöblom

5

Biopolitics of time in Foucault and Agamben Jürgen Portschy

6

Identities on the border Ott Puumeister

68 86 109

v

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PART III PRACTICES 7

Governing by prevention: neoliberal management of sexual health in France Théo Sabadel

8

Biopolitics of authoritarianism. The case of Russia Anastasya Manuilova

9

Biopolitics, New Materialism and Latin-American constitutionalism: a linguistic encounter? Gonzalo Bustamante-Kuschel

171

10

The two faces of biopolitical theory: genealogies and current approaches Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi

193

129 151

Index211

Contributors Gonzalo Bustamante-Kuschel, Faculty of Liberal Arts, Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez, Chile. Sara Dragišić, Department of Political Science, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy. Vappu Helmisaari, The Finnish Youth Research Society, Helsinki, Finland. Samuel Lindholm, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Anastasya Manuilova, Kommersant newspaper, Moscow, Russia. Mika Ojakangas, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Marco Piasentier, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Jürgen Portschy, Department of Political Science, University of Vienna, Austria. Sergei Prozorov, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Ott Puumeister, Department of Semiotics, Institute of Philosophy and Semiotics, University of Tartu, Estonia. Sara Raimondi, Faculty of Politics and International Relations, New College of the Humanities at Northeastern, UK. Théo Sabadel, Institut d’Etudes Politiques, Sciences Po Lyon, France. Katarina Sjöblom, Department of Social Sciences and Philosophy, University of Jyväskylä, Finland.

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Foreword Mika Ojakangas and Sergei Prozorov The chapters in this volume are inspired by the conversations and debates stimulated by the repeated running of sections dedicated to studies on biopolitics at events organized by various international research organizations in the past decade. We organized the first section on biopolitics at the European International Studies Association (EISA) main gathering in Warsaw in 2013. Despite the relatively marginal status of biopolitics in the discipline of International Relations at the time, the event was very well attended, featured highly interesting discussions and established numerous new contacts and collaborations. We therefore decided to organize a similar section at the next EISA meeting in Sicily in 2015, which was again a success. Some of the papers presented during these occasions are featured in the Routledge Handbook on Biopolitics, edited by Sergei Prozorov with Simona Rentea and published in 2016. From 2016 onwards, we have organized the biopolitics section annually within the institutional framework of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR): Prague 2016, Oslo 2017, Hamburg 2018, Wroclaw 2019. The move from EISA to ECPR was partly motivated by the fact that our interest in biopolitics quickly moved beyond the studies of biopolitical governance in various global, international or regional contexts, and towards a more in-depth investigation of the very concept of biopolitics in the context of both the history of political thought and contemporary political theory. While biopolitics arguably has an even more marginal status in mainstream political science than in International Relations, the conversations and research we hosted in our sections have received a lot of interest from scholars working in the fields of political theory, conceptual history and governance studies. The latest of our sections so far took place online in September 2020 due to the coronavirus pandemic, which obviously brought the questions addressed in the research on biopolitics to the forefront of debates in social sciences. Yet, somewhat less obviously, the pandemic exposed numerous connections between the more narrowly ‘biopolitical’ theme of public health policy and the more traditional concerns of political science. Besides being obviously biopolitical in taking life, body or health as its objects, the governance of the pandemic also raised questions of freedom and equality, community and viii

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solidarity, truth and justice, which are constitutive of any recognizable idea of politics. The pandemic did not merely make painfully clear the belonging of the host of issues united under the ‘bio-’ rubric to politics, but also exposed them as the site where the fundamental questions of our politics are posed, decided and contested. If COVID-19 was not enough (and it certainly was), the rapidly worsening climate crisis offers yet another demonstration of the co-belonging of life and politics, as the continuation of our life on Earth becomes contingent on political decisions, which, in turn, will affect our very forms of life in their minute detail of diet, consumption, transportation, etc. The future of politics, if politics is indeed to have a future, cannot but be biopolitical. And yet, this prominence of the biopolitical risks its increasing ambiguity, which is the fate of all central or foundational concepts. ‘Everything is biopolitical’ would sound just as hollow as ‘everything is political’. The awareness of the centrality of biopolitics in contemporary politics must therefore be accompanied by a more rigorous analysis of biopolitics as a theoretical concept, which both amplifies its explanatory power and illuminates its limits. This analysis has become ever more prominent in our sections and many of the chapters in this volume exemplify this approach to biopolitics. The first step in the development of this approach pertains to expanding and deepening the research on the history of biopolitics. After all, the history of biopolitics was the very steppingstone of the entire project of biopolitics initiated by Foucault. One of the assumptions of Foucault’s genealogies was that we cannot know contemporary phenomena without knowing the history of their lineage. If biopolitics is the prevailing paradigm of politics in modernity, how and under what circumstances did it emerge and evolve into its present glory? Foucault outlined an analytical framework for the history of the present biopolitical paradigm, but the history itself is still by and large an unwritten chapter. One of our aims in the section has been to continue the path Foucault opened. At the same time, we have acknowledged that Foucault’s historical work on biopolitics was interrupted and that, in the end, it only scratched the surface. Many of Foucault’s claims about the history of biopolitics have also been seriously challenged. Is biopolitics just a modern phenomenon or does it have a longer history? For example, are Plato’s eugenic programmes already biopolitical? Is Christian shepherd ethics at the origins of biopolitics, as Foucault suggests, or did the victory of Christianity mean a decay of biopolitics? We have sought answers to these and many other related questions by looking at biopolitics in different eras and in different geographical contexts, from Greek Antiquity to Soviet socialism. What seems to be clear, however, is that the history of biopolitics cannot be reduced to the conceptual history that would focus only on the use of the term

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‘biopolitics’ in different historical and geographical contexts. ‘Biopolitics’ – unlike ‘state,’ ‘citizen’ or ‘democracy’ – is primarily an analytical umbrella concept created by a researcher, rather than an object of inquiry in its own right. To be sure, the term ‘biopolitics’ has its own history. It was coined by Rudolf Kjellén who, in his Stormakterna (1905), studied conflicts between states and other social groups from a biological perspective, naming his approach ‘biopolitics’. Yet the history of the term is not identical to the history of biopolitics, though it may be a part of it. And to the extent that the history of biopolitics does not dovetail with the history of the term, the semantic scope of the concept must be under constant review. This leads us to what is perhaps one of the most interesting and vibrant debates in this field, which pertains to the relation of biopolitics to other forms or modalities of power: does biopolitics exist alongside other forms of power that may then be termed non-biopolitical in a meaningful way, or does it rather invest all other forms so that there is nothing that is, in a strict sense, outside the biopolitical? It is easy to recognize in these possible answers the two most influential theoretical approaches to biopolitics, developed respectively by Foucault and Agamben. While the Foucauldian approach develops the concept of biopolitics by contrasting it explicitly with sovereign power (and more implicitly with disciplinary power), Agamben’s attempt in the Homo Sacer series to ‘complete or correct’ Foucault proceeds in the diametrically opposed manner, eschewing all contrasts or distinctions in the affirmation of a radical and originary indistinction of sovereign and bio-power. While there are many advantages and disadvantages to both positions, what is crucial for our purposes is that only the former approach is capable of registering forms of power devoid of biopolitical rationality, while the latter will necessarily find the manifestations of the originary indistinction wherever it looks. This is why the Foucauldian approach has arguably been more successful in its diagnostic function than the Agambenian one, whose questionable value for the analysis of current events was demonstrated in Agamben’s controversial coronavirus commentary. And yet, the debate between these positions is far from settled, since Agamben’s approach retains and will possibly even increase its attraction in light of the ongoing climate crisis and attendant global problems that do indeed create the impression of there no longer being an outside to biopolitics, even as biopower might well find itself facing its own limits. This brings us to the third possible approach to biopolitics that has been largely implicit in the discussion, since it ultimately targets the very concepts addressed in it. In his riposte to Roberto Esposito’s comments on the coronavirus, Jean-Luc Nancy said: ‘neither “biology” nor “politics” are precisely determined terms today. I would actually say the contrary. That’s why I have no use

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for their assemblage.’1 This is perhaps the strongest objection to the concept of biopolitics. If we do not know either what biology is or what politics is, then what do we gain by putting them together except for a compound obfuscation of the meaning of both concepts? This objection is further fortified by Nancy’s own development of an entire philosophical vocabulary to describe the coexistence of bodies as incommensurable singular-plural beings, which resonates strongly with the debates within the studies of biopolitics about its possible ‘affirmative’ declension. Is affirmative biopolitics still a biopolitics, or is this assemblage altogether inappropriate a term for the forms of coexistence suggested by it? Nancy’s sustained scepticism about the concept of biopolitics does not merely serve as a reminder about the possible limits to the explanatory power of our fundamental concepts, but also as an invitation to a continuous conceptual and terminological experimentation. Perhaps, the imprecise determination of ‘biology’ and ‘politics’ could be mended by something like a co-determination in their very mutual entanglement. This is the approach we have sought to practice and promote in the sections on biopolitics since 2013. Rather than attempting to enclose biopolitics as a specialized field somewhere on the margins of the disciplines of political science or international relations, we have encouraged contributions that seek to dis-enclose this field, letting its problematics spill over into and all over these disciplinary discourses in order to produce new (co)determinations of life and politics. The chapters presented in this volume practice this dis-enclosure in a variety of ways. They offer the reader a sample of the ongoing conversation that we hope will continue to generate new perspectives on the politics of life. Jyväskylä and Verona October 2021

Jean Luc Nancy, ‘Riposte by Jean-Luc Nancy to Roberto Esposito’, European Journal of Psychoanalysis  . 1

Introduction Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi This edited volume springs out of the theoretical and practical urge to reflect on some key and promising debates that have crossed the ever-expanding field of biopolitical studies in the past few years. As anticipated by Mika Ojakangas and Sergei Prozorov in the Foreword to the volume, the factual occasion for the conversations that lie at the basis of the volume has been offered by the years of running the Biopolitics Section at the regular events organised under the umbrella initiatives of the European Consortium of Political Research (ECPR) and other international research bodies. This springboard has been the source of further meetings, networking and stimulating discussions, which have driven the wish, shared by the editors and the contributors to this volume alike, to record the prolific encounters that emerged from this platform, in order to address the question of what it means to debate biopolitics today. As a matter of fact, the very running of so many events concerned with the topic in recent years is itself the expression of the ongoing developments that the field of biopolitics, understood both in its academic framings and practical applications, is witnessing. These developments are partially driven by expansions, advancements and reconsiderations grown internally to the field itself, and partially by the need to respond to and meaningfully engage with the interrogations and pressures that come from outside the domain of biopolitical scholarship, both in cognate disciplinary areas and, crucially, in current events on the terrain of practices. Current political dynamics globally and new developments in the field have demanded a reconsideration and expansion of biopolitical studies in order to equip them to the analysis of the present. Biopolitical scholarship, in other words, is now forced to look back upon itself. Since Michel Foucault’s reformulation in the 1970s, biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used concepts in the humanities and social sciences. Over the past years, many scholars have insisted that while the work of Foucault is certainly worthy of the highest consideration, it nonetheless needs to be expanded and updated, thus taking into account a wider range of historical data and theoretical issues. This volume aims at contributing to this growing body of scholarship by combining enquiries into the very foundations of the biopolitical canon with an experimental attitude aimed at unlocking the hermeneutical potential of these approaches in two complementary directions. 1

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The first one has a theoretical character and seeks to show the importance of biopolitical theory to elaborate new and original interpretations of classical political thinkers and key philosophical notions. The second one is empirical in nature and aspires to enrich the body of texts and materials which constitute the current biopolitical archive. By analysing at length some issues lying at the core of contemporary governmental practices, these empirical enquiries demonstrate the relevance of biopolitics for the understanding of our societies. Instead of privileging the theoretical or the empirical side of this field of study, the current volume finds its specificity and strength in a virtuous and scrupulous entanglement of these two dimensions, which no longer constitute the poles of a divide between theoretical humanities and empirical social sciences, but are the two pillars of an interdisciplinary approach to biopolitical studies. This project remains faithful to Foucault’s original research approach, which was founded on a conceptual toolbox grounded on a solid theoretical basis, but aimed at enquiring into societal discourses and practices. With these premises, the collection identifies three main axes of analysis: the genealogies, dimensions, and practices of biopolitics. Part I of the volume, ‘Genealogies’, acquires a theoretical garment in simultaneously exploring and expanding the list of figures that have chiefly contributed to the development of the biopolitical corpus. It pursues two lines of enquiry. On the one hand, the chapters in the section provide thoughtful and original readings of some of the most important biopolitical thinkers – such as Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito – around core political problematics of subjectivity, agency and political praxis. On the other hand, they build cases for introducing classic modern thinkers, such as Jean Bodin and Thomas Hobbes, in the current canon of biopolitics through a rereading of traditional biopolitical topoi such as questions of governing of populations and conducts, community and sovereignty. Chapter 1 by Sara Dragišić opens the volume by comparing and contrasting Foucault’s and Agamben’s conceptions of biopolitics. Dragišić focuses especially on the question of political subjectivity in the two thinkers, and shows how the two authors take very different paths to shed light on what Roberto Esposito has defined the ‘enigma of biopolitics’. The understanding of subjectivity in the two thinkers, Dragišić demonstrates, is fundamentally linked to their respective view of politics, and, crucially, to the way they historically and conceptually articulate the relationship between biopolitics and sovereignty, as two distinct regimes of political power. If Foucault describes the transition from the juridical understanding of the subject under sovereignty to the emergence of homo oeconomicus in biopolitics, Agamben takes sovereignty (and its inextricable relation to bare life) as the basis to understand biopolitical manifestations from the very beginning of political thought. However, as Dragišić demonstrates, Agamben’s paradigm leads him to imagine a political future of

Introduction

3

a non-community of desubjectivised individuals, which is taken as the only escape from the author’s sovereignist understanding of political power. In contrast, Foucault’s critique of modern political thought leaves open a space for the ethical subject to be redefined and freed from the depoliticised direction of political economy, thus envisioning the possibility for a new (political) subjectivity. Despite acknowledging the fundamental contribution of both authors to the development of current biopolitical studies, Dragišić argues that Foucault’s genealogy is more convincing in providing a more in-depth understanding of the texts, materials and historical data that constitute the ‘archive’ of modern biopolitical practices and discourses. In Chapter 2, the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics is also the topic of Vappu Helmisaari’s contribution on fear and authority in Roberto Esposito’s reading of Hobbes. Whereas Dragišić focuses on the contemporary dimension of biopolitics, Helmisaari enquires about the origin of the modern politics of life in the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, which she interprets in light of Esposito’s paradigm of immunisation. Esposito, Helmisaari argues, challenges the reality of Hobbes’s state of nature as a state of war, which itself mobilises key questions around nature, power and, crucially, community: Hobbes sees the state of nature as a fiction that legitimates the breaking of the community which, for Esposito, is based on the mutual exchange of gifts; the result, according to Esposito, is Hobbes’s emphasis on the covenant and institutions as necessary to the constitution of the social body. Running through the metaphor that equates the human body’s immune system and the state, Helmisaari challenges Hobbes’s immunitarian strategy. Esposito puts into question both war-like descriptions of immunity and the Hobbesian state based on the threat of civil war. In conclusion, and in line with Esposito, the chapter argues for a different conception of community beyond the self-destructive excess of Hobbes’s political immunisation and fear, and based on the notion of the gift as the foundation of people’s common life. In Chapter 3, Samuel Lindholm further complicates and enriches the genealogy of the modern politics of life by introducing a new author in the canon of current biopolitical theory, and stretching the latter’s boundaries even before Hobbes: the Angevin 16th-century thinker Jean Bodin. According to Lindholm, Bodin’s climate theory has an intrinsic (bio)political meaning, long before climate change became a question of fundamental political relevance. Lindholm explores the way in which Bodin established the relationship between the climate, and the environment in general, and human behaviour. Even though Bodin’s theory was based largely on ancient and mediaeval disciplines and knowledge, its importance lies in the way it relates to explicitly political questions: Bodin argues that the ideal form of commonwealth varies according to its location and, by so doing, he sets the premises for a biopolitical government that has to rule according to nature. Through an excursus that

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runs through the precursors of climate theory before Bodin, Lindholm’s piece invites us to look afresh at biopolitics’ debated history. If Bodin’s political thought can be ascribed a distinct biopolitical element, which coincides with the author’s interest in the governing of physical bodies in order to achieve an optimized society, it might then be necessary to reconsider the boundaries of the more traditional trajectory that situates the origin of biopolitics in a much later period coinciding with Michel Foucault. Altogether, the three chapters that constitute Part I of the volume question and, potentially, challenge the temporal situating of key developments in the history of biopolitical theory and its complex lineages. They remind us that not only current advancements in biopolitics have moved beyond Foucault’s lesson and seminal analysis, but also that the discussion of its earlier influences, ramifications and pre-modern manifestations remain far from settled. Part II, ‘Dimensions’, complements the genealogical enquiry that is the focus of Part I by investigating another axis of current expansions of the biopolitical literature: not only its historical depth, but its conceptual and theoretical width and breadth. Part II is concerned with new dimensions of research that are springing up from more recent advancements in biopolitical studies, by looking at the relationship between government and life through questions of temporality, potentiality and borders. The authors in Part II convincingly argue that such topics lend themselves to an enquiry in biopolitical terms and should thus receive further theoretical attention. The contributions show how the study of the current politics of life leads us to reimagine classic concepts in political studies and continental philosophy, by rethinking the neoliberal transformation of dominant time-regimes in Western societies; the potentiality of political action to create alternative forms of life through both art and politics; and the complex bordering and securitizing practices produced by biopolitical forms of global governance that sit at the core of the understanding of ‘identity’. The section also opens up new synergies and connections with other theoretical fields and approaches, such as critical time studies, semiotic anthropology, the arts and subaltern studies, whose link to biopolitics still remains underdeveloped. In Chapter 4, Katarina Sjöblom resorts to the thought of Giorgio Agamben on the question of (im)potentiality to shed light on the essence of artistic creation and the importance of this notion to subvert existing political paradigms beyond mainstream understandings of political action in the Western tradition. To this end, Sjöblom addresses the concepts of style and manner in the works of Agamben, by paying particular attention to his analysis of Glenn Gould’s mannerism. By clarifying one of the most enigmatic instances in Agamben’s thought, namely the idea that Glenn Gould plays with his potentiality not to play, Sjöblom unlocks a conception of potentiality whose theoretical relevance goes beyond aesthetic practices and puts the relationship between possibility

Introduction

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and reality in an altogether new light. Transcending the analysis of artistic forms, Sjöblom demonstrates that Agamben’s idea of the dynamic between style and manner is already present in the entire field of politics, from popular pressures on governmental outcomes to the strategizing of one’s identity, through an analysis that runs from Hannah Arendt to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Ultimately, the idea of manner, as offered in the chapter’s reading of Agamben, can lead to new, distinctive ways of doing politics, which envision the possibility of resistance internal to the act and to the established apparatus of existent norms, structures and traditions. The relationship between potentiality and actuality is deeply connected to the question of time. The analysis of this latter topic, however, has not received sufficient attention in biopolitical theory. In Chapter 5, Jürgen Portschy addresses this gap by enquiring into the temporal dimensions of the government of the living in the 21st century. Portschy devises a theoretical framework that is a combination of the philosophical work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, whom Portschy sets in dialogue also with voices from critical time and queer studies, such as Elizabeth Feeman. Portschy follows the distinction between chronos and kairos time-forms borrowed from the Greek world to explore the intersecting and yet different understandings of time – and their relations to the (bio)political regimes that they subtend – in the two authors. By applying the notion of apparatus and technologies of power to the question of time, and despite the different conclusions of Foucault and Agamben, Portschy comes to a diagnosis of the dominant time-regimes in the West as defined by the hegemonic role of a ‘neoliberal presentism’ in current society. The latter is grounded on the normative character that the singular moment holds in contemporary neoliberalism, which stands at the centre of the government of the living. Thus, Portschy maintains, a critical approach towards the normativity of time confronts social and political theory with huge challenges: a critique of a politics of time needs to accompany the analysis of any politics of life in the strive towards a new emancipatory notion of temporality and, thus, a different way to act (bio) politically. Part II ends with a chapter that also puts the question of border at the centre, this time, however, not the temporal one of our ontology of actuality but understood in both its semiotic and most material sense. In Chapter 6, Ott Puumeister explores the question of the border from a theoretical and historico-sociological perspective, with the aim of contributing to a critical approach that moves beyond identitarian understandings of politics. Puumeister shows how, far from acting as a boundary or a constraint, the border – understood in its theoretical, anthropological and semiotic functioning – is a necessary condition of possibility for the existence of cultural identities. This does not mean that the border has to be interpreted as a static and fixed entity, but rather

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as a site where dialogue across cultures and constant negotiation of ideas of self-otherness become possible, thanks to the border’s constitutive uncertainty. Yet, contemporary securitizing practices and policies have turned the border into a space that works to identify, classify and crystallise peoples and identities, thus reproducing an insecurity that is capitalised on by governmental logics. Drawing on, and yet distancing from, the works of Agamben and other critical theories across anthropology and semiotic studies, Puumeister challenges the securitized conception of the border and opens up an horizon of resistance to power that has the border as its own condition of possibility. The questions of borders, spaces and dimensions of the biopolitical experience and its subjects paves the way to an enquiry into the practical manifestations of biopolitical logics and their empirical and more tangible applications. From securitization practices to alternative forms of effecting political action: biopolitics does not exist either primarily nor purely in an abstract sphere of conceptual exercise and theorizing, but, as Foucault himself made fundamental to his approach of enquiry, can be studied and understood only through the close observation of the actual manifestations of techniques and rationales of governing at any specific time. Part III of the volume, ‘Practices’, focuses on the ways in which contemporary biopolitical rationalities redefine the traditional sovereign-territorial logics in their actual and concrete manifestations through institutions, measures and power dispositifs. The chapters in this Part build on and fulfil Foucault’s original coordinates to approach biopolitics from two directions. First, they break open the link between biopolitics understood as a theoretical and conceptual framework of analysis and the empirical examples that continue to fuel studies in this area. Biopolitics is and requires an attention to the actual plane of discourses and practices understood not in the abstract, but rather through the historical arrangements and configurations of power and knowledge and their effects on populations and societies. Second, the shift described by Foucault – from the ancient right to take life or let live to a power aimed at fostering life or disallowing it to the point of death – is here tested and displayed in its global dimension, giving shape to different forms of biopolitical rationalities all over the world. From the analysis of sexual prevention policies, to the comparison of the role of the population across types of political regimes, to the linguistic analysis of constitutional forms and their relations to forms of life: these chapters address concrete aspects of biopolitical governance in Europe, Russia and South America by performing empirically detailed studies. The breadth and variety of the geographical realities represented in the chapters manifest not only the wide and, at the same time, specific and localized applicability of biopolitics, neoliberalism and governmentality as frameworks for empirical analysis. They also stand as a proof of the increasing interest in biopolitical studies across regions and contexts, and for academics and practitioners alike.

Introduction

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In Chapter 7, Théo Sabadel offers a compelling analysis of trends in HIV/ AIDS and STD prevention strategies that are part of the current French national sexual health measures and policy agenda. Through a look at the prevention campaigns carried out in the last decade, Sabadel analyzes a shift towards a diversified approach in prevention schemes registered since 2015 onwards. The more recent prevention schemes, Sabadel argues, are an example of what Foucault in 1979 describes as a new paradigm of governmentality based on a rationalisation of practices aimed at the ‘conduct of conducts’ of the subjects targeted by the measures. More specifically, these governmental logics operate through two combined lines of action aimed simultaneously at shaping the environment through which to indirectly influence conducts at distance and, connectedly, the creation of a neoliberal subject that is proactive and adaptable, and exercises their freedom within the public policy framework of sexual health. Both pulls, Sabadel demonstrates, can be read and grasped through the genealogy of neoliberal practices that Foucault sees as ushering from the joint experience of the US and German ordoliberalism in his lectures. Through the governmental regulation of the environment, or milieu, neoliberal governmentality does not result in a formal loss of freedom, but promotes a framework of action in which individuals are free to make their choices. The chapter, thus, invites a reflection on the neoliberal drivers that define policy choices and strategies in the field of sexual health in particular; at the same time, it offers a novel interpretation and addition to a large body of studies that have looked at public and health policies through a biopolitical lens as an ongoing, and yet still preeminent, area of analysis. If governmentality and its expressions through neoliberal rationales can be seen to inform public measures and governmental practices that are at the forefront of national policies in areas such as health, we should be wary of taking this model as ubiquitous and as universally applicable across contexts and political systems. In Chapter 8, Anastasya Manuilova tests the suitability of the biopolitical paradigm introduced by Foucault and his understandings of dispositifs of power to explain the ‘mentalities of governing’ of different political regimes. If biopolitics and governmentality have proven both theoretically and historically apt to an analysis of both liberal and totalitarian regimes, the same cannot be said about the cases of authoritarian political systems, which entertain a different relation with configuration of power and the effects on their population. Through a close study of the case of contemporary Russia taken as an example of authoritarian regime, Manuilova demonstrates how the latter less easily lends itself to an analysis in biopolitical terms; on the contrary, the traditional paradigm of sovereign power, based more on direct restrictions than on environmental regulation, still remains more pertinent to the functioning of a regime where the population is regarded as secondary to the territory of the country and to its natural resources. By entering into the discussion of political

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regime types, the chapter is also a testimonial to how studies of biopolitics can meaningfully engage and complement enquiries in political sciences and speak with the seminal works of the field. Similarly tackling the limits of the biopolitical paradigm and its applicability to the study of practices, the chapters in Part III also remind us of the context-specific, if not parochial, intellectual and ontological assumption on which the biopolitical canon, and its understanding of ‘life’ specifically, relies. In Chapter 9, Gonzalo Bustamante-Kuschel opens up the analysis of (bio)political understandings of life beyond the Eurocentric assumptions and focus that permeate this framing both in its intellectual roots and in its objects of study. As Bustamante-Kurshel shows through an engagement with Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Aristotle, even key biopolitical authors seem unable to problematize a distinction between human and non-human forms of life that can escape binary understandings. To this end, the chapter looks at recent developments within the field of New Materialisms, that, in the last decades, have aspired to offer an ontological paradigm that postulates an understanding of reality not mediated by language and based on the relationality and entanglement of living and non-living being. New Materialism, with its rejection of the omnipresence of discourse, Bustamante-Kuschel argues, seems better equipped to grasp non-Eurocentric constitutional texts, such as the Bolivian and Ecuadorian ones, that imply an affirmative, de-anthropologised, biopolitical proposal regarding the existence of life itself. The Latin American constitutional forms, founded on the principles of sumak kawsay and suma qamaña, can offer a wider understanding of the idea of ‘good life’ centred exclusively on a human dimension that grounds the Aristotelian understanding of politics, and which lies at the foundation of Western thought. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the incompatibility between New Materialism and an understanding of reality as constituted through language exists only to the extent to which language is understood Eurocentrically. The culmination of the analysis in these last chapters completes and, somehow, circuits back from the level of practices to the levels of dimensions and genealogies previously analysed: not only implying the opening of new or old but renewed dimensions of biopolitical studies (as seen here, from sexual and public health, to minority ad group rights, to migration and, crucially, to the question of non-human forms of life and the relation with the environment) that are found at the forefront of discussions in public discourse, global political agendas and academic developments alike. The ramifications here explored ask us to confront again the question of the history and genealogies of biopolitical thought and its relation, intersection and dialogue with other disciplinary fields (political science, legal studies, public administration, to mention a few), as well as to confront the very assumptions that set out the roots of biopolitical studies since their incipit (the above reference to Aristotle’s politics being

Introduction

9

another clear example). The challenge around the definition of what counts as the legitimate terrain for biopolitical analysis, then, starts again. As it might appear clear by now, the aim of the present book is not to provide a definitive answer or close down the dialogue around what defines ‘biopolitics’. Rather, it is an attempt at recognizing that biopolitics remains an open-ended field of investigation in discussing the entering of biology and life in its multiple forms within techniques and rationales of governing. It is our goal to intimate that the non-conclusive character that emerges out of these specialised enquiries when they are taken together to form a wider picture could even be desirable. Put differently, ongoing tensions within the field and across its multiple levels of operating are not to be repressed or urgently resolved, lest precluding the possibility for this field of study to respond to the actual manifestations, emerging practices and theoretical advancements that it tries to describe. As Prozorov and Ojakangas have pointed out in the Foreword, this does not mean arguing for the omni-pervasive character of biopolitics – as capable of absorbing in itself any emerging question or problematic – either. This would contradict the very initial remarks that Foucault has sown, and that maintain a deeply methodological character: claiming the universality of the explanatory power of biopolitics would mean risking saturating and totalising the space of understanding in a theoretical abstraction that is detached from empirical reality and from historical arrangements. The line of this book is rather to maintain the potential productivity generated by the tensions encountered in the biopolitical corpus, which provide not an impasse, but an input to further developments. To this end, Chapter 10 resumes the discussion of the ambivalent and rich genealogies that have crossed the developments of biopolitical thought. In Chapter 10, the editors Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi start from a further, constitutive tension that is seen to pertain to developments in biopolitics in the last decades, and especially to the contested legacy ushered in the wake of Foucault’s work. The authors point out how Foucault himself simultaneously implied two approaches in answering the problem of the relation between politics and biological life: one putting emphasis on discourses and on the regimes of power that control, manage and take hold of life – and with an impact on the shaping of subjectivity and the definition of biological life as a discursive invention produced by specific political ‘apparatuses’. On the other hand, Foucault seems to allude to a more original, naturalist understanding of life that escapes and exceeds the capacity of discursive control of power and is permeated by its own, vital force. In this light, the chapter identifies two trajectories: a historico-discursive strand and a naturalist-vitalist strand that structure the landscape of the discussion of biopolitics in the field of Foucauldian studies and critical theory. The chapter delves into the exploration of these two lineages by recuperating the references to thinkers

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that have historically influenced Foucault’s work, as well as contemporary thinkers that have taken on the author’s initial work in each direction. If the historico-discursive strand runs through Foucault’s reading of Kant and the historical a priori, the naturalist-vitalist strand identifies the precursor of this understanding in George Canguilhem. Analogously, while Giorgio Agamben can be regarded as the principal heir of the first tradition with his theorization of the relationship between sovereign power and bare life, it is Roberto Esposito who builds on the idea of the affective capacity of life for imagining new ways of being-in-common in order to define his own brand of (vitalist) biopolitics. Whilst acknowledging that these contrasting perspectives can indeed create an ambiguity within the biopolitical corpus and its current developments, Chapter 10 concludes by arguing that, far from being a weakness, this internal tension is an important asset for biopolitical scholarship today. The pluralism from which these tensions stem allow for the enlargement of the methodological and theoretical toolbox with which biopolitics, as a framework of understanding, can respond to some of the most urgent challenges and questions of the present. This apparent lack of conclusion is a statement to the ethos of enquiry pursued throughout the whole volume: the chapters in this collection do not aspire to any exhaustive or final word; rather, they invite an appreciation of the dynamic and ever-evolving character of explorations within the biopolitical field – if the latter aspires to remain grounded in actual historical manifestations – whilst carrying a broader theoretical breath: this makes ‘debating’ biopolitics simultaneously a highly timely and timeless endeavour.

PART I

Genealogies

1. Subjectivity in Foucault and Agamben: the enigma of sovereignty and biopolitics Sara Dragišić What does biopolitics mean for contemporary political thought, and what could be defined as contemporary biopolitical phenomena? The importance of the notion and discourse of biopolitics for modern political thought has been largely brought to the fore by the work of Michel Foucault, as well as other well-known names of the so-called Italian theory, such as Giorgio Agamben. In this chapter, we will deal with Foucault’s and Agamben’s accounts of biopolitics, by looking at their analysis of the relation between sovereignty and biopolitics. The first part of the chapter will tackle Foucault’s analysis of political economy, focusing on the emergence of homo oeconomicus and the importance of the relation between juridical, economic and ethical subject for understanding his political views. Given the disunity of his work and the multiplicity of open questions he raised in his analysis, we limit ourselves to looking at the author’s engagement with subjectivity from his biopolitical perspective. The second part of the chapter will be dedicated to Agamben and the reception of Foucault in his biopolitical theory. His post-Foucauldian explanation of the development of biopolitics will show that the difference in understanding the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics by the two authors is key to grasping what their respective theories can offer around the issue of subjectivity. We will also seek to show that, although Agamben manages to locate numerous inconsistencies in contemporary politics, his insistence on a new ethics, non-subject and post-political community prevents him from recognizing the prevalence of certain biopolitical practices and thus to offer a basis for a new political subjectivity.

BIOPOWER AND POLITICAL ECONOMY IN FOUCAULT … my own problem has always been the question of truth, of telling the truth, the wahr-sagen – what it is to tell the truth – and the relation between ‘telling the truth’ and forms of reflexivity, of self upon self. (Foucault, 1990, pp. 32–33) 12

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The practices and techniques that, in the modern era, make life integral to the mechanisms of state power (the ‘inclusion of zoē in the polis’, according to Agamben, 1998, p. 6) led Foucault to investigate how the territorial state turned into a state focused on the population, thus turning politics into biopolitics. The transition from disciplinary to control and surveillance societies was marked by a new rationality inscribed into the art of governing that was incarnated by the principle of governing for maximum efficiency. While in disciplinary societies, power was related primarily to institutions and focused on the individual, this transformation integrated subjective techniques of individualization and objective procedures of totalization to an unprecedented extent. The anatomic and biological nature of ‘this great bipolar technology’ is primarily concerned with the body and focuses on the processes related to life (Foucault, 1978, p. 139). The new reality in which life is politicized and the body is instrumentalized is produced through ‘a major mutation, undoubtedly one of the most important in the history of human societies’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 369). The power over life is no longer presented as the right to kill, but as the investment into life, guided by the principle of caring for all and each one individually. Such control acts simultaneously on the body and life, so that biopower is exercised over the individual from the one side, and over the population on the other side (Foucault, 2003, p. 253). With the advent of homo oeconomicus in the 18th century, the market takes the place of truth and becomes a real challenge to the traditional conception of sovereignty. In the neoliberal society, the self-sufficiency and predominance of the economy result in the separation of the political and economic spheres. The processes of normalization of citizens are carried out through a strong emphasis on individualistic rhetoric, by affirming a mode of governance based on individualization. In a society defined by market relations, the biopolitical appears precisely as the opposition to the political, because the triumph of the economy leads to the depoliticization of politics. The market is beyond the reach of sovereign power because it does not deal with the legitimization of political sovereignty. A technical form of governance is a priority of liberalism, whereby the main aim is to limit state power against state benefit, by means of legal restrictions. The principle of benefit determines the criteria of state action, which becomes utilitarian. Liberalism does not start from the idea of a political society based on a contractual relationship, as it appears in Rousseau’s theory. The effects of state intervention are defined in terms of failure and success, and no longer in terms of legitimacy and illegitimacy. The two approaches present in Foucault are two conceptions of law – utilitarian and revolutionary. These are two conceptions that are not mutually exclusive, even though they have a different origin and imply two heterogeneous procedures of action, which themselves establish two conceptions of freedom (freedom for and freedom from). The relationship of these two approaches in

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Foucault will prove to be very important for his understanding of sovereignty and biopolitics. Foucault’s genealogy of biopolitics is constantly permeated by a focus on binarism, in speaking of binary structure of a society, binary perception, binary rift within society, binary schema, a binary mechanism ‘that puts the seal of war on the entire social body’, binary relationship and confrontations, binary logic of war (Foucault, 2003, pp. 61, 74, 109, 159). His critique is directed toward binary oppositions and, in particular, towards biopolitics as a new form of governance based on a binary structure. ‘The logic of strategy’, as Foucault calls it, determines the possible connections between disparate concepts such as the two directions of utilitarian and revolutionary law. The decisive direction in the development of Western societies is the action that proceeds from the bottom, defining the legal limitation of state power: ‘Consequently, this problem of utility – of individual and collective utility, the utility of each and all, the utility of individuals and the general utility – will be the major criteria for working out the limits of the powers of public authorities and the formation of a form of public law and administrative law’ (Foucault, 2003, pp. 43–44). The power that Foucault speaks of invests in different forms of life and is reflected precisely in investing in the potentiality of life. Juridical sovereignty, strongly bound and conditioned by the legal and political order, stands in opposition to biopolitics, which uses the body as an instrument in the service of politics. That is the reason why politics in liberalism appears as biopolitics, because with the use of new governing techniques, the body and life are instrumentalized and materialized in a completely new way. The political critique of knowledge differs from various critiques of European rationality in that it seeks to shed light on the conditions under which the regime of truth occurs. The relationship between the economics of discourse of truth on the one side and power on the other is such that the production of truth in our society is a prerequisite for the exercise of power. Sexuality and madness have become a matter of knowledge, as liberal society produces a discourse of truth within institutions like clinics, prisons and schools, where knowledge, power and the body intersect. This shows the transformation of governance techniques, from the sovereign power of the king to the various fields of scientific knowledge, which create different new practices in relation to the body and life. It is a question of a new political rationality of the biopolitical, which is characterized not by legal procedures, but by state practices, guided by a utilitarian principle. If biopolitics appears as the depoliticization of politics, then, how does Foucault understand politics itself? What is it that is depoliticized in the political for politics to become biopolitics? To answer these questions would mean to analyse Foucault’s genealogy of biopolitics in a way that unravels his understandings of rationality, mind, and discourse itself, and thus of politics and the political.

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Foucault designates sovereignty as the power to kill and let live and biopolitics as the power to give life and let die (Foucault, 2003, p. 241). At this point, we see the transition from the body of the individual to the population, from the power of control to regulation. Modern forms of power in most cases represent the realization of both moments, such as we find in Nazism, where control and biological regulation are co-present. The question that arises is then: what is the position of sovereignty? What is Foucault’s attitude towards philosophical and legal thinking, if biopolitics for him appears not through the regulation and codification of ‘logic of right and sovereignty, [but] as the strategic and warlike logic of struggle’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 281)? In what way is the discourse of biopolitics based on the instrumentalization of knowledge opposed to juridical age? Foucault says that ‘this may well be the first exclusively historico-political discourse – as opposed to a philosophico-juridical discourse – to emerge in the West; it is a discourse in which truth functions exclusively as a weapon that is used to win an exclusively partisan victory’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 57). Two lines of thought seem to derive from Foucault’s overall analysis: one, which opposes the utilitarian path to the revolutionary, and the other, which underlines the difference between philosophy and law, on the one hand, and the emergence of political economy, on the other. The idea of human rights and the idea of sovereignty are based on law, while the practices, skills, and techniques of governance in liberalism derive from the new economy of state reason. In this sense, revolutionary discourse is associated with the concept of public law, while the utilitarian approach to state practices is reflected in the criterion of state competencies, where legitimization gives way to the principle of benefit. By opposing sovereignty to biopolitics and portraying the king as powerless before a market he cannot touch, Foucault argues that sovereignty is not indispensable in the articulation of political relations. Sovereignty and biopower are incommensurable, but the question remains whether they can be complementary. Drawing on Foucault’s analysis, the transition to liberalism seems to have opened up such a model of governance that the power of sovereignty is marginalized and does not play an essential role in contemporary political relations. Although it may seem that the sovereignty of nation-states still plays a significant role, Foucault shows how precisely the utilitarian understanding of modernity, focused on the results of transactions, directly affects the sphere of intervention of state power. That is why Foucault presents the sovereign in modern political rationality as someone whose hands are tied and whose power is not even similar to the one possessed before the emergence of homo economicus. In contemporary political relations, this can clearly be seen from the example of the position of small, sovereign states and international law, which

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are proven weak and powerless, when faced with the so-called humanitarian, military forms of interventions which are dictated by the most powerful states. The question of the position of sovereignty in Foucault’s genealogy of biopolitics is strongly bound and inseparable from the question of political subjectivity. The dynamics between subjection-subjectivation is reflected in the relationship between power and resistance, because resistance always belongs within the structure of power. Subjectivity has two potentialities: to be constitutive and constituted, and, depending on the flow that power takes, subjectivation or desubjectivation arises. If Foucault did not explicitly determine what political subjectivity was to him, how can we interpret his definition of assujetisement in relation to the possibility of the emergence of a new political subject? Would it be represented as a figure of homo politicus, produced by subjectivation process? What kind of relation exists between homo politicus and homo oeconomicus, on the one side, and between the political and ethical subject developed in Foucault’s hermeneutics of the self? Can we find a basis for developing some kind of (political) engagement in Foucault? We will try to show that the latter question could be answered affirmatively, on the basis of Foucault’s decisive separation of the economic and legal subject on the one hand, and the development of the idea of the care of the self, on the other.

FOUCAULT, REASON AND POLITICAL SUBJECTIVITY In order to approach the meaning of Foucault’s idea of subjectivity, it is necessary to shed light on his understanding of rationality. What is the relationship between mind and discourse, and on which basis does Foucault reject the rationality of modernity? That question brings us back to Habermas’s critique of Foucault and the question of whether he is an anti-modernist intellectual. Is Foucault’s critique of modernity total in the sense that he rejects the normative foundations of humanism, and what are the implications of this rejection? David Hoy (1986) interprets Foucault’s rejection of modernity exclusively in a philosophical framework, which means that his position should not be defined as a complete rejection of humanistic values. Even if we agree with Nancy Fraser that such an interpretation, although defensible, does not take into account elements of Foucault’s analysis that suggest a ‘rejectionism of a stronger sort’ (Fraser, 1985, p. 167), this does not resolve the issue of whether Foucault rejects modernity also on strategic grounds: even if the latter statements were answered affirmatively, the question of the normative rejection of humanism still remains. Furthermore, even if such a substantial rejection would be proven, does that drastically change Foucault’s attitude toward reason itself? We do not seem to find enough elements in Foucault to claim that his perspective of reason and mind leaves room for the conclusion that

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his theory lacks political realism. Foucault’s genealogy developed under the strong influence of Nietzsche’s genealogy of morality, but does that suggest that Foucault is a critic of reason itself? The lectures Foucault gave at the Collège de France and published under the title The Birth of Biopolitics provide insight into Foucault’s critique of liberal political discourse. Does a critique of the form of reason that is dominant in liberalism necessarily mean a critique of reason and discourse per se? Foucault’s analysis of the mechanisms of power and the ways in which different forms of rationalization emerge in governing practices should not be construed as Foucault’s adherence to antimodernist discourse. As Foucault writes: ‘I think that we must limit the sense of the word “rationalisation” to an instrumental and relative use ... and to see how forms of rationalisation become embodied in practices, or systems of practices’ (cited in Dreyfus and Rabinow, 1986, p. 133). His consideration of historical forms of rationality should therefore be viewed as an attempt to provide a kind of local critique, whereby Foucault abstains from using universal norms: ‘Rather, he saw himself as a modernist, where modernism is understood as more of an attitude than a historical period, as “a permanent critique of our historical era” in the pursuit of enlightenment’ (Kelly, 1994, p. 3). Criticism, for Foucault, is seen as ‘a historical investigation into the events’ (Foucault, in Rabinow, 1986, pp. 45–46); during this process, the possibility of constitution of the subject and development of its potentialities arise. It is precisely in this sense that we can understand the idea of care for the self, developed in Foucault’s later works. Foucault asks how humanism could be defined after the death of Man, that is, what anti-humanistic humanism would be. Although this question sounds paradoxical, his understanding of ethics as a concern for the self shows that Foucault nevertheless inherits some basic elements that belong to the humanistic tradition (Hardt and Negri, 2000, pp. 91–92). Self-care, as a potentiality for a new subjectivity, rests on the belief that self-creation is possible, and that through this process subjectivity emerges as a constituent force. We believe that it is through the introduction of the ethical subject as a possible carrier of resistance and engagement that Foucault shows that only when we get rid of humanism from the juridical age, can we try to realize our creative powers. In order to try to reach the answer to the question of what the (ethical) subject is, it is necessary to deal with psyche, because psyche is comparable to the subject itself. Foucault did not seek to approach historical psychology from a psychoanalytic perspective, but to show how the very methods by which we try to understand and encompass psyche actually fall under another technique of self-construction. In that sense, he developed the theory about care of the self, because it is something that belongs to the subject, that the subject can actually provide for himself. The way we see the psyche, according to Foucault, stems from techniques we have developed precisely with the aim of under-

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standing our psychological processes. Various rituals of self-examination and self-control, according to Foucault, have their origins in various early practices, citing examples from early Christianity. However, in the Stoic ideal, Foucault finds more than self-examination, and that is precisely the care of the self. It is necessary to discard the tools of the philosophies of the self that belonged to intellectual traditions and, accordingly, had different techniques and goals. Instead of creating forms that capture our creativity, we need to seek knowledge about ourselves through finding new meanings. Only such a search for self-understanding can free man from the constituted forms of self-technologies (Hutton, 1988). It is possible to draw a parallel between two demands in Foucault. The first refers to replacing the care of the psyche with the care of the self and, thus, to open up the possibility for self-understanding capable of deconstructing the known technologies of the self and opening the space for creativity in the search for meanings and values. The second concerns his call to think and imagine new schemes of politicization: to give up the ‘machines of freedom’ and the standard ways of political organization, and turn to new ways of political engagement through the creation of new forms of political possibilities (Foucault, 1996, pp. 211, 341). In this sense, his insistence that with the introduction of neoliberal governance practices, there has been a shift from a paradigm of sovereignty to a paradigm of biopolitics, and from the political to the economic subject, can be seen as Foucault’s call to replace the economic subject with the ethical. The basic question that remains open is about the relationship of the ethical subject to the political, and how we can position Foucault’s ethics in relation to contemporary political thought. Since Foucault does not have a clear definition of what politics is for him and what the term political should refer to, it is very difficult to give an interpretation that will not ignore some and overemphasize other parts of Foucault’s analysis. Nevertheless, we believe that Foucault’s genealogy of power, through which biopolitics emerges through the destruction of the power of sovereignty and as the depoliticization of the political subject and politics itself, offers one of the possible lines of interpretation. To attribute to Foucault’s analysis an implicit tendency for subjectivity to emerge as constitutive, as political subject of the juridical age would be wrong, in the sense that the transition from sovereignty to biopolitics does not mean less critical review of sovereignty power. On the other hand, Foucault’s interpretation of the ethical subject as exclusively opposed to the subject of law seems to ignore Foucault’s edge of criticism directed at the dominance of economism, resulting in the dissolution of the power of law and philosophy. If Foucault held that the economy is central for biopolitics and that it is exactly the entrance of the economy into politics that defines the art of biopolitical government (Foucault, 2008, p. 92), then it is clear that his focus moved from the abuse of sovereign power to governing techniques that use minimum dom-

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ination. Foucault emphasizes precisely that homo economicus is irreducible to a legal subject; he does not simply limit the power of the sovereign; rather, he highlights that ‘homo oeconomicus strips the sovereign of power inasmuch as he reveals an essential, fundamental, and major incapacity of the sovereign, that is to say, an inability to master the totality of the economic field. The sovereign cannot fail to be blind vis-à-vis the economic domain or field as a whole’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 292). Sovereignty does not seem to be a place for exercising power anymore – because it is ‘inhibited by economic subjects’ (Foucault, 2008, p. 294). Relying on this line of reasoning, Foucault’s critique of modern political thought and his opening to the space for the ethical subject means that the subject of law must be redefined and freed from the depoliticized and anti-philosophical direction of political economy. This is the task of philosophical thought, whereby Foucault asks: ‘What is philosophy today – philosophical activity, I mean – if it is not the critical work that thought brings to bear on itself? In what does it consist, if not in the endeavour to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known?’ (Foucault, 1985, p. 9; cited in Lefebvre, 2017, p. 1).

AGAMBEN AND SOVEREIGNTY Politics is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the act of making a means visible as such. Politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end; rather, it is the sphere of a pure mediality without end intended as the field of human action and of human thought. (Agamben, 2000, pp. 115–116, emphasis in original)

It seems that the basic difference in Foucault’s and Agamben’s understanding of biopolitics is reflected in the relation to modernity and sovereign power. Agamben transforms Foucault’s theory with the claim that the relationship between sovereignty and biopolitics is not characteristic of modernity, and that Western politics was essentially biopolitical from the beginning. In the transition from sovereignty to modern governance, Agamben does not see a prism of liberation but growing capture and restraint by biopolitical power. The identification of sovereignty with biopolitics is essential for the debate on political subjectivity. Biopolitics, as Agamben sees it, is as old as the state of emergency, because life and sovereignty enter into a relationship precisely through the state of emergency. The state of emergency, as Agamben states, is very complex to define, because the term is situated at the borderline between law and politics, at the limit which separates the legal and the political (Agamben, 2005, p. 1). As such, it should be interpreted in the frame of politics, because the legal or constitutional terrain would not be sufficient to understand and interpret the situation in which the state of emergency occurs, ‘as the legal form of what cannot have legal form’ (Agamben, 2005, p. 1). The

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relation between legal and political, from the one side, and law and the living being, from the other, can be captured only by understanding the real nature of the state of emergency. The state of exception for Agamben has become the ‘paradigm of government’ in modernity (Agamben, 2005, p. 1), corresponding to the absence of the law and the suspension of the juridical order. The special function that law has under the state of exception, where law’s force is separated from its application, led Agamben to define the state of exception as a zone of indistinction between exclusion and inclusion. The original political relation for Agamben is the ban, which unites the sovereign and bare life. However, a ban should not be seen solely as a sanction, as it implies a-ban-donment. Homo sacer can be killed but not sacrificed because he is outside the juridical order of the city, outside the order of any community. All the figures mentioned by Agamben are characterized by their exceptionality and rejection and in that sense the ban is ‘non-relational: his victims are abandoned to their condition of separation’ (Laclau, 2020, p. 131, translation S.D.). It is modernity that represents a biopolitical period par excellence for Agamben, and especially with the culmination in Nazism and Stalinism, where the state of emergency appears as the norm: these regimes produce the politicization of bare life, which reveals the totalitarian structure of the political, as well as of sovereignty, based on the permission to kill without committing murder (Agamben, 2000, pp. 5–7). Bare life proves to be an intertwining of violence and law, thus highlighting why Agamben considers that in modern biopolitics ‘the possibility of differentiating between our biological body and our political body (...) was taken from us forever’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 91). Bare life is linked to the political structure of the sovereign, while sovereignty always carries the possibility of violence: ‘sovereign is the point of indistinction between violence and law, the threshold on which violence passes’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 25). Law and politics are inseparable from the mechanisms of violence, which means that violence is inherent to the political act. The intertwining between the law and violence means reducing all humans to a bare life. A frequent subject of criticism is Agamben’s conclusion that even more radical forms of violence than in Nazism are seen in the contemporary politics as biopolitics, and that bare life dwells in the body of every individual because ‘we are all virtually homines sacri’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 57). Agamben also cites examples from the technologization of photography which led to the production of the bare life, using bodies for pornographic and advertising purposes. From that point, Agamben pushes the conclusions too far by stating that ‘the geometrical splendor of the “girls” covers over the long lines of the naked, anonymous bodies led to their death in the Lagers (camps), or the thousands of corpses mangled in the daily slaughter on the highways’ (Agamben, 1993, p. 49).

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The production of the bare life is the result of the performance of sovereign power: the fundamental consequence of the sovereign power is nuda vita, which appears as the threshold at which the boundaries between culture and nature disappear. Bare life, as the original political element, is thus universalized in Agamben, in such a way that his focus is not put on the processes and techniques of normalization of life, but ‘on death as a materialization of the borderline’ (Lemke, 2004, p. 8). Through exposure to the violence of sovereignty, life is always at risk before death, which explains why some of the authors considered his biopolitics to be a thanatopolitics. Indeed, the motive of death is very present in Agamben’s understanding of politics. He chooses to name the camp, and not the city, as the ‘biopolitical paradigm of the modern’ (Agamben, 2005, p. 58). The condition of bare, naked life in opposition to power is best represented and is most directly shown in the camp, as manifestation of a state of emergency. In the camps, where man does not have the right to die but is instead produced as a corp (see Agamben, 1999, p. 75), there is no more dividing line between norm and bare life. The process which Agamben calls ‘the materialization of the state of exception’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 174) is not a characteristic of the camps only, but of all the places whose essence is reflected in the production of naked lives. One of the most criticized moments in his theory is naming different types of modern ghettos by the name of the camp. That is how camp becomes: the stadium in Bari into which the Italian police in 1991 provisionally herded all illegal Albanian immigrants before sending them back to their country, the winter cycle-racing track in which the Vichy authorities gathered the Jews before consigning them to the Germans, the Konzentrationslager er für Auslander in CottbusSielow in which the Weimar government gathered Jewish refugees from the East, or the zones d’attentes in French international airports in which foreigners asking for refugee status are detained… . (Agamben, 1998, p. 85)

It seems that Agamben is moving from one level to another without enough explanation. In fact, he makes a similar transition also when he speaks of paradigmatic examples of homines sacri. The case of Wilson, the biochemist who bequeathed his body for research; Kalen Quinlan, the overcomatose patient, or even the neomort waiting for an organ transplant: in all these cases, the line which separates ethics and law does not exist for Agamben, nor are these bodies any more private. But Agamben goes a step further, arguing the same for the existence of a bandit, who is pure life, captioned by the power of sovereignty through the ban. But what does it mean when Agamben refers to the life of the bandit, by saying that there is no life which is ‘more “political” than his’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 90)? If the bandit is in conflict with the laws of the city or the state, then it could be said that the law by which he is living

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is in conflict with the state law; it is thus not clear why we would speak of a separation between law and bare life (Laclau, 2020, p. 139). Yet, without going deeper into the consideration of all the examples individually, we can ask what Agamben seeks to show by these different, seemingly unrelated, examples. What does it mean if Agamben does not dwell on the crimes of World War II, but draws paradigmatic examples of the indistinguishability of biology and politics from different historical periods and political contexts? As Lemke points out, although many critics failed to see it, Agamben does not diminish the differences between modern democracies and totalitarian regimes; actually, ‘he wants to show that the democratic rule of law is by no means an alternative project to the Nazi regime or the Stalinist dictatorship…’ (Lemke, 2004, p. 7). That strong biopolitical tendencies are present in modern democracies is clear from the different and many individual lives which are nothing more than naked lives. Agamben goes even further, claiming that even if the production of bare lives is intrinsic to sovereignty in all times, biopolitics entered in a new era just after World War II.

AGAMBEN AND SUBJECTIVITY: A POST-POLITICAL COMMUNITY? What are the implications of these ideas of biopolitics and sovereignty for Agamben’s view on political subjectivity? The only subject that Agamben sees as political is bare life. But even if his biopolitics could be characterized as pessimistic, it is possible to find a significant affirmative note in Agamben’s works. In The Coming Community (1993), Agamben develops the idea of ethics which strongly focuses on the possibilities of the potentiality of life. A new imagined subjectivity is subjectivity without a subject, originated in the context of the future ethical community, within which the production of the bare life will be surpassed. This new non-subject has a potential that can be explained through the idea of one’s own non-Being. What meaning does Agamben assign to this potentiality? For him, this potential means to be ‘one’s own lack, to be in relation to one’s own incapacity. Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality, and only in this way do they become potential’ (Agamben, 1999, p. 182). Potentiality is seen as property emerging in the new ethical subject, deprived of any identity. That is the reason why Agamben chooses ‘refugees’ as the name for the new singularities, landless and living outside any legal framework: Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and every condition of belonging, is the principal enemy of the State. Wherever these singularities peacefully demon-

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strate their being in common there will be a Tiananmen, and sooner or later, the tanks will appear. (Agamben, 1993, p. 86, emphasis added)

Not appropriating any identity and being able to leave the current condition means to be in the movement – this is the sense in which Agamben emphasizes that refugees status is countryless, and always temporal (Agamben, 2000, p. 19). Whatever singularity is free and is the only real possibility for the community to come, since it is the only one that rejects any self-determination, showing willingness to stand in the place of any thing. ‘Taking-place’ is the term Agamben uses to describe a willingness to step down from one’s position and take someone else’s less favourable place. It is about being willing to make a replacement instead of any thing, refusing possession of the own place and in that sense showing a feature of substitutability. On that trail, Agamben gives the example of the Badaliya community (Badaliya in Arabic means ‘substitution’). Members of this community have decided to become Christians in a completely Islamic environment, with the aim to take the place of Christians, who were not living there. It is in this example that we see the essence of Agamben’s understanding of proper and common. For Agamben the proper and the common are part of the same metaphysical found, since the common actually rests on the proper. They fall into the zone of indistinguishability, because the proper, paradoxically, establishes the common, which is in fact the foundation of the proper itself. Agamben’s call to abandon identity, showing that being in common means not having any place and anything proper, any substantial identity, comes to the fore by the interpretation of the ability of Princ Myshkin from Dostoyevsky’s Idiot to imitate anyone’s handwriting with great skill so he could sign for anyone. The two-way movement between potentiality and actuality in this act of signing instead of the other erases the difference between the individual and the general. Being able to replace with any other thing, giving up of any properties, is the particularity of the whatever singularity. The future community can be built only on the basis of a new ethics, which Agamben finds in the ethics that springs from the concepts of testimony, responsibility and the witness. According to Agamben, the only path between the illusion of understanding what happened in the camps and some kind of cheap mystification is the way of witnessing. In Remnants of Auschwitz, he tries to locate the place of the testimony for a new ethical terrain, since all ethical principles which are available in our age turn out to be fruitless. The new ethics would have the task of giving a voice to what is unspeakable, and testify about experiences which cannot be witnessed. The experiences of ‘ordinary’ people in the camps is what occupies Agamben most strongly, and Agamben names understanding their condition and mind as ‘infinitely harder

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(…) than to understand the mind of a Spinoza or Dante’ (Agamben, 1999, p. 13). A tragic paradigm of ethics as the legacy of ancient Greece is that it can no longer be of help, since we have encountered a complete impossibility to witness while standing in front of the ‘aporia of Auschwitz’. Agamben defines the majority of the camp’s inhabitants as ordinary, but also as ‘obscure’, alluding to their invisibility (Agamben, 1999, pp. 12–13). By introducing the figure of Muselmann, referring to the captives of the World War II Nazi concentration camps, Agamben shows what is unique in the experience of bearing witness – as the only path which remains after the destruction of the human being. On the basis of the figure of Muselmann, Agamben adopts the concept of form-of-life as a key notion which addresses human beings in their constitutive relation to language. Witnessing what took place in the camps means going beyond the differentiation between subjectification and desubjectification, human and inhuman, since ‘the place of the human is divided, because the human being exists in the fracture between the living being and speaking being, the unhuman and the human. That is: the human being exists in the human being’s non-place, in the missing articulation between the living being and logos’ (Agamben, 1999, p. 134). That is why for Agamben the human existence is always beyond the threshold of the differentiation between biological and cultural, zoé and bios. In logos, we can find life-in-common, and through the experience of communicability, we can participate in the desubjectivized community. What distinguishes all the figures by which Agamben describes the non-subject is the opposition between the politics of power and the status of non-belonging, non-possessing identity. Refugees and non-citizens are embedded in the post-political community emerging from the ethics of happy life. Ethical experience, as Agamben states, would not be possible if there would be some biological destiny or essence which we would have to achieve; the meaning or vocation is not something given because in that case ‘there would be only tasks to be done’ (Agamben, 1993, pp. 42–43). ‘Well being’ and ‘sufficient life’ should be realized in the field of a pure mediality, with pure means, which means to think and act beyond known categories of political thought. The event of language, as Agamben calls it, should be understood as a free use of the common, where human thought and action can develop with their own communicativeness and power beyond sovereignty. By rejecting categories burdened with meaning stemmed from the tradition of political thought, the whatever singularities as the coming people are able to form a new community, which is a community without its essence. The community of not being community, the coming people – in not being people: that is Agamben’s vision of overcoming the traditions of Western metaphysics in a sphere which will transcend political action in the way we know it. New, sufficient life can be realized only in the sphere of pure means, which sees the law as structurally

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violent. The experience of communication can exceed the ethics of responsibility and guilt, and set the doctrine of happy life as a possibility of our creativity. Just as with Benjamin we have the notion of ‘pure violence’ using ‘pure means’ that neither creates nor preserves law, so Agamben introduces the term ‘pure law’ to denote a law that is determined by something beyond itself, by an externality. Pure law, as a realm of the politics of ‘pure means’, surpasses the nexus between the violence and the law, with the help of ‘a word (…) which shows only itself, without any relation to an end’ (Agamben, 2005, p. 88). Agamben’s rejection of the domination of the ideas of the state, community, juridical order and subjectivity as legacy of Western ontology and metaphysics opens up numerous debates. By stating that terms such as democracy, people, sovereignty and nation are useless (Agamben, 2000, p. 109), does he show the complete rejection of the concept of the state and the juridical order as the ones that should be overcome in a most definitive way? Or can we interpret him in a way that, precisely because these terms do not refer to a reality anymore, open the possibility for a re-articulation of the understanding of the state sovereignty (within which the focus could be placed on general will as the will of the people as a whole, aiming at the common good and interest)? Claiming that practices in contemporary international politics have nothing to do with the sovereignty of the public law of the European legal area, Agamben seems to correctly detect some of the basic inconsistencies of contemporary political practices. As Norris emphasizes, Agamben states that the state of emergency should not be confused with the rule of law in the Nazi state, which could perhaps be interpreted as an attempt to separate law from fascist imitation of law; in that case it would be necessary to establish real legal protection (Norris, 2005, p. 272). Yet, if Agamben identifies the very beginnings of biopolitics with the beginning of philosophy, making the whole tradition of political thought actually the history of biopolitics, it is clear that Agamben’s theory is opposed to the power of sovereignty, the state and the idea of ​​the people. The free use of the common, the experience of communicativeness and the development of free, autonomous personalities is not possible if human thought and activity are affected by the power of political sovereignty. Although Agamben has rightly recognized the contradictions that the strengthening of more and more international organizations brings in the modern world, his alternative path seems to be in no case related to the strengthening of the sovereignty of nation-states or the greater influence of international law. His theory is post-sovereigntist, the future community is essentially non-community, while the idea of people appears in this framework exclusively as the concept of common people, as the coming community of desubjectivized individuals. It seems to us that Agamben, considering the state, law, and sovereignty exclusively as biopolitical means by which human beings are excluded from the political community,

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has significantly diminished the possibility of different directions in which his theory might go. Not following Foucault’s genealogy of biopolitics, which emerges precisely with a paradigm shift, his analysis shows incompleteness because it fails to respond to some of today’s most characteristic biopolitical practices. On the one hand, the insistence on deviating from the idea of subjectivity seems to be based on the vague identification of various examples of naked life with the figure of Muselmann: ‘It remains woefully unclear to what extent and in what manner the comatose in the hospitals share the fate of prisoners in concentration camps; whether the asylum seekers in the prisons are bare life to the same degree and in the same sense as the Jews in the Nazi camps’ (Lemke, 2004, p. 8). On the other hand, some of the most represented contemporary biopolitical practices could be seen in the interventionism, through military interventions, such as operations in Somalia, Rwanda, Haiti, Liberia, Cambodia, Iraq and the former Yugoslavia which were considered as necessary humanitarian actions. As some of the authors claim, Agamben’s positivist conception of human rights as empty, unless they are based on national laws, is highly questionable (Heins, 2005, p. 847). Many international organizations whose primary call is to prevent human rights violation do not seem to be succeeding to ensure their roles. The development of post-World War II states from the one side, and the growing influence and significant roles played by various international organizations on the other, show that Agamben did not take into account perhaps some of the primary spheres of human rights violations: Like Carl Schmitt, Agamben sees the invocation of human rights by democratic governments as well as the ‘humanitarian concept of humanity’ as deceptive manouvers or, at least, as acts of self-deception on the part of the liberal bourgeois subject. The difference between Agamben and Schmitt lies in the fact that Schmitt fought liberal democracy in the name of the authoritarian state, while Agamben sees democracy and dictatorship as two equally unappealing twins. (Heins, 2005, p. 860)

Retaining the edge of his critique of the nexus between juridical order and sovereignty, the question arises as to whether he has failed to see that the problem lies originally in a complete suspension of rights on the terrain of political action. In other words, very often in contemporary politics it is not a matter of the excess of the force of law in dominant political practices, but of international law being called into question (Koljević, 2015, p. 95).

CONCLUSION Our intention was to try to offer a conceptual framework for Foucault’s and Agamben’s understanding of biopolitics. As we could see, their biopolitical theories move between the concepts of sovereignty and subjectivity, even

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when their articulation is more implicit. We have sought to show the significance of the distinction made by Foucault between, on the one hand, revolutionary discourse connected with juridical order, general will of the people and sovereignty and, on the other, utilitarianism, manifested primarily through liberal state practices. Foucault’s genealogical research on biopolitics shows that with the emergence of liberal techniques and practices of the governance, there has been a transition from the juridical age and the power of political subjectivity toward different biopolitical phenomena within which power manifests itself in a very different way. The question of political subjectivity and politics in Foucault is more hidden than explicitly articulated, which opens up space for different, often very conflicting interpretations. Still, we believe that, through his works, it is possible to encompass and articulate what should be the nature of politics and political action, and whether and how political subjectivity could occur in modern liberal democracies. The two directions present in Foucault, revolutionary and utilitarian, show structurally different approaches to the question of governmental reasoning, which turns out to be not how to govern too much, but about excessive government (Foucault, 2008, pp. 16–17). Explaining the transition from the juridical to the economic subject, Foucault focuses on the analysis of the emergence of homo oeconomicus, as opposed to the legal subject, but does not affirm either of them. Only through the conceptualization of the new, ethical subject, can one understand the sphere within which Foucault sees the possibility for the new (political) subjectivity. We believe that even if the connection between his idea of the care of the self and the possible revolutionary subjectivity is not obvious, many parts of his theory leave space for seeking the right place for the political in what might be called his political philosophy and perhaps find it in the political potential of the ethical subject. On the other hand, in Agamben’s conception of biopolitics, we find great influence of postmodernism, through the idea of community of whatever singularities, and the relation toward sovereignty as the basis to understand biopolitical manifestations from the very beginning of political thought. New ethics as post-ethics, strong emphasis on the non-territoriality and the fact that Agamben chooses refugees and non-citizens as the main figures of non-subjectivity show his specific sensibility and breadth in the study of the new, common use of the world. Still, it is an open question to what extent his theory manages to capture perhaps some of the most significant biopolitical phenomena of our times. Doesn’t Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics as depoliticization of politics leave room to conclude that in addition to an ethics developed through care of the self, there may be a politics and political subjectivity that will not be the result of a process of depoliticization? Although Foucault’s influence in Agamben’s works is unavoidable, his classification of the power of sovereignty in a way that makes violence inherent in a political act does

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not allow Foucault’s analysis to continue in a direction that could offer some answers to questions that are perhaps most relevant to our political age. To think about what freedom and democracy mean for us today, or where we can find the potential for political-philosophical thinking and action, remains the tasks for further analyses of the two authors, with the intention to discover and locate a way for contemplating resistance to practices of instrumentalization of life in modern democracies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, G., 1993. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 1999. Potentialities. Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2000. Means without End. Notes on Politics. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G., 2005. State of Exception. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Agamben, G., 2009. What is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Allen, A., 2000. Anti-Subjective Hypothesis. Michel Foucault and the Death of the Subject. The Philosophical Forum XXXI, 2: 113–130. Burchell, C.G., and Miller, P., 1991. The Foucault Effect. Studies in Governmentality. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Deacon, A., 2003. Fabricating Foucault, Rationalising the Management of Individuals. Milwaukee: Marquette University Press. Deleuze, G., Postscript on the Societies of Control. Available at: (accessed 8 August 2021). Dreyfus, H. and Rabinow, P., 1986. Michel Foucault. Beyond Hermeneutics and Structuralism. Brighton, Sussex: The Harvester Press. Fitzpatrick, P., 2001. These Mad Abandon’d Times, Economy & Society 30, 2: 255–270. Foucault, M., 1978. History of Sexuality, vol. 1. New York: Random House. Foucault, M., 1985. The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon Books. Foucault, M., 1986. Power/Knowledge. Selected Interviews and Other Writings. 1972–1977. Brighton: The Harvest Press. Foucault, M., 1990. Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings. 1977–1984. London: Routledge. Foucault, M., 1996. Foucault Live. Interviews, 1961–1984. Stanford: Semiotext(E). Foucault, M., 2003. Society Must be Defended. New York: Picador. Foucault, M., 2007. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collége de France 1977–78. Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan. Foucault, M., 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Houndmills: Palgrave-Macmillan. Foucault, M., Hurley, R., Faubion, J.D. and Rabinow, P., 2000. Power. The Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, Vol. 3. New York: New Press. Fraser, N., 1985. Michel Foucault: ‘A Young Conservative?’, Ethics 96, 1: 165–184.

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Hardt, M. and Negri, A., 2000. Empire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Heins, V., 2005. Giorgio Agamben and the Current State of Affairs in Humanitarian Law and Human Rights Policy, German Law Journal 6, 5: 845–860. Hoy, D., 1986. Power, Repression, Progress. In: Foucault. A Critical Reader. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. Hutton H.P., 1988. Foucault, Freud, and the Technologies of the Self. In: H. Luther (ed.) Technologies of the Self. A Seminar with Michel Foucault, pp. 121–124. London: Tavistock Publications. Kalyvas, A., 2005. Popular Sovereignty, Democracy and the Constituent Power. In: A. Norris (ed.) Constellations 12, 2: 223–244. Kalyvas, A., 2015. The Sovereign Weaver. In: A. Norris (ed.) Politics, Metaphysics, and Death, pp. 107–134. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Kelly, M. (ed.), 1994. Critique and Power: Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Koljević, B., 2007. Teorije o Postsuverenom Stanju: Agambenova Kritika Suvereniteta, Nova Srpska Politička Misao XV, 3–4: 111–127. Koljević, B., 2015. Biopolitika i savremeni svet. Beograd: Zavod za Udžbenike. Laclau, E., 2020. Dibattiti e scontri. Per un nuovo orizzonte della politica. Milan: Mimesis Edizioni. Lefebvre, A., 2017. The End of a Line: Care of the Self in Modern Political Thought. Genealogy 1,1, 2. Available at (accessed 15 October 2021). Lemke, T., 2004. A Zone of Indistinction. A Critique of Giorgio Agamben’s Concept of Biopolitics. Conference at Nordic Summer University, Laugarvatn: Outlines 1: 3–13. Lemke, T., 2010. Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique. (accessed 30 July 2021). Losonc, A., 2008. Biopolitika I/Biomoc. Filozofija i Drustvo 1. Available at http://​ www​.doiserbia​.nb​.rs/​img/​doi/​0353​-5738/​2008/​0353​-57380801153L​.pdf (accessed 10 October 2021). Norris, A. (ed.), 2005. Politics, Metaphysics, and Death. Durham & London: Duke University Press. Ojakangas, M., 2005. Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power – Agamben and Foucault, Foucault Studies 2: 5–28. Prado, C.G., 2000. Starting with Foucault. An Introduction to Genealogy. Oxford: Westview Press. Rabinow, P. (ed.), 1986. The Foucault Reader. London: Penguin. Ransom, J.S., 1997. Foucault’s Discipline. The Politics of Subjectivity. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

2. Fear, the sovereign, and authority: Roberto Esposito and the escape from the Hobbesian State Vappu Helmisaari In this chapter1 I shall analyse the themes of war, nature, power and community in Roberto Esposito’s reading of Thomas Hobbes. I argue that Esposito denies the reality of Hobbes’s state of nature as a state of war. He sees the state of nature as a fiction that legitimates the breaking of the community which, for Esposito, is based on the mutual exchange of gifts. Instead of relying on community, Hobbes emphasizes the covenant and institutions. War, nature and power are present in Hobbes’s idea of the state of nature as a state of war, which is ended by sovereign power. Community is Esposito’s alternative to sovereign power. More specifically, he claims that giving power to the Hobbesian sovereign destroys community and does not end a war-like situation in the way Hobbes explains it should. Esposito addresses Hobbes’s ideas in his writings on politics, mostly contesting them. Besides Esposito’s analysis of war in the Hobbesian state of nature, war is also examined in Esposito’s texts as a metaphor of the body’s immune system. This is noteworthy because Esposito analyses the idea of immunity moving from the level of the body to the one of communities and states. In doing so, he puts into question both war-like descriptions of immunity and the Hobbesian state based on the threat of civil war. Esposito claims that we live in the Hobbesian state of nature, which is a fiction meant to legitimize sovereign power. Instead of fear and a society based on a contract, Esposito wants to show that the notion of gift can ground people’s common life.

An earlier version of this chapter was published as a chapter of my monograph dissertation Thomas Hobbes and Contemporary Italian Thinkers: Permanent War in Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito and Antonio Negri (2020). 1

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ESPOSITO AND ITALIAN THOUGHT I will start with an analysis of Esposito’s reading of Hobbes, paying particular attention to his concept of the state of nature. Esposito’s work seems to be divided into two different lines: on the one hand, his own philosophical work and, on the other hand, books that investigate Italian philosophy – from Dante Alighieri, Niccolò Machiavelli and Giambattista Vico to contemporary authors – its place in the canon of philosophy and of European thought. Two examples of the latter are Living Thought (2012) and A Philosophy for Europe (2018). However, Esposito is probably best known for his trilogy Communitas (2010), Immunitas (2014) and Bíos (2008). He argues that Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri are the Italian philosophers who have elaborated the most original and important redefinition of Michel Foucault’s work on biopolitics (Esposito, 2013b, p. 85), and clearly, he positions himself in this same group of thinkers. In this chapter, I will mainly concentrate on Esposito’s philosophical proposal, rather than on his works on Italian philosophy, although it should be noted that the latter provides an essential contribution to the author’s own thought and, for this reason, I will refer also to these texts. Esposito notes that ‘only modernity makes of individual self‐preservation the presupposition of all other political categories, from sovereignty to liberty’ (Esposito, 2008, p. 9) and places the beginning of this modern tradition in Hobbes’s thinking, whereby self‐preservation and exit from the state of nature provides the starting point of the author’s political theory. All social intercourse outside the exchange between protection and obedience is eliminated, and this makes the political order of sovereignty possible. The fear of violent death that all feel towards the other is in the Hobbesian scheme replaced by the fear of the sovereign. Esposito opposes the Hobbesian idea of the origin of the state that is based on the exit from the state of nature by giving all power to the sovereign. Esposito defines this scheme ‘immunitary’, to indicate that it separates people from each other in the attempt of each person to protect oneself. For Esposito, Hobbes is the founder of the modern immunitary paradigm. Immunization describes a situation where the mutual obligation created by a gift, a munus, is neutralized and the person or the state is made immune to the obligation (Esposito, 2000, p. 18; Esposito, 2013a, p. 14; Esposito, 2014, p. 6). ‘Those who are immune owe nothing to anyone’, Esposito writes (2014, p. 5). Hobbes is, according to Esposito, the thinker of this neutralization. The individual is no longer indebted to others when he or she gives up part of his or her freedom to the sovereign, who protects the citizens. In order to oppose the idea of immunization, Esposito offers a new definition of community, which is also different from the neocommunitarian theories (such as Amitai Etzioni) or German organicistic sociology (such as Niklas Luhmann), which

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are, according to Esposito, the main contemporary approaches to community. For him, community is a ‘locus of plurality, difference, and alterity’ instead of identity and belonging, which are often associated with community (Esposito, 2013a, pp. 48 and 55). In Living Thought, Esposito suggests that Machiavelli offers an alternative to Hobbes because he does not exclude conflict in the same way as Hobbes does. According to Machiavelli, there is an ‘inexhaustibility, and indeed coessentiality, of conflict in the order which contains it, something excluded in principle from the Hobbesian model’ (Esposito, 2012, p. 24, see also p. 54). Machiavelli believed that different parties trying to conquer power in a republic may be good for the republic through the compromise they need to achieve. Machiavelli also questioned the idea of origin, such as a state of nature as a foundation for politics and for the state. In these regards, Esposito continues the Italian tradition of seeing conflictuality in a positive light and not searching for an origin but rather relying on immanence.

THE ROLE OF FEAR IN THE HOBBESIAN STATE AND ESPOSITO’S CRITIQUE OF HOBBES [T]he origin of large and lasting societies lay not in mutual human benevolence but in men’s mutual fear. (Hobbes, 2018/1647, p. 24)

In this section, I move on to examine the role of fear in ending war and founding a society postulated by Hobbes and taken on by Esposito. I will show how Esposito’s opposition to Hobbes’s instrumental use of fear is one of Esposito’s main foundations for his thinking of community. For Hobbes, fear of death is what makes people give up their freedom. For Esposito, thus, Hobbesian sovereignty is grounded either in the fear of others or in the fear of the sovereign. In Esposito’s critique, traditional society was based on a gift which caused a debt, and this debt of gratitude became unbearable for the modern individual. Hobbes’s answers are the contract and institutions. As we will see, for Esposito, the idea of a community characterized by the absence of subjectivity, identity and property will be the alternative to the Hobbesian contractarian state. Hobbes claimed that fear of death is what makes people give up their freedom. Men have in common the capacity to kill and be killed. In order to save themselves in a war of everyone against everyone, they give authority to the sovereign. In Leviathan, he writes that the fear of death and the desire for comfortable life are passions which incline men to peace (Hobbes, 1985/1651, p. 188; see also Esposito, 2013a, p. 124). Similarly, in the epistle dedicatory for The Elements of Law, Hobbes states that government and peace have been based on mutual fear (Hobbes, 2008a/1650, p. 20). In what is probably the

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most famous passage of Leviathan, he underlines fear and danger of violent death as the worst consequences of the state of nature, which is also a state of war of each against all: In such condition, there is no place for Industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no Culture of the Earth; no Navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by Sea; no commodious Building; no Instruments of moving, and removing such things as require much force; no Knowledge of the face of the Earth; no account of Time; no Arts; no Letters; no Society; and which is worst of all, continuall feare, and danger of violent death; And the life of man, solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and short. (Hobbes, 1985/1651, p. 186)

Hobbes’s life history began with the fear caused by the political situation and the threat of war. He writes in The Verse Life: And hereupon it was my Mother Dear Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear. (Hobbes, 2008b/1680, p. 254)

The Verse Life also ends with a mention of fear in a different light, with death bringing an end to a life-long fear: I’ve now Compleated my Eighty fourth year, And Death approaching, prompts me not to fear. (ibid., p. 264)

Esposito points out that the horizontal relationship between people is sacrificed in the Hobbesian idea when preference is given to the vertical relation between the sovereign and his subjects. Both sovereignty through acquisition and sovereignty by institution are based on fear: either fear of the others or fear of the sovereign (Esposito, 2010, p. 32). Fear is essentially the fear of death, which is also the origin of the political – there would not be politics without fear. For Hobbes, this is equally true for the legitimate forms of the state, not only for the degenerate. Fear moves from an anarchic fear, from a state of nature, to an institutional fear in a civil state. In the latter, fear can be reduced but it does not disappear, and the role of the state is not to eliminate fear. Hobbes makes a distinction between fear and terror. Fear makes us think of ways to extract ourselves from a risky situation, whereas terror is completely negative and paralyzing (ibid., p. 23). To describe the original fear which leads to the formation of the state, Hobbes uses the stronger term terror. To escape the state of fear, people move to the fear of the state by giving power to the sovereign. For Esposito, this submission is a sacrifice: life is sacrificed in order to be preserved. This forms a spiral: sacrifice is an answer to fear, sacrifice causes fear, and so on (ibid., pp. 21–23, 25, 33; Esposito, 2015, p. 12). There is a ‘sacrifice of the individual to the undifferentiated common’, as Rossella

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Bonito Oliva describes it in an article on Esposito’s trilogy Communitas, Immunitas and Bíos. The Hobbesian pact is born out of the experience of insecurity, and individual fear is used to sacrifice the individual in the community (Bonito Oliva, 2006, p. 72). The Hobbesian way to exit the state of fear and the spiral of sacrifice is to immunize oneself against others. According to Esposito, Hobbes is a thinker of immunization, insofar as the answer to such state was to free oneself from the ‘debt’ that bound him to the community by cutting the social tie which involved a ‘gift’, and replacing it with an immunized relation between him and the sovereign. As Esposito puts it, ‘[t]he modern individual, who assigns to every service its specific prize, can no longer bear the gratitude that the gift demands’ (Esposito, 2010, p. 12), whereas the gift is that of the community itself. Not by chance, the Latin term munus, which constitutes the Latin word communitas, means precisely gift. In his commentary on Esposito’s work, Luca Serafini describes the indebtedness caused by munus as follows: ‘to share the munus means to share a constitutive lack, to be always in debt to somebody else with whom we do not share any specific characteristic’, and thus the community is an emptiness (Serafini, 2017, p. 216). In a community, boundaries of the proper and of the common become blurred. Immunitas is the opposite of the gift. In large amounts, immunization is the ‘sacrifice of the living – of every qualified life, that is – for the sake of mere survival’ (Esposito, 2013b, p. 85). The contract that Hobbes proposes is everything that a gift is not; it is ‘the neutralization of its poisonous fruits’ (Esposito, 2010, p. 14). The Leviathan-State implies breaking every communitarian bond that is outside of the relation of obedience and protection between the sovereign and his subjects. The cum, the relation among men is sacrificed here. Esposito argues that later philosophers have sensed the ‘nihilistic character of this decision’, and that they manifest a certain guilt about it in their thinking on community (ibid., pp. 14–15). The concept of immunity discussed in this chapter is mostly legal and political. In the legal meaning, those who are immune, such as Members of Parliament or of Congress as well as diplomats, are not subject to ‘a jurisdiction that applies to all other citizens in derogation of the common law’ (Esposito, 2013b, p. 84). Sometimes, the juridical discussion on immunity is extended to certain political personages, such as Augusto Pinochet or Slobodan Milosevic. Immunity is a privileged condition, an exception to the common condition. Esposito, however, also uses the concept of immunity in a more empirical, biomedical meaning of the body’s immune system, and the two meanings are often intertwined. In his analysis of Nazism, for example, Esposito shows many similarities between the two meanings brought together by the ‘body politic’ metaphor. An important example of immunization in contemporary societies is the fearful attitude toward migration flows to the Western world, which are seen as attacking political bodies. He links this atti-

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tude to political monotheism, one king and one kingdom corresponding to one God, and not accepting anything from the outside. He believes, though, that the West is capable of overcoming the immunitarian and the theological-political paradigm,2 since ‘the idea that we may be joined together not by what we share but by distinction and diversity is part of the Western tradition’ (Esposito, 2013a, p. 65). Esposito reminds us that, for Hobbes, lasting societies are based on mutual fear and not on mutual goodwill towards the other. The Aristotelian type of positive anthropology is forgotten. Human beings are each other’s opponents and competitors, and war is their natural condition. Friendship is only temporary and instrumental. Therefore, Hobbes needs to find a way out of this ‘crime of the community’: ‘If the relation between men is in itself destructive, the only route of escape from this unbearable state of affairs is the destruction of the relation itself’ (Esposito, 2010, p. 27). The new state should be built outside of the mutual conflict, as ‘the union of many men’ but not on their concord. The subjects in the Hobbesian state have nothing in common, and associations are prohibited or at least deemed unnecessary for ‘maintaining of peace and justice’ (Hobbes, 1985/1651, p. 286). The institution of a Third with whom all can relate helps to escape the mortal danger of relations. Esposito questions whether a system based only on fear can be sustained. One of the most controversial ideas in Hobbes is his passage on the renouncement of the right of resistance to the formation of the sovereign’s person, which is not completely solved by his theory of authorization. I maintain that Esposito’s reading of Hobbes as standing against community seems valid. It is noteworthy, however, that Esposito himself claims that members of a community paradoxically have nothing in common, and that the having nothing in common is somehow the very essence of community, when at the same time he accuses the Hobbesian state to imply that subjects do not have anything in common. Like Agamben,3 Esposito suggests that the state of nature continues in the person of the sovereign: ‘the state of nature is not overcome once and for all by the civil, but it resurfaces again in the same figure of the sovereign, because it is the only one to have preserved natural right in a context in which all the others have given it up’ (Esposito, 2010, p. 30). Protection and persecution are each other’s reversal. Esposito observes that in Leviathan, Hobbes describes how the victors direct their fury towards those they have defeated by putting 2 Theological-political paradigm means that there is an analogy between God and the sovereign, and similarities between how these two are seen to have ultimate power. Esposito describes the analogy: ‘since only a single God can put an end to polytheist turmoil, in the same way, only a single sovereign is able to rid the state-body of the scourge of conflict’ (Esposito, 2012, p. 55). 3 See Agamben, 1998, p. 35.

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them into prisons or fetters. They let the vanquished keep their lives, and their new slaves work to avoid cruelty. This identification of the victim with his own persecutor is for Esposito ‘the height of a sacrificial mechanism set in motion originally by mimetic desire and subsequently institutionalized in the political exchange between protection and obedience’ (ibid., p. 33). The enemy is usually outside of the state, which is created by contract, but there are exceptions, and sacrificing life to protect it is the Hobbesian answer to these exceptions. Esposito considers that sacrifice is not only that of an enemy but also of every single member of the community, ‘since every member finds in his own being the originary figure of the first enemy’ (ibid., pp. 32–34). Esposito presents Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille as strong anti-Hobbesians like himself (ibid., pp. 39–127). More specifically, Esposito sees Rousseau as the first great adversary of Hobbes. Rousseau treated Hobbes as a ‘sophist’ and himself as a philosopher. Hobbes, according to Rousseau, saw men as demons or wolves who devoured each other. The continuous cycle of devouring and being devoured is cut by a despotic monster for both Rousseau and Hobbes, although Rousseau sees this as something to oppose. The original impetus in this scheme is missing: ‘there is nothing to be found where the origin is except the trace of its withdrawal’ (ibid., p. 46). For Rousseau, the community is necessary: ‘[i] t is our munus in the exact sense that we deeply carry responsibility for community. Here then we can distinguish the lines that separate it from the Hobbesian sacrificial mechanism’ (ibid., p. 49). Esposito cites the Rousseau of the Social Contract, where he sees isolated men in the Hobbesian state as slaves to a master rather than citizens of a nation. It is an aggregation of men rather than an association, and a shared fear is what joins them together. The result is a shared servitude which is the contrary of community. Esposito notes that Rousseau’s contract is even more absolute than that of Leviathan, because of his hypothesis of unsociability: Rousseauian individuals are closed in themselves and forming a society among such individuals demands a different approach than that of Hobbes. Rousseau ends up converging with Hobbes while trying to contest him. Rousseau’s effort to combine a manifested absolute solitude with community is for Esposito a failure. Esposito points out that Rousseau rejects Hobbes’s separation between the public and the private: ‘We have here a radical development with respects both to the extralegal relation of being able to be killed by everyone else (which is the Hobbesian argument) and as the non-relation of the state of nature in Rousseau’ (ibid., p. 65). Esposito also suggests that, while Hobbes denies the question of community, Rousseau attempts to resolve it through a myth. For Esposito, unlike for both Hobbes and Rousseau, people are joined together by the impossibility of the community: ‘This is what the law of the community says: that the limit cannot be erased nor can one cross it’ (ibid., pp. 76–77).

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According to Esposito, Bataille could be seen as the thinker who has elaborated the most radical anti-Hobbesian philosophy because Bataille ‘rejects Hobbes’s obsession with a conservatio vitae extended to such a degree that it sacrifices every other good to its own realization’ (ibid., p. 124). Bataille objects to the Hobbesian idea that contact with the other is to be avoided. Instead, he sees the community, rather radically, in the mutual infection of wounds. Instead of the Hobbesian economy of the contract, he seeks an economy and community based on gifts which have no motivation or demand of return. This is a way out of the Hobbesian logic of sacrifice, although in Bataille’s own thinking sacrifice is also an important theme. For Bataille, Nietzsche is the thinker who fought against the Hobbesian tradition, and who is a philosopher of community, of partition, a partage with the other instead of a Hobbesian wish of the individual to be everything (ibid., pp. 123–127, see also Esposito, 2013a, pp. 44–45; Bird, 2016, p. 165). For Esposito, the community is incompatible with the nihilism which characterizes our time, and that is ‘the underlying tendency of modern society’ (Esposito, 2010, p. 137). Hobbes was the thinker who initiated modern nihilism. For Hobbes, institutions are an ‘artificial prosthesis’, a way of protecting men from the others. The negativity of the originary community justifies the sovereign order (ibid., pp. 136–137, 140–141): If we are to speak of community in terms that aren’t simply nostalgic, there does remain the path of circumscribing nihilism within one feature or one particular moment of our experience, namely, to think of it as a phenomenon that ‘ends,’ that is destined to come apart at a certain point or at least to recede; or to understand it as a disease that has reached only a fixed set of organs in a body that is otherwise healthy. (ibid., pp. 136–137)

As a conclusion of his etymological and philosophical discussion on communitas, based on munus, a gift, Esposito suggests that community is distanced from ‘property that is collectively owned by a totality of individuals or by their having a common identity’ (ibid., pp. 137–138). Members of the community share rather ‘an expropriation of their own essence which isn’t limited to their “having” but one that involves and affects their own “being subjects”’ (ibid., p. 138). Thus, the discussion is moved from the political philosophy to the level of ontology. Community is characterized by the absence of subjectivity, of identity, of property. It is the relation that closes individual subjects off from their identity, ‘the threshold where they meet in a point of contact that brings them into relation with others to the degree to which it separates them from themselves’ (ibid., pp. 138–139). It is something that emerges when it is at the point of vanishing. Beginning from Rousseau and until contemporary communitarianism, the Hobbesian scheme of immunization is reversed. However, Esposito notes that

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immunization for Rousseau is applied to the collective instead of the Hobbesian individual level; therefore, Rousseau is still a part of the immunitarian logic. Rousseau idealizes a community that is self-sufficient and not translatable into a political community – an ideal that has affected the Romantic tradition.

IMMUNIZATION AND THE END OF VIOLENCE IN THE HOBBESIAN STATE Hobbes could be seen as the theoretician of the end of violence, or, as suggested by Michel Foucault, a philosopher of peace or of the neutralization of conflict (Esposito, 2008, p. 61). Esposito notes that the neutralization of conflict in the Hobbesian state is not complete. Part of the conflict is incorporated in the immunized organism. Esposito agrees with Machiavelli, who saw that a certain amount of conflict is good for society and makes it more dynamic than permanent stability. Vanessa Lemm describes immunization in her introduction to Esposito’s Terms of the Political: If community is our ‘outside,’ immunization is what brings us back within ourselves by cutting off all contact with the outside. Immunization is therefore understood as a frontier, a dividing line, a term or limit (of the political) that protects individual life from the demands of community. (Lemm, 2013, p. 4)

Lemm writes that for Esposito, community is the condition of our existence and that he is attempting to make a ‘shift from thanatopolitics to affirmative biopolitics’ and ‘from freedom understood as an immunitary device to a relational‐contagious experience’ (ibid., p.  11). Lemm points out that Esposito is trying to move away from the immunitary thinking of politics. Esposito presents two opposite interpretations of biopolitics: one radically negative and the other positive, he himself taking a stand for the possibility of an affirmative biopolitics. Esposito claims that ‘sovereignty seems to have extended and intensified its range of action’ recently, and sovereignty is now more directly engaged in questions of life and death (Esposito, 2008, p. 14). He goes through different vitalistic conceptions of the state, which see the state as a living organism, and refers to the Swedish writer Rudolph Kjellén, who, in a 1916 book, supposes that the state has instincts and natural drives. Here Kjellén uses the term biopolitics, possibly for the first time. According to Esposito, Kjellén takes us beyond the ancient metaphor of the body‐state that is also central in Hobbes’s thinking. Contrary to the Hobbesian view where life is preserved through instituting an artificial barrier to nature, the political in Kjellén’s view is seen as a continuation of nature at another level.

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All modern philosophies take a stand on the Hobbesian model of sovereign power: Esposito claims that they either affirm the absolute character of this power or insist on its limits (ibid., p. 25). Esposito sees Hobbes as a nihilistic thinker: Hobbes is ‘responsible for inaugurating modernity’s most celebrated immune scenario’ (Esposito, 2014, p. 86). By this, he means that the passage from the state of nature to the civil state is an ‘annihilation of the nothing that the community naturally bears within itself, through the production of an artificial nothing capable of converting its destructive effects into ordering ones’ (ibid.); see also Prozorov (2015, pp. 50–54). According to Esposito, ‘human beings are united in institutions by their alienation; they are immunized against what they have in common’ (Esposito, 2014, p. 107), referring to Arnold Gehlen’s theories which claim that freedom expands when an institutional apparatus grows: norms free us from excessive freedom of action. Esposito finds that the body metaphor of the state is often connected with a war-like attitude towards the outside. He opposes the use of the body metaphor as it leads us to think of the community as a closed entity, regardless of whether it is used in an ‘absolutist‐Hobbesian’ or ‘democratic‐Rousseaunian’ sense, and regardless of the political orientation of the user: [E]ach time the body is thought in political terms, or politics in terms of the body, an immunitary short‐circuit is always produced, one destined to close ‘the political body’ on itself and within itself in opposition to its own outside. (Esposito, 2008, p. 158)

The object of the political body is the self‐preservation of the political organism (ibid.). For Esposito, politics and the immunitary paradigm become connected in biopolitics: the meeting point is where life becomes the content of political action. The body is ‘the liminal zone where the immunitary intention of politics is carried out’ (Esposito, 2014, p. 113). Esposito focuses on the immunitary character of the widespread body politic metaphor: the life of the body politic is fragile and it needs to be protected from what threatens it. He points out that Hobbes understood the mortal precariousness of the body politic better than anyone else. Hobbes added a machine metaphor to supplement the body metaphor. It is a way of keeping ‘the body alive beyond its natural capacity’ (ibid., p. 115). Esposito emphasizes that in Hobbes, the body is immunized rather than replaced, and the life of the state, the Leviathan, is artificial. Hobbes’s role in biopolitics is crucial: he brings the question of life and safeguarding human life into the heart of political theory. For Esposito, ‘a truly fatal leap occurs when this immunitary turn in biopolitics intersects with the trajectory of nationalism, and then racism’ (Esposito, 2013a, p. 71). Esposito contrasts the Hobbesian model to the Rousseaunian model, where the

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immune mechanism of the political body has no need of artificial support and the body politic adheres to Merleau‐Ponty’s idea of the ‘flesh of the world’. Esposito opts for ‘flesh’ rather than ‘body’ as a relevant metaphor for our globalized world: There is no doubt that the category of ‘body’ no longer responds to questions posed by a world with no internal borders; and therefore it should be deconstructed through a different lexicon, one in which ‘flesh’ is the most meaningful term. (Esposito, 2014, p. 121)

He also makes a connection between the state of nature and the flesh: at the time of the early nation‐states ‘the “flesh” of a plural and potentially rebellious multitude […] needed to be integrated in a unified body at the command of the sovereign’ (Esposito, 2008, p. 165). One of the alternatives to the body politic metaphor comes from Rudolf Virchow’s cellular theory from the 19th century. It shows that the primacy commonly attributed to the brain and the heart is unfounded, since life is present in all cells of the body and in all individual citizens of the state (Esposito, 2014, p. 132). Jaakko Ailio has noted that Esposito’s use of the metaphor of flesh for a globalized world is in contradiction with his logic of biopolitical-affirmative biopolitics, which seeks to go beyond the negations of modern biopolitics. Ailio prefers Esposito’s discussions on organ transplants and birth as they are non-aporetic compared with the flesh/body dichotomy: immunity is put aside for a while in order for the embryo to survive or for the organ to be adjusted to the body (Ailio, 2017, pp. 64–65; Esposito, 2014, p. 170). Despite preferring the metaphor of the flesh for the world, Esposito admits that bodily confines are needed: ‘It is in the body and only in the body that life can remain what it is and even grow, be strengthened, and reproduce’ (ibid., p. 113). Esposito compares Nazism to autoimmune diseases, a notion he discusses at length in Immunitas (Esposito, 2014). Nazism turns the protective apparatus against its own body, which can be exemplified by Hitler’s final orders for the destruction of Germany’s infrastructure and his own self-destruction in his Berlin bunker. Esposito claims that in this sense, Nazism represents the culmination of biopolitics in the negative sense turned into a thanatopolitics (Esposito, 2008, p. 10; for the functioning of autoimmune diseases, see Esposito, 2014, pp. 162–163). Esposito sees biopolitics more positively than, for example, Agamben, and he distinguishes the darker version of biopolitics with the term thanatopolitics, as related to death instead of life. In an interview, Esposito presents two more recent examples of ‘immunitary obsessions’: I’m speaking of Islamic fundamentalism, which has decided to protect (even to the death) its religious, ethnic, and cultural purity from contamination by Western secularization; and the other found in certain parts of the West, and that is engaged

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in excluding the rest of the planet from sharing its own surplus of goods, as well as defending itself from the hunger that strikes a large part of the world that is increasingly condemned to forced anorexia. (Esposito, 2006, p. 53)

As an alternative to these immunitary obsessions, Esposito presents common life that reaches beyond boundaries: Common life is what breaks the identity‐making boundaries of individuals, exposing them to alteration – and thus potential conflict – from others. Also, because the community brings its members together in a common relationship that is necessarily one of reciprocity, it tends to confuse the boundaries between what is proper to each individual and what belongs to everybody and hence to nobody. (Esposito, 2014, p. 22)

Esposito sees the legal immunization as a ‘generalized form of bringing the common back to the proper’ (ibid., p. 25). An essential tension is here between law and force, force being the logical and historical precondition for law (ibid.). This is also the Hobbesian scheme: the sovereign (force) is the one who imposes the law. ‘Nothing stands behind Roman law other than its own founding force’, Esposito writes (ibid., p. 27). In his considerations of the body and immunity, Esposito is deeply influenced by Donna Haraway. Esposito notes that the immune system is ‘described as a military device, defending and attacking everything not recognized as belonging to it, and which must therefore be fended off and destroyed’ (ibid., p. 17). This idea of a need for violent defence in a body is extended to a larger reality as a need for defence against anything judged to be foreign, although more recent studies on immunity contest the monolithic conception and rather see immunity as a nonexcluding relation. Following Haraway, Esposito underlines the importance of the biomedical paradigm, which ‘directly affects our fundamental distinction between life and death’ (ibid., p. 153). Esposito finds military terminology in books by Dwyer and Nilsson about the immune system from the 1980s after the discovery of AIDS: ‘the detection of the enemy, the activation of the defence lines, the launch of the counterattack, the physical elimination of the captured opponents, to the clearing away of casualties from the field’ (ibid, p. 156). He cites Nilsson from The Body Victorious: ‘[a]utoimmune diseases are for the body what civil wars are to society’ (ibid., p. 164). After the battle of the immune system, the ‘body has regained its integrity: once immunized, it can no longer be attacked by the enemy’ (ibid, p. 159). Esposito doubts this complete victory in the reconstructions of the immune process, which forget the finite nature of human existence and the fragility of the body. Esposito points out a change in the body politic metaphor when moving from the sovereignty paradigm to the biopolitical paradigm: in Hobbes’s

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Leviathan, the body politic was still a juridico-political metaphor, whereas in biopolitics it has become a reality: the individuals who constitute a population are a real, material body that is a field for medical intervention. The change is represented by a shift ‘from the sovereign language of law to the biopolitical language of norms’ (ibid., pp. 137–138). Esposito, citing Foucault, sees sovereignty and biopolitics to be in opposition. He writes that ‘biopolitics is primarily that which is not sovereignty’ (Esposito, 2008, p. 33). The first one is more oriented towards the control of the bodies and that which they do, whereas the second one was interested in the appropriation of the earth and its products (ibid., p. 34). Instead of preserving its own power in a circular manner, power is now more interested in the lives of its subjects. Instead of obedience, the aim is the welfare of the governed: health, longevity, and wealth (ibid., 36). Some pages later, however, in Bíos, Esposito writes that sovereign power for Foucault is still included in biopower, ‘just as the sovereign model incorporates the ancient pastoral power’, and he identifies the reign of immunization with the reign of biopolitics (ibid., pp. 41, 52). Esposito adds that sovereignty is neither before nor after biopolitics but ‘cuts across the entire horizon, furnishing the most powerful response to the modern problem of the self-preservation of life. The importance of Hobbes’s philosophy, even before his disruptive categorical innovations, resides in the absolute distinctness by which this transition is felt’ (ibid., p. 57). ‘It’s not by chance that the man to whom Hobbes turns his attention is one characterized essentially by the body, by its needs, by its impulses, and by its drives’ (ibid.). The centrality of life is essential to Hobbes, and politics is given the responsibility of saving life. Sovereignty is the ‘second immunitary dispositive, which is destined to protect life against an inefficient and essentially risky protection’ (ibid., p. 59). For the subjects of the sovereign, resisting sovereignty would be resisting themselves. Esposito approaches the question of representation in Hobbes: the concept has a contradictory structure because the one representing the people, namely the sovereign, ‘is simultaneously identical and different with respect to those that he represents’ (ibid, p. 60). According to Esposito, recent historiography has shown that absolutism and individualism implicate each other instead of being in contradiction with each other. Individuals need to be considered equal with others in order to institute a sovereign that is capable of legitimately representing them. For Esposito, the Hobbesian state of nature is a horizontal, communal relation despite its leading to a generalized conflict. He writes that sovereignty that ends the natural state ‘is the not being in common [il non essere] of individuals, the political form of their desocialization’ (ibid., p. 61) and the artificial vacuum created around every individual. In the process of moving from the state of nature to the one ruled by a sovereign, the communal tie between individuals is cut. Esposito

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writes that Hobbes does not say it explicitly, but there is a remnant of violence that the immunitary apparatus cannot mediate because it has produced it itself. The fear of violent death that all feel towards the other is, in the Hobbesian scheme, replaced by the fear of the sovereign. The new situation still carries the possibility that the one protecting life may also take it away. But the subject cannot really be against anything the sovereign does, because ‘every particular man is Author of all the Soveraigne doth’ (Hobbes 1985/1651, p. 232). Esposito describes the situation: ‘It is as if the negative, keeping to its immunitary function of protecting life, suddenly moves outside the frame and on its reentry strikes life with uncontrollable violence’ (Esposito, 2008, pp. 62–63). Esposito presents Walter Benjamin’s view about violence and law in Immunitas: 1. Law is always founded at the beginning by a violent act (one that is legally unfounded); 2. once established, it excludes any other violence external to it; 3. but this exclusion can only be carried out by means of further violence, no longer to institute but rather to preserve the established power. In the final analysis, this is what law is: violence against violence in order to control violence. (Esposito, 2014, p. 29)

Esposito points out that Hobbes understood this interplay of violence and law since he preserved the natural right of the sovereign at the instant he took it away from someone else (ibid., p. 30). Esposito differentiates the biomedical immunity from the political‐juridical one, which he defines as ‘a temporary or definitive exemption on the part of subject with regard to concrete obligations or responsibilities that under normal circumstances would bind one to others’ (Esposito, 2008, p. 45). He links the immunitary principle to Hobbesian political philosophy, which places its emphasis on the conservatio vitae, the conservation of life. The immunization of the political body is similar to vaccinating the individual body by giving it a small amount of the pathogen which the body wants to protect itself from. Esposito refers to Talcott Parsons and Niklas Luhmann and suggests that the Hobbesian vaccine is conflict, which is both preserved and dominated in order; that order is the result of conflict. For Luhmann, systems need to produce, not reject, conflicts and contradictions as necessary antigens for reactivating their own antibodies. Esposito also quotes Luhmann saying that the legal system serves as society’s immune system (Esposito, 2014, p. 45). Esposito takes note of how communication in Luhmann’s thinking coincides with an immune device that constitutes both its condition and effect (ibid., pp. 46–47), and how ‘Luhmann leaves behind the classic oppositional dichotomy between order and conflict – conflict as that which hinders order, and order as that which eliminates conflict – which the Hobbesian paradigm of order was based on [...].

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The problem becomes how to produce enough contradictions to create a valid immune apparatus’ (ibid., p. 49). In Luhmann’s perspective we are undergoing a generalized immunization where there is no place for violence unless we see that the generalized immunization brings a greater risk, that of eliminating the community as a whole by preventive immunization. Esposito compares the Hobbesian immunitarian paradigm with that of Nietzsche, who he considers an anti-Hobbesian thinker, and suggests that for Hobbes the immunitary demand is primary, while for Nietzsche the will to power comes before the demand for protection. Esposito points out that compared with Hobbes, Nietzsche’s perspective shows the original biological matrix of the immunitary paradigm more clearly. Hobbes and several other authors are more concerned with the fear of violent death and then a demand for protection. Esposito also shows that Nietzsche moves from the animal metaphor originated by Hobbes (that man is a wolf toward his equals) to a more microscopic level, comparing men to parasites and bacilli. According to Esposito, however, Nietzsche’s animalization of man marks the future of the human species: ‘In Nietzsche, the animal is never interpreted as the obscure abyss or the face of stone from which man escapes. […] man who is capable of redefining the meaning of his own species no longer in humanistic or anthropological terms, but in anthropocentric or biotechnological terms’ (Esposito, 2008, pp. 87, 90, 100, 108–109). Esposito underlines the Hobbesian premise which is present in Nietzsche’s thinking: that ‘human society, whatever it may be, is unable to last unless it has an artificial order capable of neutralizing the potential violence that riddles it by nature’ (Esposito, 2014, p. 98). Nietzsche, similarly to Hobbes, believes that people dissimulate and deceive each other, but unlike Hobbes, he does not propose a strong sovereign to resolve the conflict caused by human nature. As an alternative to immunization, Esposito proposes in the article ‘Community, immunity, biopolitics’ rather concretely to ‘disable[ing] the apparatuses of negative immunization’ and ‘enabling new spaces of the common’ (Esposito, 2013b, p. 88). As the opposites of the common he presents the proper, the private and the immune: social ties are dissolved by appropriation, privatization, or immunization. The idea of the common good could be revived after the modern invention of the immunitary state shadowed it. Legal theorists and philosophers are working on the concept of the common good.4 The common is at risk from appropriation both by individuals and the state, and there are no legal statutes or codes to protect it. It was excluded from both modernization and globalization, and we even lack a vocabulary to

4 Esposito does not mention names in his article, but Michael Walzer and John Rawls might be theorists Esposito refers to here.

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talk about it. It is outside of the dichotomies of public/private and of global/ local. First, environmental resources were privatized, then city spaces, public buildings, roads and cultural assets, and finally intellectual resources, communication spaces and information tools. Esposito anticipates biological organs to be the next thing to be legally sold. Intertwined with privatizations, there is a reverse tendency in the globalization of ‘making public’ of the private, which diminishes the space of the common further. The expansion of the space of the common is for Esposito a battle for affirmative biopolitics which would mean, for example, fighting against the privatization of water, battling over energy sources, and re-examining the patents that prevent the distribution of cheaper medicines in poor areas. He defines affirmative biopolitics as a turn from life as an object of politics to life as a subject of politics. Esposito calls for ‘the protection of those who are weakest in social, cultural and generational terms’ (ibid., p. 87) and opposes ‘dividing barriers, blocks to the circulation of ideas, languages, and information, surveillance mechanisms set up in all the sensitive places’ (ibid., p. 88). Esposito is not entirely clear in his division of the proper, the private and the immune as the three opposites of the common: it seems that two, the proper and the private, can be immunized, so the existence of the immune as a separate category does not seem justified, and also the difference between the proper and the private is not explained in his otherwise thorough and clear article.

CONCLUSION According to Esposito, the end of violence promised by Hobbes’s model is not fulfilled because violence and the state of nature, which is a state of war, are still present in the order created by the sovereign. Esposito criticizes the Hobbesian origin of the state that destroys the communitas. Esposito opposes several aspects of the Hobbesian paradigm, especially his use of the body politic metaphor and his immunitary model, where people give the power to the sovereign in order to protect themselves, but at the same time lose connection to other people (see also Ulbricht, 2015, p. 46). Esposito’s alternative is to think of a world with no clear distinction between inside and outside, which would more closely resemble the flesh, that is situated all over with no borders than a clearly defined body. As a model of non-exclusive immunization on a biomedical level, he presents a pregnant mother’s immune system which allows the embryo to grow despite the possibly different blood group (Esposito, 2014, pp. 18, 169, 171; Ailio, 2017, pp. 65–66), or an implant that is foreign to the body but which the body can tolerate (Esposito, 2014,

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pp. 147–149, 167). Esposito can be described as a pacifist5 on two levels: he emphasizes the new biological interpretations of the body’s immune system which are not as defensive and military as earlier biological research showed (ibid., p. 154), and he is against war in the Hobbesian scheme of forming a state. Esposito raises immunization, sacrifice, and protection as the main Hobbesian ideas, all of which are problematic for him. Immunization and protection are ideas which Hobbes himself would probably accept, but the idea of sacrifice of the common which is needed for protection is more Esposito’s interpretation of Hobbes than an original Hobbesian idea. Esposito insists on the link between modernity and self-preservation, and he voices his preference for a more communitarian way of organizing society which is not based on self-preservation. It is possible to see here a certain nostalgia for the communitarian premodern in his thinking. This claim, however, is contradicted by his positive view on genetic engineering and similar techniques raised by Serafini (2017), and especially by his non-identity-based, fluid and borderless view of the community, for which we can hardly describe Esposito as a political reactionary. There seems to be a contradiction in how Esposito, on the one hand, writes in Immunitas that Hobbes destroys the nothing that is for him at the core of the community, and on the other hand, in Bíos, that immune ‘is the “nonbeing” or the “not-having” anything in common’. Esposito himself claims that community is the community of people who do not have anything in common, and he accuses Hobbes of immunization, which leads to not having anything in common – the same condition that he gives as the ideal situation of a community. A possible explanation to this paradox could be found in their different conception of human beings: for Esposito, they want to join together in a community without a mediator, whereas for Hobbes, they are a danger to each other, and being forcefully joined together by a sovereign does not imply anything common between the subjects. Despite this contradiction, Esposito’s analysis that immunization has a Hobbesian origin (at least partly) in the history of political thought is convincing, since it helps understand the controversies in, for example, the Nazi regime that murdered on an industrial scale and at the same time made great efforts to ensure public health by starting programs to enhance health and safety (Esposito, 2013a, pp. 79–83; Ailio, 2017, p. 36). Also, the way in which European politics is dealing with immigration, mostly trying to limit it due to pressure from extreme right parties, is However, Esposito is in favour of arming Europe as a part of its political unification process: ‘In order to defend, even in the face of more aggressive strategies, a model of civilization based on peaceful relations, Europe needs to equip itself with a military force, which is to be used only as a last resort, to uphold its principles and interests’ (Esposito, 2018, p. 229). 5

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a good example of immunitary politics. On a more general level, the role of institutions liberating us from community ties is well described in Esposito’s account of the Hobbesian contract society. Most of all, the value of Esposito’s work lies in conceptual elaboration rather than in practical advice. He writes that he does not believe that philosophy’s task would be to offer models of political institutions or that biopolitics could become a revolutionary or reformist manifesto (Esposito, 2013a, p. 77). In an interview, he says he has adapted a Deleuzean view, ‘according to which the primary character of philosophy is that of constructing concepts that can keep pace with the events that involve and transform us’ (Esposito, 2006, p. 52). These philosophical concepts are really needed to help to understand our complex time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Ailio, J., 2017. Theory of Biopolitics and the Global Response to HIV/AIDS: From Critique to Affirmation. Tampere: Tampere University Press. Bird, G., 2016. Containing Community – From Political Economy to Ontology in Agamben, Esposito, and Nancy. Albany: State University of New York Press. Bonito Oliva, R., 2006. From the Immune Community to the Communitarian Immunity: On the Recent Reflections of Roberto Esposito. Diacritics 36, 2: 70–82. Esposito, R., 2000. Communitas. Origine et destin de la communauté. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Esposito, R., 2006. Interview. Diacritics 36, 2: 49–56. Esposito, R., 2008. Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Esposito, R., 2010. Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Esposito, R., 2012. Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Esposito, R., 2013a. Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. New York: Fordham University Press. Esposito, R., 2013b. Community, Immunity, Biopolitics. Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 18, 3: 83–90. Esposito, R., 2014. Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Esposito, R., 2015. Biological Life and Political Life. In: Calcagno, A. (ed.) Contemporary Italian Political Philosophy, pp. 11–22. New York: SUNY Press. Esposito, R., 2018. A Philosophy for Europe: From the Outside. Cambridge: Polity Press. Hobbes, T., 1985/1651. Leviathan. Penguin Classics. London: Penguin Books. Hobbes, T., 2008a/1650. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hobbes, T., 2008b/1680. The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hobbes, T., 2018/1647. On the Citizen. Original: De Cive. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lemm, V., 2013. Introduction: Biopolitics and Community in Roberto Esposito. In: Esposito, R., Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics, pp. 1–14. New York: Fordham University Press. Prozorov, S., 2015. Towards a Post-Hobbesian Community? Nature, Artifice and the Form-of-Life. Hobbes Studies 28: 50−63. Serafini, L., 2017. Beyond the Person: Roberto Esposito and the Body as ‘Common Good’. Theory, Culture & Society 34, 7–8: 215–228. Ulbricht, A., 2015. Multicultural Immunization: Liberalism and Esposito. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

3. Governing according to nature: Jean Bodin on climates, humours, and temperaments1 Samuel Lindholm Before climate change became the issue of unprecedented political importance that it is today, the term ‘climate’ used to occupy the centre of a very different political discussion. Instead of studying the consequences that political decisions and human action have on the earth’s climate system, the likes of sixteenth-century jurist and political philosopher Jean Bodin were focused on the effects that specific climates, and the environment in a more general sense, were believed to have on people and politics. Like many of those who came before him, Bodin supposed that people had bodies that consisted of physical matter and that both their composition and the way they behaved were influenced greatly by the specific environment that they occupied. This invites the argument that climate ‘is, and always has been, political’ (Hulme, 2017, p. xii). The notion of climate is understood here in a somewhat wide sense. ‘Climate theory’ is often used to signify everything from celestial bodies to the climates of large latitudinal zones (northern, southern, and temperate regions), small microclimates within them (such as swamps, mountains, valleys, etc.), as well as the impact that these factors were believed to have on the health, humoural makeup, and overall conduct of human bodies. Therefore, climate theory, which should perhaps be called the theory of environmental influence, was not studied solely by those interested in natural philosophy and science: it was also an explicitly political question. This is clear in the case of Bodin, who goes as far as to state that ‘governments of commonwealths must be diversified according to the diversities of their situations’ (Bodin, 1955, p. 146 [1583,

An earlier version of this chapter is included in the doctoral dissertation, ‘Jean Bodin and Biopolitics’ (Lindholm, 2022) which was defended at the University of Jyväskylä in early 2022. 1

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p. 666]).2 He also argues that all rulers ought to comprehend the importance of their environment or face the possibility of devastation. Bodin discusses climate in several instances, but his most notable efforts take place in his main work, the République. The theory of environmental influence seems to have been of great personal importance for Bodin, who appears to have discussed it with the Virgin Queen Elizabeth I during his journey made to England with the entourage of his patron, the French king’s brother Francis, Duke of Anjou, who was looking to marry the foreign monarch without success (Kuntz, 2008, p. xxiii, n. 29). While climate theory occupies a noteworthy position in Bodin’s political thought, we ought to ask why one should pay attention to this archaic discipline today. Modern science offers little support for the ancient and medieval conceptions on climates.3 Furthermore, the related ideas concerning astrology and humourism (the ancient medical system based on four basic humours or bodily fluids) have become equally obsolete. The answer is that studying these themes may prove to be of great use in establishing a biopolitical reading of Bodin’s magnum opus – after all, we are dealing with the political nature of the human body. Such a viewpoint can provide us with new perspectives on both the study of the notion of biopolitics and the phenomenon’s debated history. If Bodin’s political thought can be argued to include a distinct biopolitical element (understood here as a rationale that seeks to govern physical bodies in order to achieve a stable and optimized society), we may have to reconsider the larger Foucauldian canon of biopolitics that chooses to date the origin of such discourses to a much later period. Furthermore, climate theory and its explicit connection to politics are among the issues that Bodin is most remembered for. As Kenneth D. McRae puts it, Bodin’s ‘concept of sovereignty, his theory of climate, and his advocacy of religious toleration have today become commonplace in practically all the histories of political thought’ (McRae, 1962b, p. A vii). Moreover, the Angevin’s climate theory has been deemed to be ‘almost as widely known as his concept of sovereignty’ (McRae, 1962a, pp. A 3–A 13). Although his take on the theory is built largely upon ancient and medieval ideas, his contributions remain a noteworthy chapter in the history of early modern political philosophy. Understanding this is crucial to completing the picture on Bodin’s political thought as a whole. Climate theory, again a somewhat misleading

2 Like most scholars, I use the extended 1583 French edition of Bodin’s 1576 République. I use M.J. Tooley’s 1955 abridged translation for English quotes while displaying the original source in brackets. 3 It has been claimed that Bodin’s contribution to climate theory was less entirely scientific, and more a powerful metaphor used for political purposes (Spavin, 2017, pp. 39, 47).

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term used to signify the sum of all environmental influence, cannot thus be brushed off simply as a peculiar quirk of the past. Bodin was by no means the first to propose a theory of climates or humours. His description of the way that these factors were supposed to affect people’s actions was not particularly original either. In fact, he was not even the first to argue for their political significance. However, his take on the subject does still differ from most ancient, medieval, and early modern theories. Compared to his predecessors, Bodin was much less concerned about the specifics of how climates and humours were believed to affect the health and actions of single individuals (ibid, pp. A 22–A 23). Furthermore, he did not concentrate his efforts on the already thoroughly debated questions concerning the compatibility of free will and environmental influence (ibid). He had other things in mind. Indeed, Bodin placed most of his focus on the specifically social and political elements of the climate question (ibid). In other words, he applied the pre-existing theory in a manner that made it inseparable from the questions of political governing (ibid). He went as far as to claim that all previous political writers had neglected the topic, often with disastrous consequences (Bodin, 1583, VI.1, p. 663; see Tooley, 1953, p. 64). He made plans to end such detrimental ignorance and never shied away from calling out those who had not devoted enough time and effort to the study of the all-important matter. For example, he mentions Niccolò Machiavelli by name as someone who had absolutely no idea about the different peoples and had never read a good book in his life (Bodin, 1583, VI.1, p. 686). We begin this chapter with a brief look at the known origins of theories concerning humours, temperaments, and climates. We introduce some of the most famous theorists in the respective fields, many of whom Bodin himself cites as authorities on the matter. This allows us to establish a basic understanding of the ancient and medieval discussions that the Angevin and other early modern thinkers would later contribute to. Secondly, we take a look at Bodin’s climate theory and the forms of environmental influence that he believed in. We focus predominantly on the political aspects of his argument, which include, but are not limited to, the proper governing of particular peoples and the suitable form of state according to their natural inclinations. Finally, we consider the possibility of establishing a biopolitical reading of this peculiar, yet essential branch in the Angevin’s political thought. We discuss his takes on sex, bodily and mental health, as well as the different interventions he would employ to alter natural dispositions in order to thwart undesirable traits caused by specific climates.

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THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT In order to comprehend Bodin’s contributions to climate theory as clearly as possible, we ought to first examine some of the fundamental ideas and historical discussions revolving around this topic. The three concepts that are of most use for us are humours, temperaments, and climates, all of which date back at least to the medical and geographical theories of antiquity. According to these ideas, which are inseparably intertwined in Bodin’s thought, the specific climates and dominant bodily humours have numerous effects on both the health and the behaviour of human beings. Humours, Elements, and Temperaments The theory of four bodily fluids or humours (Greek khymos, meaning literally ‘juice’) and the pivotal role they were believed to play in bodily health was incorporated systematically into written medical theory in Nature of Man (Greek: Peri physeōs anthrōpou),4 which is often credited to the famed physician Hippocrates of Cos (c. 460–c. 370 BCE). There is no certainty about the true authorship when it comes to the majority of his texts, but this single most important Hippocratic work that discusses humours is believed to have been written by Polybus (fl. c. 400 BCE), who was Hippocrates’s student and son-in-law (see Aristotle, Hist. An. 2.3). Regardless of who wrote it, the model in Nature of Man (IV) considers the human body to consist of four basic fluids: blood (haima), phlegm (phlegma), yellow bile (xantē kholē), and black bile (melaina kholē). A healthy body is composed of a balanced mixture of these four humours, whereas their disproportion and separation within the body are believed to cause pain. Each of the humours produces specific corporeal effects and they all have a unique association with one of the four seasons (ibid, VII). Phlegm is cold and wet; therefore, it seems only logical that it is connected to winter. Blood is tied to spring, as both the season and the fluid are moist and warm. Summer, the hottest and driest of the seasons, is linked with yellow bile. Finally, black bile, which is cold and dry, increases during autumn. The connections between the humours and the associated times of the year are reinforced further by the fact that certain medical issues seem to always intensify during the corresponding season; there is, for example, obviously more mucus (phlegm) in the throat and the nose during winter than there usually is during any other season (ibid). The age of the person seems to

The Hippocratic corpus also includes a somewhat misleadingly titled work Humours [Peri khymōn]. In actuality, only Nature of Man explores the topic in depth (see Jones, 1959, p. xxxii). 4

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also affect the prevalence of specific humours, but the author of Nature of Man does not yet develop this idea to its fullest form (ibid, IV; see Jouanna, 2012, p. 335). If we are to believe another Hippocratic work, Regimen in Health (I), the composition of humours can also be altered to some extent with a regimen befitting the current season (see Jouanna, 2012, p. 335). This means that the people can actually improve their health by modifying their humoural balance. Plato and Aristotle make no tangible reference to the Hippocratic theory of four bodily fluids per se (ibid, pp. 327–338). In fact, while humours in general did merit some discussion, the theory concerning the four specific ones mentioned above was not picked up before Galen (129–c. 200/216 CE) discussed this and other Hippocratic theories in some of his works (ibid). However, the second-century physician did not adopt the humoural theory as such but, instead, fused it together with the pre-Socratic philosopher Empedocles’s (c. 494–434 BCE) ideas concerning the four ‘elements’: earth, air, fire, and water in his Fragments (15–20). This connection may seem obvious, but it did not exist within the Hippocratic model.5 Although the two formulations had not been connected explicitly in any known sources before Galen (see On Hippocrates’ On the Nature of Man, pp. 51–53), they do share several noticeable similarities. For example, while the system of four bodily fluids is absent in Plato’s works, he believed that the four elements were behind comparable health effects (Plato, Tim. 86a); meanwhile, Aristotle (Meteor. 4.339a) famously supposed that all the matter in the world consists of the four elements. One of Galen’s most interesting contributions to the humoural theory in On Hippocrates’ On the Nature of Man (pp. 95–97) has to do with him matching the dominant bodily fluids tentatively with certain human characteristics. This signals the birth of an early theory of temperaments. According to the fully developed model, a person dominated by black bile (melaina kholē) is considered melancholic; someone with an overabundance of phlegm is phlegmatic; a person dominated by blood (Latin: sanguis) is sanguine; while someone with large quantities of yellow bile (xantē kholē) is choleric. Other contributors to medicine in late antiquity would complete the connection between elements and humours as well as that of humours and temperaments (Jouanna, 2012, pp. 327–341). Humourism would stay relevant during the European Middle Ages and beyond.6 As we can clearly see with Bodin and his contemporaries, similar ideas remained more or less viable during early modernity. However, they The Galenic connection between elements and humours remains incomplete since one of the humours, blood, does not yet correspond to a single element (Jouanna, 2012, pp. 327–341). 6 Avicenna devoted an influential chapter to the study of humours in his medical encyclopaedia, The Canon of Medicine (I, IV, pp. 67–113). 5

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were also beginning to attract criticism. The Galenic theories would face their first true challenge in 1543 by Bodin’s contemporary Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica (The Fabric of the Human Body; see Vesalius, 2014) and later by William Harvey’s 1628 work Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus (An Anatomical Exercise on the Motion of the Heart and Blood in Living Beings; see Harvey, 2013). Terms like melancholic and phlegmatic are still widely used today while the idea of human temperaments persists in modern psychology. Even though this modern notion bears virtually no reference to the obsolete theory of four humours, or the original temperaments associated with them, it still refers to certain behavioural patterns that are based on nature (biology). According to Michel Foucault, psychology, which came into existence after the so-called classical period, ended up reducing ‘the classical experience of unreason to a strictly moral perception of madness’ (Foucault, 1965, p. 197). Before this development, physical and psychological interventions were inseparable from one another. For example, an attempt to reduce melancholia through labour was not a purely psychological treatment in the modern sense of the word, because it had to do with a more holistic view of the human being and associated factors such as ‘the movement of the spirits in the nerves, the density of the humors’ (ibid). Climes and Climates While the four humours and their specific connection to issues such as bodily health, human actions, and politics play an important role in Bodin’s larger theory regarding environmental influence, there is also another, perhaps even more significant, element that we need to discuss in order to comprehend his vision. We are dealing with a different (yet connected) ancient idea adopted by the Angevin – climate or, more specifically, the division of the earth into distinct latitudinal zones also known as climes, which can be split even further into a mosaic of smaller microclimates. One of the most important formulations concerning the effects of climates comes from Aristotle, who argues that the people of distinctive locations (for example the cold north) display particular characteristics: The nations inhabiting the cold places and those of Europe are full of spirit but somewhat deficient in intelligence and skill, so that they continue comparatively free, but lacking in political organization and capacity to rule their neighbors. The peoples of Asia on the other hand are intelligent and skillful in temperament, but lack spirit, so that they are in continuous subjection and slavery. But the Greek race participates in both characters, just as it occupies the middle position geographically, for it is both spirited and intelligent; hence it continues to be free and to have very good political institutions, and to be capable of ruling all mankind if it attains

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constitutional unity. The same diversity also exists among the Greek races compared with one another: some have a one-sided nature, others are happily blended in regard to both these capacities. (Aristotle, Pol. 7.1327b)

According to Aristotle, peoples of certain areas are naturally inclined towards servitude, while others are considered as natural rulers because of their climate. This prototype of racial theory, or form of racism understood in a very wide sense of the word,7 would prove to be a convenient instrument for imperialists (Isaac, 2004, p. 503). In another work, Meteorology, Aristotle (2.362a) divides the earth into five distinct zones. According to him, both poles of the earth are uninhabitable due to extreme cold while the area surrounding the equator is also uninhabitable, but this time due to the opposite reason – extreme heat. Two temperate and habitable zones are, therefore, left to either side of the equatorial zone, each limited by one of the polar regions. The words ‘clime’ and ‘climate’ are derived from the Greek term klima (plural: klimata), which is used to signify a slope or an inclination, but which also carries a more technical meaning denoting the latitudinal zones of the earth that would often be determined based on the duration of the longest day (Shcehglov, 2007, pp. 152–192). One famous division is presented by the Egyptian geographer and astronomer Claudius Ptolemy (ca. 100–ca. 170 CE) who provides a system of seven climes in his Almagest (2.6). Centuries later, Bodin, too, would divide the earth into distinct zones, which were, furthermore, connected to corresponding humours and specific effects witnessed in the health, behaviour, and politics of their inhabitants. Bodin is not the first one to establish a link between humours and climates. Such an idea appears, for example, in the part of De Regimine Principum (2.1.1–2.2.2) that is credited to Thomas Aquinas. Here, we witness a claim that bodily health is the product of a temperate mixture of the bodily fluids, and that living in a moderate climate between the two extremes is the best way of preserving this desirable balance. Even more noteworthy is the fact that his argument includes an explicit political aspect: politics and armies tend to be more successful if they reside in a temperate region and, therefore, cities ought to be established accordingly (ibid). The question concerning environmental factors, understood now in a narrower sense, meaning the conditions of a specific place within the larger zones, is often just as important as the massive climes. While Bodin (1583, p. 663) places a lot of emphasis on the typical characteristics that the peoples of each habitable zone display, he does not fail to note the significance of the Racism in the narrow sense is tied to hereditary race, but the term can also be used in a wider meaning in order to denote other powerful inclinations (see Isaac, 2004, pp. 104–105). 7

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microclimates within the larger climes. People from distinct locations such as the mountains or the valleys act differently even if they both inhabit the same zone, which is considered to be characterized mostly by one of the four humours. The author of the Hippocratic work Airs, Waters, Places (VI–IX) has been credited as the first to devise an argument for health-related influence of environmental factors (more specifically airs, waters, and places as the name of the book would suggest; see Miller, 1962, p. 130). Both Plato (Laws 5.747d–e) and Aristotle (Pol. 7.1330a) were also aware of the environment’s health-related significance. On a similar note, the Romans were conscious of the unhealthy properties of marshes (see Vitruvius’ The Ten Books on Architecture, IV). Bodin (1583, VI.1, p. 663) also mentions them as one of the notable microclimates within the larger climes. Many years later, Foucault connects the emergence of biopolitics to the people’s ‘environment, the milieu in which they live, the direct effects of the geographical, climatic, or hydrographic environment: the problem, for instance, of swamps, and of epidemics linked to the existence of swamps throughout the first half of the nineteenth century’ (Foucault, 2003, p. 245).8 There is no reason to assume that the ancient discussions concerning the negative effects of swamps were somehow less biopolitical.

BODIN ON NATURAL INCLINATIONS [Bodin’s] doctrines were a deduction from still current medieval physiological theories about the close inter-relation of mind and body. Temperature and humidity determine physique, and physique determines mental and moral aptitudes. This being so it is obvious that the forms of law and government must also be shaped by these unalterable conditions. (Tooley, 1955, xxxii)

Bodin represents a continuation of ancient and medieval ideas that were still very much topical during early modernity when he applied the theory to specifically governmental purposes. He approached the subject from several angles, but since this chapter delves into the theory’s specifically political and governmental aspects, we ought to focus on the first chapter of the fifth book in the République (Bodin, 1583, pp. 663–701). Anyone familiar with the République will not be surprised by the fact that Bodin discusses a topic such as this in one of the final two books of his major opus. The concluding parts of the work have

Raphaël Morera (2017, pp. 62, 71) has argued that the climate theories of Bodin and his contemporaries were linked directly to state efforts towards altering the land for the use of the people. These projects had to do especially with the draining of harmful marshes in a population-political manner that made room for a larger and healthier populace. 8

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proven themselves veritable goldmines for the purposes of studying Bodin’s applied approaches to political questions. However, it is important to notice that the République was by no means the only instance in which Bodin discussed the topic of climate. He had already published what has been described as the ‘first draft’ (Tooley, 1953, p. 64) of the same chapter in his first important work, the Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem (Method for the Easy Comprehension of History) (1566, V, pp. 91–176).9 He also continued to discuss related issues in his later books, such as the Universae naturae theatrum: in quo rerum omnium effectrices causae, & fines contemplantur, & continuae series quinque libris discutiuntur, in which he would focus on the theory of the celestial bodies and how they were believed to affect physical matter (Bodin, 1596, pp. 15–16; see Tooley, 1953, pp. 66–68). Astrological theories like this were widely accepted during the late Middle Ages, and while they had started to attract criticism in early modernity, the Angevin chose to stand by them (Tooley, 1953, pp. 66–68). As we are about to witness, they are also very much present in his main work. It is important to notice that Bodin’s ideas regarding environmental influence did not stay consistent throughout his career. It can be argued that he ‘retains the gist’ (Miglietti, 2020, p. 146) of what he said in the Methodus, ‘while also further developing his theory of climates in the direction of practical governmental application’ (ibid) in the context of his main work. However, his later contributions tell a somewhat different story. The mature Angevin would attempt to leave the political inquiries behind in favour of a theological and natural approach (Spavin, 2017, pp. 49–51). He would also renounce the idea of an Aristotelian mean between two vices that still dominated his more famous works, according to which the upright temperate zone should be seen as superior to its less-than-perfect northern and southern counterparts (ibid). M.J. Tooley (1953) and Richard Spavin (2017; see also 2014) provide excellent comparative readings of Bodin’s various takes on the topic. However, because our focus here is oriented specifically towards the political aspects of climate theory, and especially its governmental applications, this chapter looks at the Angevin’s main work, the République. The Diversity of Peoples So far in discussing the commonwealth we have been concerned with general principles. It remains to discuss the particular characteristics of the different sorts of commonwealth that the diversity of races [diversité des peuples] requires. Political institutions must be adapted to environment and human laws to natural laws. Those 9 Bodin’s own Latin translation of the République (1586, pp. 491–525) also includes this same chapter without many major additions (see Tooley, 1953, p. 64).

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who have failed to do this, and have tried to make nature obey their laws, have brought disorder, and even ruin, on great states. (Bodin, 1955, p. 145 [1583, p. 663])

Bodin divides the earth into latitudinal zones in a manner that is highly reminiscent of Aristotle’s model in Meteorology. To be more precise, the Angevin allots all of the commonwealths in the northern hemisphere into three 30-degree climes (Bodin, 1583, p. 667). The first 30 degrees north of the equator make up the hot south, the next 30 degrees encompass the temperate zone in the middle, whereas the final 30 degrees belong to the frigid north (ibid). After establishing these main categories, Bodin moves on to divide each of them into two, thus ending up with six separate 15-degree zones within the hemisphere. However, he does not seem to find either the entire southern half of the globe or the most torrid and frigid 15 degrees of the northern hemisphere that interesting. For example, he goes on to describe the northernmost zone as a place habited only by a few beastlike cave-dwellers. According to Bodin, there are thus only four climes that are of any actual consequence. There are several differences between the peoples that occupy the distinct zones. Bodin devotes most of his efforts to describe the typical characteristics of the people living in the habitable north and south. Let us discuss the northerners first. Bodin believes that these people are strong and large and that their immense appetite matches their sizable frames (ibid, pp. 668–673). Due to the cold environment that they inhabit, their bodies conserve a lot of heat and their insides are thus hot and humid (ibid, p. 699). The northerners are known for having an abundance of physical force and they can amass great armies, which, however, do not tend to fare well when they march too deep into the south (ibid). The most significant drawback to the great power wielded by the northerners seems to be the fact that they are described as cruel and not fully commanded by reason (ibid, pp. 579–681). The stereotypical northerner is thus a brutish character blessed with a large and strong frame but also someone who lacks the optimal mental capacities. Climates also affect the way that people look. This is why those living in the cold regions have a distinct appearance: their eyes are green, and their hair is either blonde or ginger depending on the exact latitude (ibid, p. 668). Their skin is fair and hairy; they sweat easily and lack the ability to stand the heat (ibid, p. 699). In comparison, Bodin thinks that southerners are the complete opposite of their northern counterparts when it comes to most of the aforementioned characteristics. They are typically smaller and weaker; they are also cold and dry inside, which is a result of their hot habitat (ibid). They need less nutrition but since this is due to their natural inclination and not to virtue, they should not be praised for it (ibid, pp. 668–673). Furthermore, their appetite seems to grow whenever they travel towards the north (ibid). Like northerners, the people of the south are cruel; however, the two display opposed forms of viciousness.

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As mentioned, northerners are brutish whereas the cunning southerners allow their melancholic passions to push them towards plotting cruel revenge against their enemies (ibid). Like northerners, the people of the south have a distinct appearance; their eyes and skin are dark, because black is the colour of melancholy, the humour that dominates them (ibid, p. 678). Their hair is also black and coiled from the dryness (ibid, pp. 673–674, 699). Finally, they have less hair and they do not sweat as easily as northerners do (ibid). Bodin speaks much less about the people occupying the middle region than he does about those living in the habitable north and the south. The temperate people are defined mainly as an optimal amalgamation of the two less than perfect extremes. The intermediate area does, nevertheless, have its own unique characteristics as well. Bodin describes these people as just – they are not affected by either the brutish or the cunning form of cruelty (ibid, pp. 679–681). If northerners are natural soldiers (ibid, p. 699) or labourers (ibid, p. 690) and southerners are philosophers or scientists, the people of the middle region are inclined towards law and governing (ibid). This prowess is unique to them and it does not seem to come with large drawbacks; instead, the temperate people get to enjoy the desirable qualities that make the other regions great (contemplation and military might), although with some moderation (ibid, pp. 668–673). Bodin connects the climates to a plethora of other issues as well. Some of these associations bear a striking resemblance to the ancient humoural theories and their previously mentioned connections with issues such as the bodily fluids, the four seasons, and different kinds of sickness. Bodin’s suggestions include, for example, a comparison between the different climates and the ages of man (although he does not go into much detail; ibid, p. 686). He also argues that the planets have their own relation to specific climes (ibid, p. 691). The south is connected to Saturn and Venus, which imply wisdom and venereal inclinations of the southerners, the latter of which is discussed in greater depth later in this chapter. The middle zone is linked to Jupiter and Mercury, which signify the temperate people’s competence in political government. Meanwhile, the north shares a bond with Mars and the moon, which symbolize war and hunting. The most notable association that Bodin devises has to do with the four humours. While each of the bodily fluids and their corresponding temperaments can be found from all climates, each of them seems to play a dominant role in specific parts of the world. Although the manifestation of specific humours does not seem to fit in perfectly with the exact 15-degree allocations mentioned earlier, the climes can still be used as beneficial guidelines. Hot and moist northerners, such as the Scandinavians, are phlegmatic, which renders them heavy and unsubtle (ibid, p. 679). The temperate zone, which is divided into two halves, is also the home to two distinct humours. The northernmost

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people of the temperate zone are sanguine. This temperament is found, for example, in the Germans who are joyous and strong (ibid, p. 678). Choleric, the second temperate people, can be found dominant in France where the people are active and prompt (ibid, pp. 677–678). The final temperament consists of melancholic people like the Spaniards of the south, who are restful, contemplative, and, oftentimes, sad (ibid, p. 699). Of course, Bodin does not suggest that simple latitudinal lines on a chart are enough to categorize the people of enormous areas into four distinct, unambiguous, and homogenous groups. Instead, there is an abundance of other elements that affect the natural inclinations of human beings. For example, there is a world of difference between the two points of the compass that we have not yet mentioned. The east is considered to be more like the south while the west is more related to the north (ibid, pp. 690–691). Furthermore, the general qualities of the zones do not apply strictly to all of the people in a single climate, country, or even a city (ibid). The people within the same zone may display different temperaments depending on their specific habitats (ibid, p. 663), which may be described as microclimates. Mountainous people, for example, are somewhat reminiscent of northerners even if they live deep in the south (ibid, pp. 694–697). People of barren areas are industrious and populous, the people of fertile places tend to be cowardly, whereas heavily trafficked locations, such as coastal towns and islands, are filled with merchants and dishonest people who display a diversity of humours (ibid). Sex, Health, and Madness It is imperative to notice that most of the inclinations caused by the climates are primarily corporeal; they have to do with the human body and the way it is conducted (McRae, 1962a, p. A 23). Erotic behaviour is one of the most noticeable bodily functions augmented by the environment. Bodin (1583, p. 683) considers southerners to be the lustiest among all of the people. He even argues that the ratio between men and women is different depending on the latitude. Some southern men have multiple wives, which is exemplified by the lavish harems of their rulers (ibid, p. 691). Meanwhile, there seem to be fewer women in the north than there are men, some of whom are left without a wife (ibid, p. 683). Northerners are known for their sexual inactivity and even occasional celibacy, which is not due to chastity but their natural inclinations (ibid). It comes as no surprise that the temperate people land in the golden mean of this spectrum – they are moderate in their carnal desires and usually opt for a single wife (ibid). How does the north retain its characteristic strength if the people there are indeed so impotent? Bodin (1586, p. 507) answers this question in the Latin version of the République where he argues that frequent and promiscuous sex

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acts tend to lead to a decreased number of children and a greater degree of heterogeneity in the offspring. Bodin alludes to Lycurgus, the semi-mythical lawgiver of Sparta, who, according to Plutarch’s The Life of Lycurgus (15.1–3, 16.6), wanted to limit the frequency of sexual intercourse by forbidding men from spending the nights with their wives. This restriction enforced self-constraint among the austere Spartans, but it also allowed their ‘bodies to be full of creative energy’ (ibid 15.3) when they finally did get the opportunity to reunite with their partners. Such build-up explains why northerners have plenty of children even though they perform intercourse much less often than their southern counterparts. Bodin (1586, p. 507) also makes the curious argument that this is why all northern children look alike. As we have established, the Hippocratic humoural theory was tied to the field of medicine. Bodin follows this and other ancient theories by stating that climates and humours have specific effects on bodily health. For example, the melancholic temperament of southerners seems to act as the key to their extended lifespan (Bodin, 1583, p. 685). However, the south should not be thought of as a symbol of great health since the deadliest diseases seem to always come from the south or the east, which is again associated more with the south than it is with the north (ibid, p. 692). Bodin also links different forms of mental illness with the different humours (see Tooley, 1953, pp. 74–76). The Angevin states that the melancholic people are more predisposed to becoming frenzied or mad with fury (furieux) than others (Bodin, 1583, p. 681). In fact, southern commonwealths need to have an increased number of hospitals just in order to treat all the people affected by this condition. Meanwhile, the joyous sanguine people display a completely different kind of madness (folie), which makes them dance, laugh, and jump around wildly (ibid). As we discussed previously, northerners are considered slow and phlegmatic, whereas the choleric French people seem to dodge yet another bullet. It is plain to see that the question of climate is intertwined with that of the human body. Furthermore, Bodin’s program connects these corporeal effects to several biopolitically-charged themes including sexual behaviour, madness, and health. These are, of course, issues that Foucault and the other theorists of biopolitics would go on to study in their historical analyses. It is absolutely imperative to notice that the Angevin’s theory is not simply descriptive, but, as we shall soon find out in greater detail, he is also interested in ways of altering the resulting inclinations. Next, we focus deeper on the explicitly political side of climate theory. The Political Significance of the Environment A wise ruler [le sage gouverneur] of any people must … have a thorough understanding of their disposition [l’humeur] and natural inclinations before he attempts any

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change in the constitution or the laws. One of the greatest, if not the principal, foundation of the commonwealth is the suitability of its government to the nature of the people, and of its laws and ordinances to the requirements of time, place, and persons. (Bodin, 1955, p. 145 [1583, p. 666)]

Bodin (1583, p. 666) argues that the one in charge of governing the people ought to act like a good architect who considers the materials available in the proximity. Natural inclinations do not predetermine people’s lives entirely, but they are, nevertheless, of great consequence in establishing a commonwealth and determining its laws – the optimal way of governing has to do with the temperaments at play. Different sets of tools are needed in order to control the distinct peoples: southerners listen to religion, northerners adhere to force, and temperate people understand justice (ibid, p. 686). Some of the archetypes seem to be predisposed to certain political problems, for example, the melancholic humour dominant in the south is very hard to purge and has to be managed differently compared to the other humours; the southerners are often dedicated to contemplation and far from skillful when it comes to governing (ibid, pp. 680–682, 686). As we have discussed, the general connection between climates and the way that political life ought to be established is not unprecedented in the field of political philosophy.10 Bodin’s innovation lies elsewhere; he seems to be the first one to argue that the particular nature of a given climate does not only influence how governing or the laws should be organized, but that it also indicates the optimal form of commonwealth for each particular situation (Tooley, 1953, pp. 80–81). Bodin (1583, p. 694) is famous for considering monarchy as the best out of the three possible constitutions, but he also believes that other forms of state may suit some commonwealths better because of their particular climate. Attempting to rule over people in a manner that stands against their natural inclinations can lead to disadvantageous outcomes. People of northern and mountainous regions, for example, favour popular governments or elected monarchs and although they do respect force, they do not endure tyranny (ibid). It is important to notice that the inclinations can be altered with the right interventions. Bodin argues that the discipline of laws can modify the natural disposition of men [French: la discipline peut changer le droit naturel des hommes; Latin: disciplina valeat ad immutanda hominum ingenia], for we reject the doctrine of Polybius and Galen that their natural environment has an absolute and necessary effect in forming men’s

As Tooley (1953, pp. 79–80) mentions, John of Paris’ On Royal and Papal Power (III) and Dante Alighieri’s De Monarchia (I, xiv) had already suggested that governing ought to be based according to the different natures of people. 10

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morals [French: mœurs; Latin: mores]. (Bodin, 1955, pp. 150–151 [1583, p. 666; 1586, p. 494])11

This goes to show, among other things, that the climate theory does not attempt to separate nature from culture; instead, the climate has to do with the area that is shared by these two spheres (Miglietti, 2020, p. 149). Nature affects culture and politics through climate, but these effects remain at least somewhat mutable by human interventions. However, changing the dispositions is no easy task; in fact, it can take hundreds of years (Bodin, 1583, p. 698). Education is to be considered a key (ibid, p. 678). It is also noteworthy that while laws and customs can indeed change the way that people act, neglecting to enforce good practices allows the people to return to their original state (ibid, p. 698). What does Bodin have to say when it comes to the specifics of controlling the distinct dispositions? In the Latin version of the République, he argues that southerners ought to take part in bodily exercises because of their particular nature (Bodin, 1586, p. 502). This is apparently also the reason why Plato and Lycurgus pay so much attention to this topic.12 If southerners ought to exercise their bodies, northerners should take up books. Bodin (ibid) cites Politics VIII (1338b) where Aristotle argues that while training the body is indeed necessary, neglecting to exercise the mind makes boys vulgar and animal-like. Bodin (1586, p. 519) also refers to Plato’s Timaeus V (88b–d) on a related note and argues that the practice of gymnastics and music are necessary in every city because of their respective effects on the body and the mind. According to Plato, these two arts create a balance: neglecting music makes people barbarous while overlooking gymnastics renders them weak.

CONCLUSION The theory of environmental influence is but one of the many instances where Bodin adopts an ancient idea and makes it fit his time and place – early modern France. This is not to argue that there was never a political element in climate theory before Bodin – as we have witnessed, the opposite is true. Instead, what the prevailing literature and our own close reading seem to suggest is that the

The Hippocratic tradition does include an idea of adjusting one’s humours through a befitting regimen despite what Bodin claims here (see Regimen in Health, I). 12 The importance of physical exercise permeates The Life of Lycurgus (14.1–3, 16.6). One of the benefits that arise from training the body is the fact that it builds obedience, but there are also other reasons that are related to both health and population politics. For example, young women are supposed to perform physical exercises since it helps them endure childbirth and makes their offspring more vigorous. 11

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Angevin’s originality lies with the fact that his interpretation had more political layers than those of his predecessors. It can even be argued that his theory was primarily political, unlike many of those that came before it. Bodin’s patent belief in the environment’s powerful yet malleable influence on human lives and especially his emphasis on political and governmental interventions in order to alter the resulting inclinations makes his approach to climate an example of distinct biopolitical elements before the biopolitical era of modernity as defined by Foucault. To clarify, we use the notion of biopolitics here to signify Bodin’s aspirations towards making the commonwealth stable, effective, and optimized through corporeal interventions. It is clear that Bodin’s ideas of governing the people according to their natural inclinations (including literally their bodily fluids) have to do with the juxtaposition between political power and the physical human body – not only does the political system need to be adapted in order to suit the people of a specific region, but some of these bodily predispositions can also be altered through the correct political interventions. Bodin has his eyes on the corporeal human body; he takes time to discuss several biopolitically significant themes such as sex, reproduction, education, governing, discipline, bodily health, insanity, and the necessity of physical exercise, all of which are connected directly to the different climes and microclimates as well as the humours and temperaments displayed by their inhabitants. These examples help highlight the unmistakable biopolitical element that occupies the very centre of the Angevin’s climate theory. Although his ideas are clearly obsolete, they play a far too pivotal role within his political thought to be disregarded completely as the superstitious beliefs of a lost age. It stands to reason that one must study climate theory in order to understand Bodin’s political thought as a whole and his early modern biopolitical program in particular.13 These findings support the claims of Mika Ojakangas (2016, pp. 1–12), who has shown that biopolitics has ancient origins and that it made a triumphant return during the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance after the key texts of Greek political philosophy had been translated into Latin. Bodin’s political thought is a significant part of this long renaissance of biopolitical

13 Bodin was by no means the last great thinker to embrace climate theory. Like Bodin, Montesquieu (1748, 14.1, 2, 7) also believed in the strong, yet adjustable physical influence of climates. He thought that climates affected the ‘fibres’ within the human body, which in turn led to diverse predispositions. While the baron agreed with Bodin (and disagreed with Aristotle) by stating that slavery was not good by nature, he did compromise by arguing that climate could be used to give at least some validation to the enslavement of those living in the hottest of regions, which seems to represent a clear step towards the birth of modern racism (see Schaub, 2005, p. 74).

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ideas and practices witnessed before the biopolitical era of modernity notably defined by Foucault.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Alighieri, D., 1904. The De Monarchia of Dante Alighieri. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, and Company. Aristotle, 1910. A History of Animals. In: The Works of Aristotle, vol. IV. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aristotle, 1984. Meteorology. In: Barnes, J. (ed.): Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University. Aristotle, 1994. Politics. In: Aristotle, vol. 21. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Avicenna, 1973. The Canon of Medicine of Avicenna. New York: AMS Press. Bodin, J., 1566. Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem. Paris: Martin Juvenem. Bodin, J., 1583. Les Six Livres de la République. Paris: Jacques du Puis. Bodin, J., 1586. De Republica libri sex. Paris: Jacques du Puis. Bodin, J., 1596. Universae naturae theatrum: in quo rerum omnium effectrices causae, & fines contemplantur, & continuae series quinque libris discutiuntur. Lyon: apud Jacobum Roussin. Bodin, J., 1955. Six Books of the Commonwealth. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Empedocles, 1920. Fragments of Empedocles. In: Burnet, J. (ed.): Early Greek Philosophy. London: Adam & Charles Black. Foucault, M., 1965. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M., 2003. “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. New York: Picador. Galen, 2020. On Hippocrates’ On the Nature of Man [ebook]. London: Medicina Antiqua, UCL. Translated by W.J. Lewis, pp. 1–173. Available at (accessed 9March 2022). Harvey, W., 2013. The Anatomical Exercises: De Motu Cordis and De Circulatione Sanguinis in English Translation. Mineola, New York: Dover. Hippocrates, 1959a. Airs, Waters, Places. In: Hippocrates, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hippocrates, 1959b. Humours. In: Hippocrates, vol. IV. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hippocrates, 1959c. Nature of Man. In: Hippocrates, vol. IV. Translated by W.H.S. Jones. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hippocrates, 1959d. Regimen in Health. In: Hippocrates, vol. IV. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hulme, M., 2017. Preface. In: Miglietti, S. and Morgan, J. (eds): Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Isaac, B., 2004. The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. John of Paris, 1971. On Royal and Papal Power. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies. Jones, W.H.S., 1959. Introduction. In: Hippocrates, vol. IV. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Jouanna, J., 2012. The Legacy of the Hippocratic Treatise The Nature of Man: The Theory of Four Humors. In: van der Ejik, P. (ed.): Greek Medicine from Hippocrates to Galen: Selected Papers. Leiden: Brill. Kuntz, M.L., 2008. Introduction. In: Bodin, J.: Colloquium of the Seven about Secrets of the Sublime. University Park, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lindholm, S., 2022. Jean Bodin and Biopolitics. DSocSci. University of Jyväskylä. McRae, K.D., 1962a. Bodin’s Contributions. In: Bodin, J.: The Six Bookes of a Commonweale. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McRae, K.D., 1962b. Preface. In: Bodin, J.: The Six Bookes of a Commonweale. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Miglietti, S., 2020. Between Nature and Culture: The Integrated Ecology of Renaissance Climate Theories. In: Goul, P. and Usher, P.J. (eds): Early Modern Écologies: Beyond English Ecocentrism. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press. Miller, G., 1962. Airs, Waters, and Places. Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 17, 1: 129–140. Montesquieu, C.d.S., 1748. De l’Esprit des loix: Ou du rapport que les Loix doivent avoir avec la Constitution de chaque Gouvernement, les Moeurs, le Climat, la Religion, le Commerce, &c: à quoi l’Auteur a ajouté Des recherches nouvelles sur les Loix Romaines touchant les Successions, sur les Loix Françoises, & sur les Loix Féodales. Geneva: Chez Barrillot & Fils. Morera, R., 2017. Marshes as Microclimates: Governing with the Environmental in the Early Modern France. In: Miglietti, S. and Morgan, J. (eds): Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Ojakangas, M., 2016. On the Greek Origins of Biopolitics: A Reinterpretation of the History of Biopower. London: Routledge. Plato, 1925. Timaeus. In: Plato, vol. 9. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plato, 1967. Laws. In: Plato, vols. 10–11. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Plutarch, 1914. The Life of Lycurgus. In: Parallel Lives, vol. 1. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ptolemy, 1998. Ptolemy’s Almagest. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Ptolemy of Lucca, with portions attributed to Thomas Aquinas, 1997. On the Government of Rulers – De Regimine Principum. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schaub, D.J., 2005. Montesquieu on Slavery. Perspectives on Political Science 32, 2: 70–78. Shcheglov, D., 2007. Hipparchus’ Table of Climata and Ptolemy’s Geography. Orbis terrarium 9: 159–192. Spavin, R., 2014. Les symboles politiques du climat: Bodin, Montesquieu, Rousseau. PhD. Université de Toronto. Spavin, R., 2017. Jean Bodin and the Idea of Anachorism. In: Miglietti, S. and Morgan, J. (eds): Governing the Environment in the Early Modern World: Theory and Practice. London: Routledge. Tooley, M.J., 1953. Bodin and the Mediaeval Theory of Climate. Speculum 28, 1: 64–83. Tooley, M.J., 1955. Introduction. In: Bodin, J.: Six Books of the Commonwealth. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Vesalius, A., 2014. The Fabric of the Human Body: An Annotated Translation of the 1543 and 1555 Editions of ‘De Humani Corporis Fabrica’. Basel: Karger. Vitruvius, 1914. The Ten Books on Architecture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

PART II

Dimensions

4. Glenn Gould’s mastery of not-playing: style and manner in the work of Giorgio Agamben Katarina Sjöblom In the short essay ‘Bartleby’, Giorgio Agamben (1993) states that Glenn Gould is the only pianist who can play with his potentiality not to play. The claim is repeated in two of his recent publications in a slightly reformulated version (Agamben, 2017; 2019). This fragment has given rise to divergent interpretations, partly because Agamben does not explain why precisely Gould exemplifies the ability to play by not playing. For example, the passage has been interpreted as referring to Gould’s unusual gesticulation while playing (Katschthaler, 2016); it has also been argued that Gould’s musical genius always accompanies him, whether or not he is playing the piano (de la Durantaye 2009). In this chapter, we argue that some of these interpretations demonstrate insufficient applications of Agamben’s writings on potentiality. Based on Agamben’s reading of Aristotle, potentiality is always both potentiality to and not-to, and this double structure is transported into actuality in a way that allows for the potentiality not-to, or impotentiality, to be preserved within the act. This chapter attempts to demonstrate that the reference to Glenn Gould should be interpreted precisely in these terms: while playing, Gould manages to exercise a way of not-playing. This is, in simplicity, also Agamben’s argument, although in the original text he does not explain this in detail. However, in the more recent essays, Agamben discusses Gould in the context of other artistic practices and through the differentiation between style and manner. While style denotes the recognizable traits of a specific way of doing art or a genre, such as ‘French Baroque’ or ‘Viennese Classicism’, manner denotes the artist’s idiosyncratic way of resisting and playing with these canonical elements. In line with this, we argue that Gould’s not-playing is exercised through a relatively high degree of mastery, which allows him to interpret a score and play with it freely, this way resisting the style he engages with in an original manner.

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Instead of being a singular fragment that needs to be clarified, the reference to Gould highlights larger points of analysis: the focus on manners forms a line of development in the late work of Agamben (Agamben, 2016; 2017; 2019). In addition, we investigate how the idea of mannerism may be applied to analyze politics, arguing that the idea of mannerism is implicit in more established conceptions of politics. In the following section, we first briefly summarize Agamben’s reading of Aristotle’s discussion of potentiality. We then provide an overview of how Agamben’s reference to Glenn Gould has been interpreted and demonstrate why these interpretations require further elaboration. Finally, we investigate how the theme of manner features in the recent work of Agamben and argue that the notion of manner may be applied to praxic and poietic conceptions of political action as well as identity politics.

BACKGROUND Only a power that is capable of both power and impotence, then, is the supreme power. If every power is equally the power to be and the power to not-be, the passage to action can only come about by transporting (Aristotle says ‘saving’) in the act its own power to not-be. This means that, even though every pianist necessarily has the potential to play and the potential to not-play, Glenn Gould is, however, the only one who can not not-play, and directing his potentiality not only to the act but to his own impotence, he plays, so to speak, with his potential to not-play. While his ability simply negates and abandons his potential to not-play, his mastery conserves and exercises in the act not his potential to play (this is the position of irony that affirms the superiority of the potentiality over the act), but rather his potential to not-play. (Agamben, 1993, p. 36, italics in original)

The last sentence of this paragraph is slightly modified in the essay ‘What is the Act of Creation?’, which has most recently appeared in Creation and Anarchy: The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism. In this text, the last sentence is replaced with the following: ‘As opposed to ability, which simply negates and abandons its potential not to play, and talent, which can only play, mastery preserves and exercises in action not its potential to play but its potential not to play’ (Agamben, 2019, p. 19). As the passage reveals, the Aristotelian discussion of potentiality functions as a starting point for Agamben’s statement that Glenn Gould has the potentiality to play the piano by not playing. Before providing an overview of how the passage has been interpreted by various authors, we briefly rehearse Agamben’s interpretation of Aristotle’s concept of potentiality. In the essay ‘On Potentiality’ (Agamben, 1999a), two main elements capture Agamben’s attention in his discussion of Aristotle: on the one hand, the mode in which potentiality can be said to exist independently from actuality and, on the other, the mode in which potentiality can be said to be present in actuality. Following Aristotle, Agamben discusses the former problematic

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– concerning the existence of potentiality – through the differentiation between dynamis and energeia, potential and act. To illustrate how potentiality exists independently from its actualization, Agamben explicates that Aristotle differentiated between the generic potentiality of a child that can possibly be developed and the existing potentiality of someone who has already acquired a skill. The core argument is in the end rather simple: when architects are not designing buildings, they nevertheless have the ability to do so; when a sculptor is not sculpting, the ability to sculpt does not vanish into thin air. Human beings are capable of having a potentiality even when not exercising it. In this sense, Agamben can say that there is something like ‘pure potentiality’, ‘existing potentiality’ or, by borrowing from Aristotle, that ‘there is a presence and a face of potentiality’ (Agamben, 1999a, p. 180). It is from this position that Agamben also formulates his broader critique of the primacy of actuality in the Western tradition, arguing that ever since ancient times and particularly within the rise of the Christian doctrine of the will, we have been accustomed to think in terms of that which is actualized instead of exploring the depths of our ability to not actualize our potentialities. However, as Kevin Attell (2009, p. 41) also argues, the most idiosyncratic move in Agamben’s interpretation of Aristotle is not his request for granting primacy to potentiality instead of actuality, but his way of understanding the relation between potentiality and impotentiality (dynamis and adynamia). As a starting point, Agamben again follows Aristotle in proposing that the structure of potentiality always entails the co-existence of potentiality and impotentiality with respect to the same thing: to be able to write entails that one is also able to not write. This is what leads him to the question of what happens to the potentiality not-to when it passes into actuality: whereas the actuality of a given potentiality, for example to play the piano, is of course that of playing the piano, what happens to the potentiality to not-play when it passes into actuality (Agamben, 1999a, p. 183)? Instead of simply vanishing at the threshold of actuality, Agamben argues that impotentiality is in fact preserved in the act. Relying on a fragment from the Metaphysics, Agamben reads Aristotle as having suggested that the potentiality not-to ‘does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such’ (ibid, italics in original). In other words, the original structure in which potentiality to and not-to coexist is transported into actuality as such. We could thus speak of two steps in Agamben’s interpretation of Aristotelian potentiality: existence as potentiality and existence within potentiality. In the first case, we have potentiality that exists even when not exercised, precisely as illustrated by the example of the skill to play the piano. This type of potentiality might in fact exist in a form that never passes into actuality, which might have been the case with the pianist Andrew Garrido, who taught himself to play the piano by drawing a keyboard on a piece of paper and memorizing

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the pitch of each key with the help of material he found on the internet (The Guardian, 22 November 2019). Had he not been given the chance to develop his playing by getting hold of a real piano, we might argue that his ability to play exists entirely in the form of potentiality. In distinction to this type of potentiality we have something slightly more complicated, which we will call ‘potentiality within actuality’ for the remainder of this text. In this case, potentiality preserves itself within an actual operation in a way that does not exhaust the potentiality not-to. As Agamben demonstrates through his well-known concept of inoperativity, to be inoperative means precisely that one preserves a way of not being or doing within the act. For instance, in the paradoxical structure of sovereignty, analyzed in detail in the first volume of Homo Sacer (Agamben, 1998), the sovereign suspends itself from the law by deciding on its exception: this way, the inoperativity of law is manifest in its ability to be in force, yet without significance. In performative arts like dancing, we experience and witness a way of moving, yet not towards a determined end (Agamben, 2000; 2018). In the religious hymn, the conventional function of language – to transmit a specific content – is suspended and replaced by pure praise: language remains in use but inoperative as it does not communicate anything other than itself (Agamben, 2013). In this chapter, we explore how the latter case of potentiality – potentiality within actuality – functions in Agamben’s discussion of style and manner. As the reference to Glenn Gould can be argued to illustrate this question in an exemplary way, we start by giving an overview of how the passage in question has been interpreted by other authors. The following subsection includes two interpretations in which Agamben’s reference to Gould is discussed in the context of the work of the composer John Cage and two additional interpretations that appear in volumes dedicated to Agamben’s thought. All four approaches ultimately fail to take into consideration Agamben’s formula of potentiality within actuality, either implicitly by placing Gould’s playing by not-playing somewhere outside his piano-playing or, in a more explicit manner, by maintaining that Agamben is primarily interested in the autonomous existence of potentiality. In the second subsection, we analyze two texts that propose that the passage in question has to do with Gould’s ability to renew an interpretative tradition or play with his own artistic capacities. While it can be argued that these interpretations cast new light on Agamben’s reference to Gould, we point out that they could be further articulated in relation to the author’s concepts of style and manner. Finally, in the third subsection, we delineate the concept of manner in more detail.

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John Cage, Silence, and Glenn Gould’s Musical Genius Karl Katschthaler (2016) devotes a chapter to analyzing 4’33”, a well-known composition for the piano by John Cage from the 1950s. No notes are written in the score, only breaks: the piece consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. We first examine Katschthaler’s interpretation of Agamben’s reference to Gould, as this is one of the author’s starting points for his broader analysis of the role of silence in music, especially as regards Cage’s ‘silent piece’. We then assess the author’s application of the concept of potentiality to the absence of sound. As Katschthaler rightly points out, Agamben gives no clear explanation as to why Glenn Gould is his preferred example of not-playing while playing. He offers Gould’s peculiar way of gesticulating with his left hand while playing only with his right as one possible explanation, arguing that these silent gestures ‘make perceivable Gould’s potential to not-play, to read the score and incorporate his reading in gestures which do not produce sound’ (Katschthaler, 2016, p. 167). The question of the bodily presence of a musical performer functions as a broader source of inspiration for Katschthaler’s analysis of silence in music. He offers sophisticated insights into how bodily gestures as well as other visual elements structure music, an aspect that he demonstrates has received little attention in interpretations of Cage’s silent piece. The 4’33” piece has been understood primarily as a time frame during which the audience may listen to the ambient sounds of the concert hall, thus becoming aware of the fact that there is no silence at all. However, for Katschthaler’s analysis of David Tudor’s premiere performance of 4’33”, the bodily presence of the performer is important. He argues that Tudor did not merely open and close the keyboard lid to indicate the beginning and the end of the piece but read the score in a concentrated manner, diligently turning the pages throughout the piece. Although not referring to Agamben explicitly in this context, Katschthaler seems to suggest that performing an empty score is a way of manifesting the potentiality to and not-to of music. Accordingly, he mentions that ‘Tudor shows that music may come into existence by reading the score alone without playing the music’ (Katschthaler, 2016, p. 172). Katschthaler analyzes three additional performances of 4’33”, all featuring John Cage himself. The first one is a video recording of a performance that was organized in Harvard Square in 1973, showing Cage recreating the premiere performance of the piece on a grand piano that has been transported to the centre of the square. For the second performance, the score was modified so that instead of three movements it comprised four separate movements, each performed at different locations in New York City. These performances were organized without a piano; the video simply shows Cage standing at a given

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spot and listening to the surrounding noises of the city. It is the spot in Harlem that Katschthaler focuses on in his analysis: during this performance, curious teenagers start asking what Cage is doing. Instead of staying silent, Cage answers their questions. Finally, a third performance of the piece included in Katschthaler’s analysis took place at the opening of an art exhibition in Kunstverein in Cologne in 1986. Close to nobody in the exhibition audience took notice of Cage starting his stopwatch and performing 4’33”. Based on his interpretation of these three performances, Katschthaler explores whether there exists something like a potentiality of silence. He cites a passage in Potentialities (Agamben, 1999a, pp. 180–181) in which Agamben elucidates the potentiality not-to by referring to the human ability to experience the privation of sense activities – we can experience the absence of vision and hearing in the sense that we can ‘see darkness’ and ‘hear silence’. Regarding these notions, Katschthaler argues that this is technically impossible as a complete lack of sound can only be attained in laboratory conditions – he points out that ‘[we] can close our eyes to see darkness, but we cannot close our ears to hear silence’ (Katschthaler, 2016, p. 176). As he thus excludes the possibility of hearing silence (understood as the absolute absence of sound), he concludes that silence takes place when nobody is listening: whereas the teenagers in Harlem stop the performance to ask questions, the exhibition audience in Cologne fails to realize that there is a performance taking place (ibid, p. 177). In summary, Katschthaler first concludes that Glenn Gould’s silent left-hand movements constitute a way of not playing while playing. With respect to the premiere performance of 4’33”, he holds that Tudor’s physical presence brings music into existence even in the absence of a score, this way manifesting both the potentiality to and not-to of music. Finally, regarding the three different performances of 4’33”, he contends that the ‘potentiality of silence’ occurs when nobody is listening. Although these conclusions offer sophisticated insights into how the bodily presence of the performer structures the 4’33” piece and how different framings affect the audience’s interpretation, the first two conclusions suffer from a slight overcomplication of Agamben’s idea of potentiality within actuality. If there is a way in which Glenn Gould plays by not playing, this needs to be present in the actuality of playing the piano and not in any alternative or accompanying activity. Similarly, Tudor’s way of ‘playing’ an empty score can hardly be treated as a rigorous example of performing music. Although Tudor’s physical presence may be central for providing the context for listening to the surrounding ‘music’ of the concert hall, as Katschthaler suggests, he is not strictly speaking producing these sounds himself. Additional gestures or performing music that is not written cannot thus be understood as a way of playing in a sense that would illuminate Agamben’s idea of what happens to the potentiality to not play or not perform music in the actuality of these activities, at least not if these activities alone

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are understood as a musical performance. We return to this question in the following section. With respect to the ‘potentiality of silence’ that Katschthaler attempts to reconstruct by arguing that complete silence is impossible, it could be noted that it is probably a correct notion that for John Cage, there could be no such thing as complete silence. This is what he announced himself: ‘Until I die, there will be sounds’ (Cage, 2013, p. 8). Agamben’s point is however different to a substantial degree. Rather than being concerned with whether we can create a space in which all sound waves are blocked, Agamben is interested in formulating a way of being in relation to the sense of hearing even when there is nothing particular to listen to. In other words, it is not with respect to silence that we should formulate how the potentiality within actuality takes place. Rather, silence itself manifests the impotentiality with respect to the sense activity of hearing. When we do not hear any specific object of hearing, such as speech, noise, or music (understood in a somewhat conventional way), we nevertheless remain in relation to hearing itself: this is the potentiality of hearing. Let us briefly examine another interpretation of Agamben’s reference to Glenn Gould that also connects it with Cage’s work on silence. Seth Kim-Cohen (2012) offers a critique of Cage’s conception of silence, focusing on his performance lectures, particularly Lecture on Nothing (Cage, 2013, pp. 109–127). While a closer analysis of Kim-Cohen’s objections to Cage’s approach is beyond the scope of this chapter and his reference to Agamben and Gould cannot be said to be a central framework for his text, it points toward almost identical problems to the ones identified in the text analyzed above. It seems that Kim-Cohen attempts to turn Agamben’s definition around – to place the potentiality to not-play outside playing. He first argues that although Agamben speaks of playing by not-playing and Cage seems to be doing the opposite by saying nothing as a way of saying something, their aims are in fact similar. This is what leads him to ponder whether piano-playing is somehow present in Gould’s other activities: ‘When Gould types a letter, do the Goldberg Variations haunt the movements of his fingers across the Qwertyan expanse?’ (Kim-Cohen, 2012, p. 92). However, as already argued above, if we want to follow Agamben’s model of potentiality within actuality, the potentiality not-to of a given activity cannot be understood as taking place in the absence of this activity. Just as the potentiality to not-play the piano cannot be understood as doing something additional while playing or as ‘playing’ an absence of anything to play, we cannot define it by simply reversing the process and examining what happens to the potentiality not to play whenever the pianist is not seated at the piano. It is in the actuality of playing that we should be able to trace its impotentiality.

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Leland de la Durantaye (2009) devotes a short chapter of his book on Agamben to the somewhat cryptic passage referring to Gould. He starts by citing a play by C.E. Lessing in which one of the characters wonders whether Raphael would have been such a great painter had he been born without hands. De la Durantaye suspects that this idea has its origins in the very same discussion of Aristotelian potentiality that Agamben also departs from. He does not rely on Agamben’s main sources for interpreting Aristotle, the Metaphysics and De Anima, but instead refers to Aristotle’s example of a dormant geometer, which illustrates the very same difference that Agamben also mentions as a starting point for his discussion: that between the mental capacities of a child that may or may not be developed and the already existing knowledge of a geometer. In de la Durantaye’s interpretation, Gould functions as a modern example of the latter type of skill: ‘Gould’s musical genius is such that it accompanies him at every step; whether in the presence of a piano or not, whether playing or not, the potentiality to play remains richly and fully his’ (ibid, p. 55). He admits that this proposition is somewhat self-evident: artists remain artists even when not exercising their art. What he argues to be less self-evident, however, is how to adequately describe ‘potentiality independent of its actualization’ (ibid). However, as we have already argued, there is nothing particularly problematic in conceiving how potentiality exists when not actualized. This is precisely what the example of the dormant geometer illustrates: that there is a form or presence of the geometer’s abilities even when he is not exercising them. What is less self-evident is thus not this ‘existence as potentiality’, but rather the way in which both potentiality to and not to are preserved in actuality. De la Durantaye, however, rejects this option from the outset and, in his interpretation of Agamben, asserts that impotentiality ‘is not to be understood in the context of actuality at all’ (ibid, p. 5, italics in original). Of course, it can be argued that the formula ‘potentiality within actuality’ presents a contradiction. Yet this is precisely what Agamben proposes, whether or not his interpretation of Aristotle is correct. Thus, de la Durantaye’s interpretation of Glenn Gould being an example of someone who possesses the potentiality to play and not-play – whether or not in the presence of a piano – simply reintroduces the idea of ‘existence as potentiality’ and fails to follow Agamben’s reading of Aristotle until the end. Claire Colebrook and Jason Maxwell’s understanding of the Glenn Gould reference offers likewise an insufficient account of impotentiality with respect to actuality, although in a slightly different way than in the above-analyzed interpretations. In their book Agamben (Colebrook and Maxwell, 2016), the authors maintain that Gould’s way of not-playing is exercised within his praxis of piano-playing, which is essentially correct. In a more problematic manner, they argue that Gould remains in relation to not playing because he is capable of ‘positively extinguishing the potential not to play’ (ibid, p. 28).

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They contrast this to both duty and accidental playing: playing the piano is not something Glenn Gould must always necessarily pursue, nor does he simply happen to be playing. Instead, while playing, he stays in ‘an intimate relation to a power not to do that which also has come to define him’ (ibid, emphasis in original). It is possible that their emphasis on ‘extinguishing’ impotentiality while playing stems from Agamben’s reading of Aristotle in the ‘On Potentiality’ essay discussed above; Agamben ends the presentation of his original approach by stating that ‘[what] is truly potential is thus what has exhausted all its impotentiality by bringing it wholly into the act as such’ (Agamben, 1999a, p. 183). However, in a manner that we have by now become familiar with, to ‘exhaust’ does not mean in this context to ‘extinguish’ in the sense of actively resisting impotentiality within the activity, this way retaining some form of relation to it, as Colebrook and Maxwell seem to suggest. On the contrary, the potentiality not to is welcomed to the act as such in the form of the artist’s ability to resist the conventions of style. Toward Potentiality Within Actuality Citing Agamben’s reference to Gould in The Fire and the Tale, James Salvo (2018) suggests that Gould is a ‘luminary’ who opens a new path for other pianists to follow. As Gould was the first one to record Bach’s Goldberg Variations on the piano instead of the harpsichord, for which it is originally written, Salvo views him as a pianist who is ‘not fully exhausting the potential for ways to interpret the Goldberg Variations’ (ibid, p. 201). In other words, Gould’s ability to not-play while playing is expressed in his way of interpreting Bach in a novel way. Salvo further investigates the role of this type of vanguard as both initiators and arbiters of a tradition that others can engage with. Partly relying on Agamben’s definition of style, the author understands style as the specific form that something takes when it is transmitted through tradition. In line with Agamben, the author conceives of style as the impersonal element of tradition – that which stays essentially the same although it may be approached by different interpreters in a personal way. In the context of music, Salvo argues that what makes a given style impersonal is in a crucial way indebted to the instrument it is realized through: ‘If style is that which is brought forth from a particular instrument, what’s brought forth through the hands using that particular instrument is shared inasmuch as all the hands use that same instrument’ (ibid, p. 204). As the focus is here on the instrument itself, the author highlights the material conditions of Gould’s artistic practice throughout the text, such as the already mentioned choice to record the Goldberg Variations on a harpsichord. In addition, Salvo mentions the creaking and unusually low

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piano chair that brought a unique twist to Gould’s performances and a recording that was produced entirely with computer technology. Based on these remarks, Salvo argues that whereas one can follow a tradition opened by a luminary like Gould, one wins nothing by simply repeating the same thing: ‘Repetition in tradition amounts to nothing but a spiritless impersonation’ (ibid, p. 207). Thus, what makes a tradition interesting is not that a style is perpetually repeated either through imitation or elaborate technology, but that each interpreter brings something idiosyncratic to it. As Salvo puts it very simply, ‘one must find one’s own way’ (ibid). It could be argued that this is not exclusively a question of what type of instrument one is playing but concerns more generally the way in which musical works are interpreted. Salvo seems to suggest the same when mentioning that Simone Dinnerstein’s interpretation of the Goldberg Variations ‘accomplishes the seemingly impossible of being fully aware of Gould, yet covering none of the same ground’ (ibid, p. 208). It is precisely in the essay cited at the beginning of Salvo’s chapter that Agamben delineates his idea of manner as the personal element that manages to resist the impersonal inscribed in the style. This is, in short, the potentiality at work within the actuality of artistic creation: the idiosyncrasy of an artist’s expression that forms a way of not exercising the style within the style. From this perspective it is notable that despite Salvo’s overall faithfulness to Agamben’s thought, no thorough engagement with the concepts of manner or potentiality appears in the text. We argue in the following section that Agamben’s reference to Gould should be understood primarily through the concepts of style and manner rather than being specifically connected to Gould’s position as the initiator of a tradition. In an article exploring the ethical implications of Agamben’s thought, Simon Marijsse (2019, pp. 144–145) makes a distinction between ‘existing potentiality’ and ‘existence as potentiality’ to illuminate precisely the same distinction that we presented at the beginning of this section. In the first case, we have the presence of a capacity independently of its actualization; in the second, the power not-to preserves itself within actuality. Following Agamben, Marijsse uses Glenn Gould throughout the text as one example of the latter, which we have in this chapter presented as ‘potentiality within actuality’. He understands Gould’s ability to play with his potentiality not to play as ‘a certain playfulness toward his own artistic expression’ (ibid, p. 151); it is precisely this ‘playfulness’ that makes him a supreme player. Thus, in a similar manner as in Salvo’s interpretation, Marijsse suggests that the unconventional touch that Gould gives to his performances constitutes a way of not fully exhausting the potentiality not-to within the act of playing. Largely adopting these insights as correct, we scrutinize them more closely in the following section through Agamben’s concepts of style and manner. As an addition to

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Marijsse’s account, we point out that Gould’s playfulness is not only directed at his own artistic capacities but remains in tension with the very material he is working with.

STYLE AND MANNER IN ARTISTIC PRACTICES AND BEYOND Glenn Gould’s Mannerism In the more recent texts including the reference to Glenn Gould (Agamben, 2017; 2019), Agamben places his discussion of potentiality in the context of style and manner. In this essay, Agamben uses examples of poetry, painting, and music to demonstrate how style and manner form a tension between the impersonal and the personal element of artistic creation. Style is the impersonal and general element in art, which, as implied in Salvo’s text above, remains independent from the individual touch of the artist. In this sense, it could be understood as a genre or a recognizable way of doing art. Manner, on the other hand, imprints the work with the artist’s unique mark, with an element that sometimes ‘almost enters into conflict’ with the impersonal element (Agamben, 2019, p. 21). As Agamben’s example of a late canvas painting of Titian suggests, the traces of the master painter’s several attempts to remake and delete parts of his work do not simply testify to a defect or indecision, but ‘perfectly [express] the twofold structure of every authentic creative process, intimately suspended between two contradictory urges: thrust and resistance, inspiration and critique’ (ibid, p. 20). Style and manner thus form something like a bipolar gesture in which the artist both masters a genre or a technique and simultaneously takes distance and deviates from it. Expressed through Agamben’s interpretation of Aristotle, we could say that manner is the potentiality at work within the actualization of a style. It is from the perspective of style and manner that Agamben’s reference to Glenn Gould gains clarity: Gould’s mastery preserves a resistance to the works he is performing within the process of playing. Instead of simply executing the complicated scores of the works he masters, he imprints them with an idiosyncratic mark, with his own manner of playing. This type of mastery manifesting the ability to resist the style is in some ways intrinsically connected with tastefulness and quality. Whenever there is only formally correct execution of a style, there is no degree of ability not-to present in the performance and hence no taste: ‘Those who lack taste cannot refrain from anything; tastelessness is always a not being able not to do something’ (Agamben, 2019, p. 20). The question of taste also sheds light on the following distinction Agamben makes between ability, talent, and mastery in the Gould passage: ‘As opposed to ability, which simply negates and abandons its potential not to play, and

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talent, which can only play, mastery preserves and exercises in action not its potential to play but its potential not to play’ (ibid, p. 19). In the case of ability, the difference with respect to mastery is rather clear: someone who has acquired enough skills to read a score can somehow pull off playing a piece without this being an act of distinctive mastery. The differentiation between mastery and talent, on the other hand, is slightly more intricate. We can perhaps understand talent as an unusual kind of ability to, for example, compose works of a specific style. Think of the early works of a child genius like W.A. Mozart: as perfect demonstrations of Viennese Classicism, they manifest the extreme talent of the composer. However, being a perfect example of a specific style is not enough for something to count as genuinely interesting – we rarely listen to this bulk of Mozart’s compositions today. Instead, it is the later mature works that we appreciate because they demonstrate a sophisticated ability to slightly deviate from the style in question, making it personal and interesting. Simply executing a style thus amounts to nothing but tasteless imitation or, in Salvo’s words, ‘spiritless impersonation’. On the other hand, although mastery remains tied to a certain sense of taste, mannerism does not always introduce an amelioration of the style – some aspects of Gould’s mannerism could be deemed almost unbearable or, in Agamben’s terms, to ‘almost enter into conflict’ with the style, such as humming while playing. It is in this sense that Gould’s silent left-hand gestures, which grasp Katschthaler’s attention, could also be accommodated within an Agambenian framework. Instead of constituting a form of playing on their own, these gestures can be understood as aspects of Gould’s distinctive mannerism. As some of Agamben’s more extreme examples suggest, mannerism can also occur in a form that is not tied to mastery at all. For example, Kafka’s Josephine does not have the slightest idea of how to sing, yet she manages to produce sounds that nobody else is capable of (Agamben, 2019, p. 22). In other words, Josephine has no knowledge of the art of singing and accordingly, lacks both mastery and taste, but succeeds nevertheless in playing with manner alone. We could therefore understand all three instances of mannerism – tasteful mastery, transgressive use of manner and pure manner – as expositions, or paradigms, of the very same logic. At the very least, style is modified with a tasteful hint of personal mannerism like in the case of a composer like Mozart. In the middle, there is a manner so strong that it almost violates the style, like in some aspects of Glenn Gould’s idiosyncrasy. As an extreme example, we have Josephine who has no knowledge of any style but manages to produce a manner like no other. This threefold differentiation may also further clarify Agamben’s enigmatic insistence on Glenn Gould being the only pianist who can play with his potentiality not to play. It might perhaps be argued that it is only in the case of Gould that we tolerate precisely the kind of mannerism he is known for, such as humming or interpreting Bach in a completely unheard-of

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way. In a more general sense, however, there seems to be no reason why the interplay between manner and style would not be present elsewhere. In line with Titian, Josephine and all other examples that Agamben himself makes use of, Glenn Gould functions as a paradigm – a singular example – of the larger phenomenon of mannerism. We investigate in the following subsection how manners form a larger area of inquiry in Agamben’s thought and how these could be utilized in analyses of politics. Manners Beyond Artistic Creation In The Use of Bodies, Agamben demonstrates how the relationship between style and manner can be approached as an experience of that which is most proper to us but simultaneously ‘inappropriable’ and beyond our reach (Agamben, 2016, pp. 80–94). He argues that our own body becomes foreign to us precisely the moment we experience its most elemental activities, such as the need to urinate; in need, the body is experienced as proper yet strangely external because one remains helplessly trapped in the body part from which the need originates. Similarly, although our mother tongue appears intimate to us, we do not own it in any meaningful sense; language is imposed on us since childhood and remains an object of common use shared with other speakers. This bipolar tension within language is particularly evident in poetry: to master language to the point of playing with it creatively, poets must take distance from all conventional uses of language and approach it as if it were an unknown terrain. Precisely as in the case of Glenn Gould’s mastery of playing the piano, Agamben thus illustrates through these examples how style and manner form ‘the two irreducible poles of the poetic gesture: if style marks its most proper trait, manner registers an inverse demand for expropriation and non-belonging’ (Agamben, 2016, pp. 86–87). Agamben also connects the notion of manner to his modal ontology, which he develops in this concluding volume of the Homo Sacer series. Undertaking what he calls an ‘archaeology of ontology’ in chapter 2, he asserts that Aristotle’s division between primary and secondary essence is a fundamental framework that has conditioned Western ontology despite the various formulations it has taken during the course of history (ibid, p. 115). The general argument that Agamben makes in this context is that being has traditionally been understood as something that presupposes a subject that is prior to or lies underneath every predication; ‘man’ is always predicated on the basis of a singular and determinate man (whence the term sub-iectum in Latin and hypokeimenon in Greek, designating something that lies underneath). Against this apparatus, Agamben proposes his modal ontology in which modes are not understood as predicates added to a prior subject or substance but constitute being as such: ‘Being does not pre-exist the modes but constitutes itself in

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being modified, is nothing other than its modifications’ (ibid, p. 170). It is in this sense that he can refer to an ‘ontology of the how’ (ibid, p. 231); what is at stake is not what being is but how it is, an aspect that also permits Agamben to make a connection to the notion of manner toward the end of the volume. When explicating his enigmatic concept of form-of-life, he has in mind precisely a being that does not have but simply is its modes; a form-of-life is ‘a “manner of rising forth”, not a being that has this or that property or quality but a being that is its mode of being, which is its welling up and is continually generated by its “manner of being”’ (ibid, p. 224). The distinction between essence and existence, or being and beings, finds its correlate in the separation of life from its form, of zoe from bios, which functions as the kernel of the Western biopolitical order according to Agamben’s analysis of the Western tradition. And although overcoming these distinctions is what he presents as the central political task of the West, one will search in vain for a programmatic application of these insights to current forms of political praxis. For the most part, Agamben discusses politics in rather general terms – what he demands of a coming politics is precisely that the entire ontological apparatus of the West be modified. Occasionally, the role of provocative figures in everyday politics is mentioned in passing. In Homo Sacer, we find the figure of ‘the troublemaker’: because the right to suspend itself and to not pass into actuality is reserved to the sovereign, ‘[the] troublemaker is precisely the one who tries to force sovereign power to translate itself to actuality’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 47). Similarly, in Creation and Anarchy, Agamben mentions ‘the so-called provocateur’ ‘who has precisely the task of obliging those who have power to exercise it’ (Agamben, 2019, p. 17). We may perhaps understand various kinds of activist figures as precisely this kind of ‘provocateurs’ who demand something to be done about the current state of affairs. Although Agamben’s engagement with politics in the above-described sense is either extremely general or restricted to unspecified remarks, his notion of manners can be argued to offer tools for re-examining predominant understandings of political praxis in the West. We may approach these conceptions of politics as formed within what Agamben calls apparatuses of tradition. Inspired by Foucault, Agamben defines an apparatus as literally anything that captures human life in order to orient it toward a specific function, such as a discourse, institution, technology, or canonical way of acting (Agamben, 2009, p. 14). We may also understand styles – which we have discussed above in relation to the body, language, and art – as formed within apparatuses of tradition. If the apparatuses define and shape a style, manner adds to the style a potentiality not-to, which enables a different use of it. In line with this, we explore in the remainder of this chapter how the concept of manner may be applied to styles of political action that may be described as formed within Western apparatuses of tradition.

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If we approach politics as a type of activity, we may argue that the classical Greek distinction between praxis and poiesis, acting and producing, still continues to shape Western conceptions of political action. Agamben has regularly engaged with this distinction from his earliest work onward (Agamben, 1999b), arguing in his subsequent works (Agamben, 1999a; 2018) that his somewhat enigmatic concept of gesture denotes a type of activity that is separate from praxis and poiesis. While Agamben never presents gesture as a fully developed framework and implies that it points to a politics that remains to be invented, we argue that what Agamben develops under the concept of manner points to a more promising attempt to disclose a force working within praxis and poiesis. We first outline how the distinction is observable in the Western political tradition and then highlight how a certain notion of manners is implicit in these approaches. In addition to praxis and poiesis, we also note how mannerism might be applied to identity politics, which is highly prevalent in contemporary politics. The purpose of this engagement is not to offer a thorough analysis of manner in these contexts, but to point out how Agamben’s focus on manners might be further developed in relation to more established theories and discourses of politics, a dimension that remains relatively underexamined partly because of Agamben’s own lack of rigour in this regard. In a poietic sense, politics is understood as an instrumental activity that is undertaken for the sake of producing or bringing about something external to the activity itself. Although the classical age may have categorized engaging in the public life of the polis under praxis, action with no end other than itself, thinkers like Plato and Aristotle nevertheless compared politics to the poietic act of weaving: governing was like weaving together a perfect piece of garment, implying the activity of producing the material and social conditions of a political community. The Marxian conception of the dialectics of history is also, in this overall sense, inherently poietic: politics is contained in the making of history, and the ultimate product of this process is a new humanity free from class struggle. In the context of modern electoral politics, politics is framed perhaps entirely as governmental action that is expected to produce outcomes like infrastructure, workplaces, a clean environment, and so on. According to the model of praxis, in contrast, politics is understood as voluntary action, for instance in the form of public protests. Hannah Arendt’s approach to politics is perhaps one of the best-known examples of a praxis-oriented understanding of politics, and it is precisely to the poietic conception that she contrasted it by defining political action as being contained in the experience of freedom itself and not in any external outcome that results from it. The emphasis on the necessity of government, of ruling the unpredictable realm of human action, is what Arendt criticized Plato, Marx, and the entire modern generation of political thinkers for. Put very briefly, one of the most established distinctions which Western politics revolves around – insofar as we operate on the plane

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of activity – is the interplay between what governments do (in the sense of producing) and what people want (in the form of voluntary public action). In this sense, although Agamben’s engagements with praxis and poiesis sometimes seem rather sketched, it is in no sense arbitrary that his attempt at ‘going beyond’ is articulated precisely in relation to this distinction. If we approach the poietic conception of politics through manner, it is immediately obvious that with reference to modern governments, it implies something like a public demand for governments to produce outcomes of a certain quality. Politics is not just about producing something for the sake of it, but about producing relevant and justifiable outcomes. This is in some ways what is at stake in modern electoral politics: ideological controversy over what kind of a society is to be produced, not least in the wake of the current climate crisis and the new ramifications it poses for the productive function of governments. In other words, it is not enough that governments perpetually reproduce what already is – there is always, at least in democratic politics, the presence of a critical eye that demands deviations from the political legacy that has been handed down through previous administrations. If we in turn approach Arendt’s ideal of political agency through the concept of manner, it is also rather easy to detect that the type of public action she prefers demands a specific manner of performing it. It is not least in the parallels that Arendt draws between theatrical and political performances that we find inscribed an invitation to perform politics in a distinctive manner – not awkwardly at home and alone, but by appearing publicly among fellow men. In contrast to the automatism of the labour processes that sustain life itself, argued Arendt, in political life we are exposed to a community of equals in our uniqueness (see Arendt, 1998, p. 176). Examples of successful protests also attest to the fact that public action requires skill and creativity to gain attention and momentum. For instance, one of the most distinctive traits of the Serbian social movement Otpor! of the late 1990s was its innovative use of humour in its campaigns against Slobodan Milošević; the central figures behind the Arab Spring knew likewise how to skillfully utilize social media platforms to mobilize a large spectrum of people. In addition to producing and acting, Agamben’s concept of manner may help understand certain aspects of identity politics. Whereas identitarian politics often rests on the assumption that there is a fixed identity that is expressed in political action (one speaks for example ‘as a woman’ or ‘as a person of colour’), manner instead points to a certain distancing from identity. This aspect is evident for instance in Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s influential term ‘strategic essentialism’. She has strongly emphasized the notion of ‘strategy’ in various identity battles, arguing that identities do not refer to an essence but may instead be used as strategies for expressing marginalized positions; her own disavowal of the term has precisely to do with the tendency to forget

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the idea of strategy (Spivak, 1993). In line with this, we might argue that for identities to function as an effective ground for political change, they need to be utilized in a manner that takes a critical distance to the identities in question. These brief reflections on the meaning of manner in politics, although in some sense obvious, highlight that Agamben’s idea of the dynamic between style and manner is not just an obscure form of praxis that remains to be invented by a completely novel politics of the future. Instead, the interplay between the two is already present in the entire field of politics as we know it. When we demand governments to produce outcomes, we do so with a specific quality of outcomes in mind; when we favour people’s power and engage in public protests, we do not merely follow the masses but seek to appear in a distinctive way. And for identity politics to gain effective leverage, there is always the presence of a critique and resistance to the very identities in question.

CONCLUSION Insofar as Glenn Gould is understood as a skillful pianist who individualizes his performances with a distinctive manner of interpretation, his playing displays a degree of mastery that allows him to exercise a way of doing otherwise within the artistic performance. This is a way of ‘not-playing’ while playing – a trait that could be argued to be present in any skillful musical performance. On the other hand, Agamben’s puzzling assertion that Gould is the only pianist who has this ability is further clarified if we scrutinize it through a distinction between tasteful and transgressive use of manner. Manners that are exclusive to Gould, such as humming while playing or interpreting classical piano repertoire in an unconventional manner, face the risk of drifting toward a violent transgression of the style. In this sense, Agamben can perhaps argue that Gould is the only pianist who plays with this particular kind of mannerism. We have demonstrated in this chapter that, instead of being restricted to Glenn Gould or artistic practices, the dynamic between style and manner is present in other forms of non-canonical use and highlights a larger area of interest in Agamben’s recent work. In addition, we have pointed out that the concept of manner may be applied to describe distinctive ways of doing politics: producing outcomes of quality, acting publicly in a creative way, and fighting inequalities by strategizing one’s identity. Central to all these instances of mannerism is that the potentiality not-to that they entail does not mean withdrawal from activity or the simple refusal to act. Rather, by exercising the potentiality not-to within the activity, a type of resistance internal to the act, the utilization of manner enables an alternative use of activities formed within apparatuses of tradition.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, G., 1993. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 1999a. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 1999b. The Man Without Content. Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2000. Means Without End: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G., 2009. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2013. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2016. The Use of Bodies. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2017. The Fire and the Tale. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2018. Karman: A Brief Treatise on Action, Guilt, and Gesture. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2019. Creation and Anarchy. The Work of Art and the Religion of Capitalism. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, H., 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Attell, K., 2009. Potentiality, Actuality, Constituent Power. Diacritics 39, 3: 35–53. Cage, J., 2013. Silence: Lectures and Writings by John Cage. 50th Anniversary Edition paperback ed. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press. Colebrook, C. and Maxwell, J., 2016. Agamben. Key Contemporary Thinkers. Cambridge: Polity Press. De la Durantaye, L., 2009. Giorgio Agamben: A Critical Introduction. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Garrido, A., 2019. Experience: I learned how to play the piano without a piano. The Guardian (accessed 10 June 2021). Katschthaler, K., 2016. Absence, Presence and Potentiality: John Cage’s 4’33” Revisited. In: Wolf, W. and Bernhart, W. (eds): Silence and Absence in Literature and Music. Word and Music Studies Online, Volume 15, pp. 166–179. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Kim-Cohen, S., 2012. I Have Something to Say, but I’m not Saying It. In: Saladin, M. (ed.): Tacet: Experimental Music Review, No. 1: Who is John Cage? pp. 88–109. Les presses du réel. Google Play edition. Marijsse, S., 2019. Agamben’s Happy Life: Toward and Ethics of Impotence and Mere Communicability. Mosaic 52, 1: 139–154. Salvo, J., 2018. Musical Chairs: Method, Style, Tradition. In: Denzin, N.K. and Giardina, M.D. (eds): Qualitative Inquiry in the Public Sphere, pp. 200–210. New York: Routledge. Spivak, G.C., 1993. Outside in the Teaching Machine. New York: Routledge.

5. Biopolitics of time in Foucault and Agamben Jürgen Portschy This chapter addresses the temporal dimensions of governing life in the 21st century, thereby building on the philosophical work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben. According to Foucault’s lectures on governmentality, the emergence of a liberal rationality of government is fundamentally connected to the problem of the population, making up a dispositive that he tried to conceptualize via his notion of biopolitics by describing the process of ‘nothing less than the entry of life into history, that is, the entry of phenomena peculiar to the life of the human species into the order of knowledge and power, into the sphere of political techniques’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 141f). While Foucault is today recognized as a scholar especially sensitive to issues of spatiality, only a few commentators have emphasized his continual interest for historically changing arrangements of time, temporality and power (see Michon, 2002; Portschy, 2020). The state of the literature is better with regard to Agamben (see e.g. Casarino, 2003; Delahaye, 2016), but only a few philosophical commentators have situated his temporal reflections in the wider context of his biopolitical writings (see Prozorov, 2014). Until now, comparative readings of the work of Foucault and Agamben brought important conceptual distinctions to the foreground (Ojakangas, 2005), but aspects of time and temporality have not yet been key topics of attention in this regard. Therefore, building on both authors and by drawing from queer-studies scholar Elisabeth Freeman (2010), who explicitly reflects on temporal aspects of biopolitics, this chapter tries to elaborate on the concept of a ‘biopolitics of time’ in the context of the neoliberal transformation of dominant time-regimes in Western societies, involving both chronos and kairos temporalities. Further, drawing on debates in social time-studies that theorize processes related to the rise and decline of modern time-regimes, I will reflect on the question whether Foucault’s and Agamben’s conceptual apparatuses, read through a temporal lens, are able to account for recent transformations connected to the hegemony of neoliberal presentism. Consequently, bringing together insights from biopolitical studies, Foucault studies and critical time studies, I work out and compare different convergent and divergent temporal strategies, concepts and frames of argumentation in the 86

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work of both critical intellectuals, focusing especially on changing relations of time, power and resistance in the biopolitical age of 21st-century (post-)liberal democracies. Currently, changing structures, norms and concepts of time, temporality and history have become the subject of intense debate in philosophy, cultural studies and social sciences. Scholars of different theoretical backgrounds argue that we are experiencing a fundamental transition to a new time-regime, related not only to the way the rhythms of society are processed, but also to how we experience, conceptualize and make sense of time and temporality (Adam, 1990; Nowotny, 1996; Rosa and Scheuerman, 2009; Hartog, 2015; Badiou, 2018; Rancière, 2017). This fundamental transformation marks an epochal shift from a linear, directional, homogeneous and unitary modern time – related to a specific notion of history and the hegemony of clock-time – to a late-modern or neoliberal time-regime – connected to new ICTs and global capitalism – characterized by the feeling that everything speeds up and time is experienced in a condensed, instantaneous, fragmented and singular way. Building on Aleida Assmann (2020), I will call this diagnosis ‘the narrative of the rise and decline of modern time’ and ask what the implications of such a conception are for an attempt to conceptualize the temporal dimensions of biopolitics in the 21st century via Foucault and Agamben. I will proceed in four steps. First, I will sketch different theoretical views dealing with current transformations of hegemonic time regimes in Western industrial societies, which assume that we are experiencing a shift from liberal historicism to a regime that I like to call neoliberal presentism. Second, I will reconstruct time-theoretical notions in the work of Foucault and Agamben and try to connect them to their work on biopolitics. Third, I will introduce selected work from queer studies that, building on Foucault, establish a focus on recent forms of ‘chronobiopolitics’ (Freeman, 2010) or ‘biopolitics of time,’ as I have defined it (Portschy, 2019). In a fourth and final step, I will integrate these different strands by asking the question: if we take recent diagnoses of a transformation from a linear, modern time towards a form of neoliberal presentism seriously, what implications does this have for governing life at the intersection of chronos- and kairos-times in the 21st century, and which kind of critical tools can we find in the work of Foucault and Agamben to investigate these changes? I will conclude with the assumption that we could profit from theoretical perspectives which invest deeper attention into the inquiry of historical articulations of a politics of life and time, and suggest that we should

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not simply extend the notion of biopolitics to the realm of time and history, but conceive biopolitics in its core dimension as a form of politics of time.1

FROM MODERN CHRONOLOGICAL TIME TO NEOLIBERAL PRESENTISM: A SHORT GENEALOGY OF THE CHRONOS- AND KAIROS-TIME TRADITIONS Modern time is often associated with two specific forms of temporal order: (1) the rise of clock-time and (2) the temporalization of history as a collective singular noun, although their relationship is rarely theorized in a substantial way (Adam, 1990; Koselleck, 2004). One could assume with Aleida Assmann that both build on a Newtonian framework: modern history, according to Assmann (2020), has encultured Newtonian time through imbuing it with values, meaning and practical imperatives. However, this argument might be contested, because the modern notion of history is also influenced by the ancient Greek myth of chronos and Christian eschatology, but, most importantly, builds on the separation of ‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation,’ which implies the anticipation of constant change (see Koselleck, 2004). Foucault described the difference between the two notions of time or history in the context of a radical transformation in the positive order of knowledge from the ‘classical’ to the ‘modern age,’ where the dynamic movement of history in the 19th century is freed from its former ‘arrestment’ in a rigid grid related to mathesis universalis, and, together with the figure of the human, becomes a new historical a priori (see Foucault, 2002). Different from a modern notion of linear-chronological time, ancient Greek thought participated in a complex and plural temporal imaginary, involving at least three notions of time: chronos, kairos and aion. According to the ancient

The conceptual distinction of notions of time and history are highly contested in social time studies. Historians of time examine the change of temporal norms, structures and experiences through history, thereby making the latter a kind of meta-temporal device, container or mechanism ‘in’ or ‘through’ which temporal change happens (see Koselleck, 2004). Contrary to this, philosopher David C. Hoy assumes that ‘[t]emporality and historicity are not the same, even if they are connected. Temporal phenomena are not necessarily historical phenomena. Even if there can be temporality without historicity, there can be no historicity without temporality’ (Hoy, 2009, p. 165). With Amy Elias and Joel Burges, I see history as a ‘cultural mediated form of time, which itself has already been mediated through our cognitive schemas, cultural vocabularies, moral systems, ontologies, and epistemologies’ (Burges and Elias, 2016, p. 19). Therefore, although understandings of time and history always intersect in complex ways, in this chapter I use time as the more general term, referring to temporal phenomena of different kind, i.e. historicity, periodicity, rhythm, process, duration etc. which cannot be reduced to one another. 1

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myth, chronos was depicted as an unbridled force of coming into being and fading away, separating heaven (uranos) and earth (gaya) and not stopping short of devouring his own children (Turetzky, 1998). In ancient myth, aion initially referred to the temporal dimension of a spiritual life force, but in his Timaeus, Plato associated it with the realm of eternal ideas. Further, he introduced chronos as a counterterm to aion, reducing the former to a temporal copy of eternity. Later, Aristotle defined time (chronos) as the ‘number of change with respect to the before and after’ (Aristotle, 1997). Time is here understood not only as intrinsically connected to the order of ‘number,’ but also to a form of movement (time is not identical to movement but also never without it), which finds its standard measure in the cyclical rotation of the heavenly bodies. Therefore, an ancient version of chronological time was born, but it had a cyclical morphology and was dependent on movement and change. Contrary to this, St. Augustine, while lamenting in his Confessions about being torn apart between the times of present, past and future – and hoping for a state of wholeness in the hands of god’s timeless eternity – in his Cevitate Dei, referred to a conception of linear, teleological and eschatological time as the only time appropriate to Christianity (see Turetzky, 1998). In modern times, a secularized version of linear-chronological time was identified with Newtonian physics, which represented the core premises of the modern mechanical worldview. Here, not only the dynamic and transformative aspect of the ancient chronos-myth but also the directionality implied by Christian eschatology were arrested in the spatial image of a space-time container, where time was defined – independent from movement, but on its own flowing constantly – as absolute, homogenous, empty, invariant, continuous, endlessly divisible and reversible (ibid). Hegel later added elements of ‘old’ chronos to ‘new’ chronological time, to bring life into ‘homogenous, empty time’ – as Benjamin (2007) called it – by integrating aspects of change, tense and directionality. Time, inseparable from the movement of spirit and concept, was now defined as ‘pure restlessness of life’ (Hegel, 1989, p. 46), transforming it into something that Bloch later called ‘Tendenzzeit,’ to give voice to a dialectic of form and content (Bloch, 1970, p. 129). In radical contrast to the ‘chronos/chronological-time tradition,’ in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle – building on the Sophists and Plato – made use of a different concept of time: kairos, here understood as the ‘virtue of time’ (Turetzky, 1998; Aristotle, 2009). According to the ancient myth, kairos was depicted as the youngest son of Zeus and the god of the right opportunity. With a long forelock, a shorn back of the head and wings on his feet, he was able to rush by so fast that one needed either luck or practical wisdom to seize it. Beyond this notion of the right moment, and in contradistinction to chronos, kairos not only brings to expression qualitative aspects of time-experience and stands for the richness and meaningfulness of time, but also represents an

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image of due measure, always keeping the level between too much and too little. With regard to politics, in ancient Greek and renaissance texts, kairos was used as a symbol to point to the necessity that rulers have to be educated in reading the times and seizing the moment, to make the right decision at the right time. But if we want to sketch a short genealogy of the kairos-tradition, we need a bigger picture: beginning with Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, in the late 19th century, and continued by Benjamin, Heidegger and different scholars of poststructuralism, in the 20th century, kairos is mobilized against the chronological levelling of liberal mass-societies and liberal progress narratives. They all pointed to the fact that, beneath the vulgar, linear, homogenous and highly naturalized time of the nation-state, we find a more authentic way to temporalize time, giving voice to the singularity of the moment, which puts the individual into a vertical relation with eternity, thus making possible a heroic confrontation with human finitude (Heidegger, 1967; Agamben, 1993; Nietzsche, 1997; Benjamin, 2007). In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History,’ Walter Benjamin formulated a radical critique of a modern notion of history and progress, contrasting liberal historicist thought with a notion of Jetzt-Zeit, which flashes up at a moment of danger, thus giving expression to the real state of emergency and blowing up the continuum of history, so as to create a crack in time for the Messiah to enter (Benjamin, 2007). Benjamin wilfully participated in the theological horizon of the kairos tradition, which Agamben – in an interesting move – traces back to St. Paul (Agamben, 2005), so that the moment of decision is associated with a radical revolutionary act, which founds a new time-order – a new aion – as Agamben says. Even Hannah Arendt participated in this ‘kairotic tradition’ to make human practice the medium of a godlike creation of the new (Arendt, 1998). But there is a problem: kairos not only symbolizes an eternal potential of human agency and emancipation, but is fundamentally entangled with forms of power and domination, since determining the ‘right moment’ is intrinsically connected to powerful knowledge practises, which grant people authority and legitimize their ruling over others. Currently, social and cultural time-scholars argue that the modern linear-chronological time-regime – which achieved hegemonic status through processes of state and nation building – is being challenged by new modes of temporal organization related to capitalist globalization, new technologies, and a general trend towards acceleration (Rosa and Scheuerman, 2009). In this regard, David Harvey assumes that in the present phase of capitalist late-modernity, we are experiencing fundamental transformations of space and time, corresponding to a transition from Fordism to more flexible forms of capital accumulation, which manifest in a compression of space-time and a general acceleration of economic and social processes (Harvey, 1989). According to Zygmunt Bauman, the experience of time in neoliberal societies

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is reduced to an eternal now, a shrunken present, which is instantaneous and in a certain sense timeless, because it involves only ‘points without dimensions’ (Bauman, 2000, p. 118). With a different emphasis, time and science-studies scholar Helga Nowotny argues that post-modern time arrangements, which go hand in hand with a longing for the real and authentic experience of the moment and are connected to the technological achievement of ‘approximative simultaneity,’ lead to a vanishing of the future, which is replaced by an ‘extended present,’ so that we are no longer able to imagine radical change (Nowotny, 1996; see also Jameson, 1994). The belief in a future-directed linear progress, which was characteristic of industrial modernity, is replaced by a radically accelerated process of innovation, which puts into question the established boundary formerly separating the present and the future. Therefore, notions of chronological time, historical progress and the singular moment, chronos and kairos reconfigure each other in late modernity. That is also the reason why Toni Negri, in his masterpiece ‘The constitution of time,’ no longer situates ‘now-time’ on the side of the proletarian revolution but at the centre of the time of administration, ruled by the state and capitalism, combing progress and a demand for permanent innovation: ‘Now-time (Jetzt-Zeit), innovative precision, uto-pia: capital considers them as its own. Progress is the eternal-return, lit up by now-time (Jetzt-Zeit). Administration is illuminated by charisma’ (Negri, 2013, p. 109). Recently, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière also questioned the norm of the present in neoliberal societies. Revising Benjamin, Badiou asks: ‘What is the facticity of the present? What is our bordello?’ (Badiou, 2018, p. 37, my translation). He interprets the unquestioned orientation towards the present – which to a certain sense also guided his Being and Event – as a devotion towards a cult of youthfulness that has become an ideal, going hand in hand with a form of political nihilism. Because youth already represents the image of the future in the present, any idea of a reflected formation of the future becomes meaningless. Rather, the present is erratically-normed and directed uniformly towards an idea of constant change as well as to the imperative of wasting time in the moment, without being able to pile it up, which is necessary for any creative and revolutionary project (Badiou, 2018, p. 98). At the same time, Badiou also interprets this norm of the present as related to processes of acceleration and a form of empty time, where each moment is equivalent and has no decisive meaning. Therefore, what is needed is a ‘de-presentation’ of time or a ‘de-fetishization’ of the present and a creation of a state of non-drug induced ‘artificial slowness’ (ibid, p. 103). Rancière shares Badiou’s assumption that we are currently living in a temporal regime of neoliberal presentism, but he combines this diagnosis with a critique of a hierarchical division of times, making it necessary to establish more inclusive narratives directed towards temporal justice (Rancière, 2017). But then, there is the question: how can we conceive of

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the relation of modern linear-chronological time and neoliberal presentism? Is the one replaced by the other? Was the latter already (absently) present as a potential or a tendency? German sociologist Andreas Reckwitz assumes that these recent transformations of the social organization of time have to be interpreted in the context of a theory of social singularization (Reckwitz, 2019). The striving for uniqueness, authenticity and singularity is no longer just an individual desire to escape mass societies of the 20th century, but – at least in the cultural horizon of a highly qualified new middle class influenced by the creative economy – becomes a social norm. This process goes hand in hand with a compulsion towards experiencing a form of temporal difference and proper time, and where affect and temporality intersect in the celebration of the singular moment (ibid, p. 9f). This brings to expression a new relation of the general and particular in late modernity, where the logic of ‘formal rationalisation,’ which was characteristic of modernity, is now transformed into a background-structure, working as an enabling condition for an emergent logic of singularization, which is dominant in the foreground (ibid). Difference no longer stands in a strict antagonism to standardization in late modernity, but, rather, we see its constant emergence as a factor of cultural and economic value production, which is enabled by a complex infrastructure of standardization. Therefore, we have to ask the question: what implications does this complex intersection and layering of chronos and kairos times in neoliberal societies have with regard to biopolitics?

FOUCAULT’S AND AGAMBEN’S NOTION OF BIOPOLITICS If we try to follow Foucault’s attempt to make visible a historical tendency towards the articulation of life and politics, the notion of ‘biopolitics’ is initially defined ex negativo. While sovereign power refers to a form of extraction and disposition over the death of the subjects, in the 18th and 19th centuries we encounter the emergence of a new form of power, which operates not so much via law or systems of representation, but rather on the basis of techniques of normalization (see Foucault, 1978, p. 133ff). The negative power of the sovereign sword, deriving from patria potestas – being primarily concerned with issues of blood and territory, where power over life is nothing more than an arbitrary power over death – is transformed into a fundamentally positive biopower, that no longer tries to repress bodily forces and capacities of its subjects, but induces, produces and amplifies them. Foucault differentiates two axes of this new form of biopower: (1) Discipline of the individual, which is concerned with the dressage, utilization and augmentation of the forces of individual bodies for the sake of economic exploitation and political impairment; (2) biopolitics of the population, related to the statistic measurability of the

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biosocial features of the body of the species, making possible the indexicalization, objectification of and the intervention into the general forces and potentials of the state (see ibid, p. 139f). Foucault further speaks of an integration of life into the realm of power-knowledge and the emergence of a ‘bio-history,’ ‘through which the movements of life and the processes of history interfere with one another’ (ibid, p. 143). Sexuality is understood as a hinge connecting both axes along which political technologies of life develop. As a historical dispositive, it hereby builds on pastoral practices of confession and makes possible the control of individual bodies and the statistical capture of population development (see ibid, p. 146f). What further connects the two forms of power – discipline of the individual and regulation of the population – is demonstrated by Foucault along his critique of the Nietzschean hypothesis of repression, pointing to the productivity and positivity of knowledge-power, which goes beyond prohibition, negativity and law. Building on Foucault’s reflections on the biopolitical threshold of modernity, Giorgio Agamben re-situates the conceptual lines of analysis. Although he imports Foucault’s definition of biopolitics as ‘the point at which the species and the individual as a simple living body become what is at stake in a society’s political strategies’ (Agamben, 2010, p. 3), he re-situates the notion of biopolitics along the image of an original exclusion of bare life (zoe) from the polis, allowing only for a qualified life (bios), which is expressed in Aristotle’s definition of man as a ‘political animal.’ Bare life is relegated and confined to the realm of reproduction, the oikos. Further, Agamben interprets the production of this kind of ‘bare life,’ which he exemplifies by the figure of ‘homo sacer,’ who is both excluded from sacred and profane law, as an original, although concealed, form of exclusion of sovereign power. This exclusion is understood as an exception, which is foundational for the rule itself. Rule and exception therefore maintain a complicated relation, where the exception fully comes to expression in the suspension of the rule: The state of exception (Agamben, 2008). Unlike Foucault, who understood ‘biopolitics’ as a recent phenomenon, which goes beyond the power of the sword, Agamben makes visible a deeper connection between life and power, which is fundamentally anchored in sovereign power. While, for Foucault, ‘biopolitics’ follows an economic rationality of frugal government that invests into life for the sake of its longevity and productive capacities, for Agamben, biopolitics gives expression to a sovereign logic of the state, which also makes visible the totalitarian character of modern democracies. As Mika Ojakangas argues, the distinction of ‘bare life’ and ‘qualitative life’ is absolutely inconceivable within Foucault’s conceptual apparatus, because in the ‘age of biopolitics,’ life is conceived on a univocal plane of immanence, allowing only for differences in degree and not in kind: there is no transcendence and no immanent outside to life anymore (see

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Ojakangas, 2005). Life is understood as emergent in its pure becoming: ‘Now it is over life, throughout its unfolding, that power establishes its dominion’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 138; see also Ojakangas, 2005, p. 13). So while Foucault puts a form of power centre stage, which tries to optimize and multiply life, making an economic and bureaucratized form of ‘pastoral care’ the ultimate rationality of biopolitical government, Agamben recentres biopolitical analysis on sovereign power. Nonetheless, we have to remind ourselves that Foucault conceived the relationship between ‘discipline,’ ‘security’ and ‘sovereignty’ neither as external nor as a form of chronological sequence, but rather along the lines of a dynamic triangle of elements, which reciprocally determine each other (Foucault, 2007, 2008).

ELUCIDATING THE NOTION OF A ‘BIO-POLITICS OF TIME’ The notion of a ‘biopolitics of time’ builds on academic work inspired by poststructuralism and queer-studies. Kathrin Braun (2007) and Dana Luciano (2007) were the first to reflect on the historico-specific relationship of time, temporality and biopolitics. Political theorist Kathrin Braun compared the conceptual implications of biopolitics and temporality in the work of Arendt, Foucault and Agamben. At about the same time, queer-studies scholar Dana Luciano tried to extend Foucault’s argumentation in The History of Sexuality by adding a temporal dimension to it. She coined the term ‘chrono-biopolitics,’ referring to ‘the sexual arrangement of the time of life,’ which she investigated in the context of 19th-century American rituals of mourning and grief (Luciano, 2007, p. 9). Elizabeth Freeman, in her groundbreaking work on queer temporalities, further developed this notion as an analytical bridge to bring into focus the connections between forms of chrono-normative and hetero-normative violence (Freeman, 2010). Chronobiopolitics, for Freeman, enables the binding of societies in time by turning ‘nacked flesh’ into ‘socially meaningful embodiment through temporal regulation’ (ibid, p. 3). Building on Foucault, it involves the chrono-normative anatomy of the individual body structured by time-discipline and the temporal regulation of the population, which is synchronized along macro-temporal schemes to establish naturalized forms of belonging (ibid, p. 4). Chronobiopolitics, therefore, relates to the ‘hidden rhythms’ (see also Zerubavel, 1981) that regulate human behaviour, thereby converting social structures of power and domination ‘into seemingly ordinary bodily tempos and routines, which in turn organize the value and meaning of time’ (ibid, p. 3). In this regard, the state provides subjects with a temporal signature, so that ‘personal histories become legible only within a state-sponsored timeline’ (ibid, p. 4). Similar to Freeman, McCallum and Tuhkanen (2011) focus on what it means – in a temporal sense – for queer

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lifeforms to permanently deviate from hegemonic norms: ‘Living on the margins of social intelligibility alters one’s pace; one’s tempo becomes at best contrapuntal, syncopated, and at worst, erratic, arrested’ (ibid, p. 1). Queer temporalities therefore have to be understood in the context of political strategies of resistance against modern forms of biopolitics, which are inextricably bound up with a theory of temporality, and in particular a theory of historical time… In other words, the emergence of biopower at a certain historical moment is conceived of not only through the conversion of the biological rhythms of a society from death to life, but in terms of interpreting time in a particular way. (ibid, p. 2)

All of these approaches in a certain sense build on Foucault’s historical-philosophical engagements with the government of the living, trying to extend his approach to the realm of time. Although these remarks are not conclusive, they point to an interesting intersection of the government of life and time in 20th- and 21st-century neoliberal societies, on which I want to further elaborate.

FOUCAULT’S TEMPORAL DISPOSITIVES Building on Foucault, in recent writings (Portschy, 2019, 2020) I tried to work out divergent temporal rationalities and technologies characteristic of three different types of power, which, although working through different logics – according to my interpretation – have to be integrated into biopolitical analysis: sovereignty, discipline and security. These temporal dispositives give voice to historically-specific forms of time-power-knowledge, to structure the conduct of conducts and enable temporal forms of subjectivation, by actualizing different rationalities and technologies of time. Therefore, the biopolitical threshold of modernity cannot be reconstructed against the negative foil of sovereignty, but rather we have to integrate it into the power-nexus of modern biopolitics, pointing to the fact that the negative power of the sword and the positive power investing into life reciprocally overdetermine each other, leading to a form of ‘bio-chrono-thanato-politics’ (see also Mbembé, 2003; Freeman, 2010, p. 22). The temporal logic of sovereignty builds on the imagination of a ‘founding precedence’ (Foucault, 2006, p. 43), referring to a mythical origin, which has to be periodically renewed, integrating sacred and profane times. Therefore, it is concerned with the establishment of a unifying form of historiography: ‘a historical narrative whose function was to recount the sovereign’s past, to re-actualize the past of sovereignty in order to reinforce power’ (Foucault, 2015, p. 239). Further, sovereignty deduces from its subordinates their products, their harvest, their labour, their times, of which it gives back some part on

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cyclically recurring occasions of excessive expenditure. Against this subtractive and therefore negative access to the time of life of its subjects, Foucault originally differentiated the positive form of biopower. Foucault sums up the historical transformation from feudalism to capitalism in terms of changes in the temporal exercise of power and control: If the problem of feudal society was one of localizing individuals, tying them to an estate over which one could exercise one’s sovereignty and from which one could take rent, the problem of capitalist society is not so much to tie individuals down locally, as to capture them in a temporal mesh that ensures that their life is effectively subjected to the time of production and profit. We pass from fixing locally to temporal sequestration. (Foucault, 2015, p. 211)

Because the irregularity of times creates problems for capitalist classes and state administration, discipline now basically becomes ‘time-discipline.’ Trying to avoid working-class habits of treating the body, its life and times in an inaccurate way (seen from the view of production), the emergence of disciplinary apparatuses and the employment of the ‘examination’ as a new temporal technology of knowledge-power in the 19th century involves three specific functions: (1) the sequestration of the time of life, and its subjection to the time of production; (2) the establishment of a form of discursivity of surveillance, involving the permanent account and evaluation of individual lifetime; (3) the linkage of this discourse to a form of normativity, that can also refer to an external authority, so that the individual can be described in terms of her/his possible or ‘real divergence from something no longer defined as the good, perfection, or virtue, but as the normal’ (see ibid, p. 211ff). Because the discursive matrix, on which the norm is based, has to be inscribed into the body, the primary objective of the exercise of power is the shaping of bodily habits (ibid, p. 217f). Contrary to the juridical contract, which binds the individuals to their property, habitual routines make it possible to fix individuals who own no property to the apparatus of production. Contrary to the sovereign deduction of times and complementary to the disciplinary control and economic investment into bodily durations, security apparatuses put the focus on the temporal administration of population-development. They use statistics and probability-calculus to record, compute and assess possible future development, building on and extrapolating from past events. Thereby, the use of time-power lies no longer in fixing temporal processes according to a rigid grid or a classified time characteristic for the ‘classical age’ of Newton and Descartes (see Foucault, 2002), but frees movement and becoming from their powerful immobilization. What we are now confronted with is a reality that is ‘in flux’ and which can no longer be controlled in its entirety (Foucault, 2008). Rather, security focuses on the aleatory in the context of becoming, which implies naturalized forms of

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kairos- and chronos-temporalities. That is why the administration of an open series of events stands in the centre of attention, which is no longer concerned with individual action, but with a politics of number related to the development of the population, aiming for a form of context-shaping to structure the milieu, in which individual actions can occur. The population is now conceived as an entity sui generis, having its own liabilities and tendencies prone to statistical reasoning: longevity, mortality, birth rate, illnesses, and which together contribute to the well-being of the state. Security therefore installs a ‘serial-aleatoric evolutionism’ (Portschy, 2020), which is oriented towards letting things move their way, investing into the passing of time, regulating peaks and lows, thereby trying to keep the balance. This temporal dispositive is characteristic of societies that reflect on their own temporal becoming in a way that makes the passing of time the single most important variable when it comes not only to the ‘binding’ of time in social institutions, but also to the generation of social values, understood both in the economical and the cultural sense. Finally, in neoliberalism, the subject has to cultivate and habituate certain temporal norms and values, which make him or her ‘eminently governable,’ by learning to permanently care for an uncertain future in the present (Foucault, 2008, p. 270). The neoliberal cutback of social security-systems goes hand in hand with a shirking of responsibility to the realm of individual self-management. As an ‘entrepreneur of the self,’ the subject has to invest in human capital, involving the development of bodily and mental capabilities, beginning from the adaptation to the environment to the manipulation of genetic predispositions. Furthermore, new technologies in the field of reproductive medicine and nanoscience make previously unimagined interventions possible into the conditions of creating future human and non-human life on the planet. Authors such as Ulrich Bröckling (2013, 2017) have examined how these transformations align with new temporal forms of subjectivation, which orient themselves towards maxims of creativity, innovation, mobility, activation, risk-taking, project-logic and short-termness, while also following a cyclical movement of permanent evaluation. In this regard, aspirations of self-optimization go hand-in-hand with the compulsion to cultivate attitudes of prevention, anticipation and resilience, which put pressure on the self and urge him/her to better act in the present to take care for the future.

AGAMBEN: FROM BIOPOLITICS TO TEMPORALITY AND BACK In Infancy and History, Agamben accused Marxism of neglecting ‘to elaborate a concept of time that compares with its concepts of history’ (Agamben, 1993, p. 91). Hence, Marxisms falls back to ‘homogenous, empty time,’

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which Benjamin critiqued for remaining stuck in a progressivist ideology and which – we could assume – is the time of the sovereign state. But this is not the full picture, since Agamben thinks of sovereign power through Schmitt’s exceptional decision, which at the same time founds and dislocates the chronological order of time. Therefore, the reason why Marxism needs a revolutionary notion of time is that the ‘original task of a genuine revolution … is never merely to “change the world,” but also – and above all – to “change time”’ (ibid). Agamben works himself through different philosophical notions of time: Aristotle, Augustine, Newton, Hegel, Marx, Benjamin and Heidegger, making the last two philosophers agents of messianic hope. Benjamin introduces the notion of ‘Jetzt-Zeit,’ aiming toward a radical disruption of the time continuum of history, bringing time to a standstill, where time crystallizes, thus opening up a gate for the messiah to enter (see also Benjamin, 2007). Heidegger, on the other hand, distinguishes the vulgar notion of time from the time of an authentic decision facing the finitude of the human being (see also Heidegger, 1967). Both authors are crucial for Agamben to constitute a theory of time, which is adequate to a materialist notion of history. Therefore, Agamben’s critical concept of time centres around the ‘jouissance’ of the revolutionary event, which is incommensurable to any notion of quantified, linear, homogeneous time. ‘For history is not, as the dominant ideology would have it, man’s servitude to continuous linear time, but man’s liberation from it: the time of history is the cairos in which man, by his initiative, grasps favourable opportunities and chooses his own freedom in the moment’ (Agamben, 2000, p. 104). Seen from this perspective, the true historical materialist, ‘is ready at any moment to stop time’ (ibid, p. 105). In The Time that Remains, Agamben (2005) further develops his concept of kairos as messianic time by investigating St. Paul’s ‘Letter to the Romans.’ There, he distinguishes the time of apocalypse – referring to the end of time – from his understanding of the messianic as ‘a time that contracts itself and begins to end’ (ibid, p. 62). It is a shortened time, a time that remains, but only until it comes to a cesura, where one order of time or aion passes into the next. This is the time of kairos, or in Benjamin’s word ‘nowtime,’ which is distinguished from chronos as ‘profane time.’ But on a closer view, kairos and chronos do not stand in an external relation, but rather kairos is conceived as a constitutive part of chronos; it is chronos, but in a different ‘mode.’ Chronos is constituted or represented time, while kairos is constitutive or – in the words of Gustave Guillaume – ‘operational time’ or ‘chronogenetic time’ (ibid, p. 65f). Kairos is nothing else than that time which is ‘pressing within the chronological time, working and transforming it from within’ (ibid); for in the end, kairos is ‘nothing more than seized chronos,’ or ‘in other words, what we take hold of when we seize kairos is not another time, but a contracted and abridged chronos’ (ibid, p. 68f). Therefore, kairos is a ‘transitional time,’

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which connects two different phases, time-orders or aions, but with regard to chronos ‘it is that innermost disjointedness within time through which one may – by a hairsbreadth – grasp time and accomplish it’ (ibid). Hence, Agamben, in The Time that Remains, does not interpret kairos and chronos as two antagonistic principles of time. Rather, kairos is chronos, but only in its dimension of becoming, transition or passage.2 We have to ask the question of whether we can understand the relation of kairos and chronos in the work of Agamben in analogy to the relation of exception and rule. In what way is the sovereign decision over the state of exception then connected to the true revolutionary moment – the real state of emergency according to Benjamin? How far do they both represent complex intersections of kairos and chronos temporalities in the context of the biopolitical control of life itself? In his Means without Ends, Agamben criticizes approaches that want to make an end to the sovereign state while leaving history intact, or destroying the state while sticking to a form of historical-chronological time. The real revolutionary – a Heideggerian thinker of the event – is therefore depicted as this singular figure, able to combine both aims: ‘[o]nly a thought capable of thinking the end of the state and the end of history at one and the same time, and of mobilizing one against the other, is equal to this task’ (Agamben, 2000, p. 110f, emphasis in original). Recently, Agamben has developed a concept of ‘the contemporary,’ which draws on Foucault’s notion of actuality and Benjamin’s ‘Jetzt-Zeit’ (Agamben, 2011). With Barthes, and building on Nietzsche, he tries to interpret ‘contemporaneity’ in an untimely way. Nietzsche understood the ‘untimely’ in the sense of ‘acting counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a time to come’ (Nietzsche, 1997, p. 60). Actuality or contemporaneity, in a critical understanding, does not point to a sort of presentism, but rather is about gaining distance towards the present. Actuality is never simply present, but goes hand in hand with a sort of obscurity, a kind of shadow, which is constitutive of its very being, since each present is always only partially actualized and involves latent potentialities (see also Bloch, 1970). Agamben interprets this shadow as a result of constitutive traces from the past, which we have to critically address if we want to understand Foucault’s question: What is actuality, what is today, what is contemporaneous? The true contemporary therefore establishes a relation towards time, which is both in and against the present (Agamben, 2011, p. 11). The The reference to Benjamin is therefore misleading, since in ‘On the Concept of History,’ he tried to position his concept of ‘now-time’ against any idea of temporal passage, emphasizing a form of time, characterized through a total stand-still, a crystalized time-image, where past and present intersect and which blows chronological time apart (Benjamin, 2007). 2

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contemporary relates to the present in an always ‘untimely’ way, he or she performs a temporal attitude of asynchronicity, anachronism and archaism, going along with the present, while keeping a critical distance, so that its obscurity and darkness comes into view, ‘as something that never ceases to engage’ him or her (ibid, 14). Actuality therefore does not stand for a unity or totality, but rather for a fraction or a caesura, which signals the intersection of different times (ibid, p. 18). He or she establishes a relation towards time, which is not contemporary to his time, but to all other times. Agamben exemplifies this stance again through the figure of Paul and messianic time, who announced the contemporaneity with Messiah in the ‘time of the now,’ kairos, which – according to Agamben – is also the point where Foucault’s and Benjamins’ projects intersect. But the problem in this regard is that Foucault’s historical investigations are very ambivalent towards the notion of kairos, for he eschews two time-theoretical perspectives: Authenticism and Apocalypticism. While authenticism assumes some substantial temporal force or dynamic that gets blocked up by the dominant mechanisms of organizing time, and hence must be recovered or restored – therefore assuming an external relation of power and freedom, which Foucault (see i.e. 1982) repudiates – apocalypticism totalizes the heterogeneity of temporal forms from the standpoint of its own present, which is conceived as a fundamental break in time (Foucault, 1989, p. 379). This makes Foucault, on the one hand, critical of a romantic notion of kairos and, on the other hand, in Agamben’s terms, not only of ‘apocalyptic’ but also of ‘messianic time:’ We hit upon here one of the most destructive habits of contemporary thought. … That is that the moment of the present is considered in history as the break, the climax, the fulfilment, the return of youth, etc. The solemnity with which everyone who has a philosophical discourse reflects his own time seems a stigma to me. … One must probably find the humility to admit that the time of one’s own life is not the onetime, basic, revolutionary moment of history, from which everything begins and is completed. (Foucault, 1994a, p. 251)

Contrary to this perspective, Foucault interprets time and history according to a ‘principle of manifold relations’ (Foucault, 1994b, p. 222, my translation), making it impossible to understand it as a discrete, homogeneous and unitary entity or substance, but rather as plural and relational. Therefore, the ‘event’ is not conceived as a simple ‘moment’ in time, but as an ‘intersection between two different forms of persistence, two speeds, two developments, two historical lines’ (Foucault, 1994a, p. 581, my translation). Building on these reflections, Foucault situates time in the context of regimes of knowledge-power and investigates how it becomes a dominant social technology, making possible the synthesis of heterogeneous time-relations, guiding social behaviour, bodily

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comportment and processes of subject-formation. In this regard, for Foucault, there is no authentic way to represent or temporalize time. Contrary to this, time is involved in social struggles for power and hegemony. Therefore, his ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ (Ricoeur, 1971, p. xvii) goes beyond a critique of ‘chronological, homogeneous, empty time,’ recognizing how speaking truth to power even involves kairos as a fundamental tool to legitimize authority and forms of domination. It is especially in his later writings (The History of Sexuality II and III) that Foucault reconstructs a notion of kairos in the context of an investigation of ancient Greek, Roman and early Christian ethical principles of self-guidance. Although Foucault is inspired by Heidegger’s temporal analysis of ‘Dasein,’ he historizes his categories of describing existential-ontological dimensions of being and time. Therefore, the subject becomes readable as a creature of time, but not in a time-less or a-historical way, because Foucault is interested in reconstructing the historical practices, which led to the emergence of certain temporal experiences, orientations, attitudes and norms. Therefore, he investigates ethical guidelines and codes of conduct, which formed temporal self-relations: creating a sense of the present as an extended duration, cultivating a vision of anticipation, being able to re-narrate the recent past according to memory (see Foucault, 2005). All these forms of temporal vision, which in modern subject-experience became part of a natural attitude, give expression to historical processes of shaping the conduct of conducts. In this regard, Foucault further develops an interesting perspective on kairos – right moment and due measure – in relation to his notion of governing the conduct of conducts: One has to keep in mind that this theme of the ‘right time’ had always had considerable importance for the Greeks, not only as a moral problem, but also as a question of science and technique. The exercise of practical skills as in medicine, government, and navigation … implied that one was not content with knowing general principles but that one was able to determine the moment when it was necessary to act and the precise manner in which to do so in terms of existing circumstances. (Foucault, 1985, p. 58)

In ancient thought, kairos is connected to phronesis, a form of practical wisdom, which is decisive to recognize the right moment. ‘And in fact it was one of the essential aspects of the virtue of prudence that made one capable of practicing the “politics of timeliness” in the different domains – whether this involved the city or the individual, the body or the soul – where it was important to seize the kairos. In the use of pleasures, morality was also an art of the “right time”’ (ibid). The rationality of kairos is most developed in the field of ‘dietics,’ which asks for the ‘when’ and ‘how often’ of different kinds of practices not only related to sexuality, but also to nutrition and the

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general wealth of the body. But indeed, it is in the realm of pleasure that the relevance of time and kairos becomes most important.3 In each case, what has to be avoided is intercourse at ‘untimes’ (akairon), referring to bad conditions of sexual activities. But these schedules and calendars of conduct cannot be understood as strict instructions, but rather as a collection of strategic principles of practical wisdom, which had to be accorded to the specific context conditions. Therefore, we are not confronted with a general disapproval or stigmatization of the sexual act, but with a temporal index of favourable conditions of conduct.

CONCLUSION In conclusion, I want to ask what happens when the singular moment becomes a new social norm in contemporary neoliberalism, which stands at the centre of the government of the living. A critical approach towards the normativity of time confronts social and political theory with huge challenges. The ambivalences and contradictions of chronos and kairos time-categories make it visible that there is no notion of time that is able to uphold a non-normalizing form of temporalization per se. Every temporal orientation, structure, attitude, perspective, rhythm – every countable and narratable aspect of time – can potentially become a powerful tool with regard to the reproduction and transformation of social relations of power and domination. My hypothesis would be that we are currently experiencing a transformation from a chronological towards a kairological time regime, but not in the form of a sequential replacement of the one by the other. Rather, chronological time still functions as a kind of infrastructure, making possible emergent kairotic time-forms which overdetermine, reconfigure and modify the time-norms of industrial societies into the direction of a hegemonic neoliberal presentism. Therefore, we are confronted with a time-regime that is characterized by features like the singularity of the moment, instantaneity, short-time-horizon, synchronicity, real-time-connectedness. While it contributes to the experience of an eternal present, which seems equally shared, on closer view, it goes hand in hand with powerful forms of exclusion, marginalization and subordination (see Fabian, 2002; Badiou, 2018; Rancière, 2017). This point is related to the effect that the time of life of different social actors and groups is not only unequally valued, 3 Here, the right moment concerns different temporal scales: first, individual lifetime, where sexual maturity and reproductive capacities stand in the foreground; second, the seasons, where we have to take care for climatic circumstances, warmth/ cold, humidity/aridity; third, the times of the day, where we have to consider times favourable to bodily exertion and fertility; finally, kairos needs to be coordinated with other activities (Foucault, 1989, p. 78).

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but that they are assigned to their ‘proper time’ in a hierarchy of social times, which establishes gradual time-zones of life-times worth living, demarked from those deemed already dead. For Achilles Mbembe, similar to Freeman, the notion of biopolitics is intrinsically connected to a form of necropolitics (Mbembé, 2003; Freeman, 2010). By investigating the multiple intersections of time and life in the work of Agamben and Foucault, I want to reflect on the question of whether these intellectuals are capable of providing us with critical conceptual tools to take into view recent transformations of social time-regimes from a linear-chronological time, connecting 19th-century historicism, liberal ideologies of progress and the global synchronization of clock time to the recent emergence of neoliberal presentism. My hypothesis is that Agamben – building on Benjamin, although complicating his approach – still tends to reify time, in that he identifies power with a certain form of “‘homogeneous”, empty time’ that he confronts with the messianic horizon of kairos (cairos). Both times are somehow reduced to uniform principles – a principle of order and a principle of difference – even if the one is located within the other, giving expression to its constitutive dimension. Agamben further integrates his time-theoretical reflections into a political theology, which, in his original attempt to profanize political concepts, ends up re-sacralizing the relation of politics and time. Foucault, on the other hand, makes it possible to establish a relational perspective of temporal manifolds, understanding time not as discrete, unitary and singular, but as an intersection of multiple temporal layers, speeds, durations, events etc. Therefore, he thinks of time as a manifold relation. Although we have seen that Agamben – building on Foucault – also tries to rethink actuality as an intersection of times, his thought remains situated in a wider context, which is connected to his authenticist and apocalyptic reflections on kairos and messianic time. Contrary to this, Foucault makes it possible to put the focus on powerful time-dispositives, which integrate chronos and kairos aspects, answer to a social urgency and connect power, knowledge and forms of subjectivation, by making subjects incorporate and habituate temporal schemes, which conform to temporal norms of biopolitical societies. Further, Foucault also provides us with a critical perspective on temporal resistance, finding inspiration in the will not to let oneself be governed like that, investing into individual and collective forms of temporal experimentation (see Portschy, 2020). While Foucault wrote on the verge of the passage from liberal modernity to neoliberal presentism, Agamben’s thought is situated in a different historical situation, taking the ‘end of history’ as a starting point for his own investigations (see Prozorov, 2014). Therefore, Agamben is maybe already too much involved in this new neoliberal time regime, so that he interprets his present according to a logic of the camp and elevates sovereignty to the core paradigm of a fundamental biopolitical division. Contrary to this, in the recent

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past, rationalities and technologies of governing time manifest in a complex entanglement of different time-dispositives from the lenses of Foucault: first, a historiographic logic connecting an imagined origin – bearing traces of eternity – in the past to its re-actualization in the present, which is characteristic of sovereignty; second, a clocktime-logic of habit, repeating the past mechanically forward into the future, typical for discipline; third, a new version of kairos situated in a milieu of permanent becoming, which involves tense, transformation and direction, and which enables a form of reality which is in transition. This requires the development of a critical ethos, which is directed towards the constant questioning of what seems natural, even if it gives expression to forms of becoming rather than being. Foucault therefore positioned himself critically with regard to emerging process-philosophical approaches of his age, recognizing the fact that they just replace a metaphysics of being with one of becoming. This is also the direction in which Mika Ojakangas interprets Foucault’s depiction of the next century as Deleuzian (see Ojakangas, 2005). But Foucault’s future-prediction was only partially correct, because after the breakdown of real-socialism, neoliberal presentism enclosed the dynamic and tensed aspects of historical time in a condensed present, making it everything there is. Agamben, therefore, situates his own theoretical endeavour in a historical time that is experienced in an ‘endless now,’ which is paradoxically all the more backed up by a Newtonian frame of empty, homogeneous time. It is this empty present that Agamben tries to counter-actualize by putting the full time of revolutionary kairos centre stage, which bursts open the time-continuum. However, the problem remains that Agamben is not able to think of the neoliberal appropriation of kairos, understood as full time and singular present, and as existential devotion to the experience of the moment. Therefore, in late capitalist society, kairos is elevated to a core principle of government. First, this becomes visible in its connection with the ancient chronos-figure of becoming. Therefore, with regard to security-apparatuses, the event is situated in a time-reality, which is ‘in flux.’ Second, kairos figures more and more as the radical other of chronological reason, which has to be taken into account before it happens: black swans, unknown unknowns etc. Third, in the context of cultural capitalism, time is singularized and it becomes imperative to live your life in the moment, which is on the one hand commodified and on the other experienced as an authentic form of temporalization. Hence, in the context of late-capitalism, kairos represents the new measure of a measureless time-experience, situated in the eternal present of neoliberal societies. With regard to the possibility of a critique of neoliberal presentism through a critical concept of nowtime, actuality and presentist democracy, we would first have to ask what distinguishes a neoliberal kairology from a fascist – which is oriented towards the sovereign decision – and a revolutionary one, focussing i.e. on the common, care-relations, social-justice and an equal

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division of times (Hardt and Negri, 2009; Lorey, 2016; Rancière, 2017). The problem is that the connection of kairos and the messianic in the critical theories of Benjamin, Derrida, Agamben and Negri makes it visible that the symbolic place in which it is actualized is always embedded into a theological horizon, even if it is the profaned form of a negative theology of the event. But if we follow Daniel Bensaïd (2002) in his assumption that the first step towards a strategic politics of time lies in the radical desecration of time, through which a notion of time as possibility comes to the centre of attention, then we have to ask the question of an emancipatory notion of temporality in a different way, which leads us beyond the distinction of chronos and kairos. Such a view would understand time as an intersection of different rhythms, durations and events, a form of temporal manifold, which is never free of power relations or a measure. It brings into focus the possibility to relate to and temporalize time in always new, but provisional ways. The multiplicity of temporal dimensions of biopolitics in the 21st century still remains a subject to be explored in depth. What I wanted to do in this chapter was to bring into contact recent diagnoses about a shift of dominant time-regimes in Western society with neoliberal strategies of governing the living, therefore connecting critical time studies with Foucault and biopolitical studies. For this purpose, I followed Agamben in establishing chronos and kairos as central categories of critical temporal analysis. But while the Italian philosopher just reflects on the power-dimension of chronos, making kairos a transhistorically valid term of critical time thought, Foucault historically investigates chronos- and kairos-time-categories as potential tools in strategic games of power and resistance. When we therefore assume that neoliberal time government – at least besides or in addition to chronos-times – puts kairos-temporalities at the centre of strategies of biopolitical government of the living, it seems that we are better off with Foucault, because he theorizes both time-forms in the context of historical formations of power-knowledge. What we saw through these investigations is that the regulation and control of time is not external to forms of biopolitics, but has been a core dimension of it ever since. We could even say that every politics of life has to be premised upon a specific politics of time, but only under the precaution that it is not reducible to it, because it also involves a politics of the body, affect, materiality, etc. Therefore, this chapter tried to take a first step in the direction of an attempt to reconstruct biopolitical analyses through a temporal lens. For a comprehensive picture, further investigations need to follow, but this is just a question of time.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adam, B., 1990. Time and Social Theory. Cambridge: Polity Press.

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Agamben, G., 1993. Infancy and History. On the Destruction of Experience. London, New York: Verso. Agamben, G., 2000. Means without End. Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G., 2005. The Time That Remains. A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2008. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Agamben, G., 2010. Homo Sacer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2011. Nudities. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Arendt, H., 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Aristotle, 1997. Physics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Aristotle, 2009. The Nicomachean Ethics. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Assmann, A., 2020. Is Time Out of Joint? On the Rise and Fall of the Modern Time Regime. Ithaca, London: Cornell University Press. Badiou, A., 2018. Der zeitgenössische Nihilismus. Wien: Passagen Verlag. Bauman, Z., 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. Benjamin, W., 2007. Kairos. Schriften zur Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bensaïd, D., 2002. Marx for Our Times. Adventures and Misadventures of a Critique. New York: Verso. Bloch, E., 1970. Tübinger Einleitung in die Philosophie. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Braun, K., 2007. Biopolitics and Temporality in Arendt and Foucault. Time Society 16: 5–23. Bröckling. U., 2013. Das unternehmerische Selbst. Soziologie einer Subjektivierungsform. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Bröckling, U., 2017. Gute Hirten führen sanft. Über Menschenregierungskünste. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Burges, J. and Elias, A.J., (eds), 2016. Time. A Vocabulary of the Present. New York: New York University Press. Casarino, C., 2003. Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben, and the Corporeal. Strategies: Journal of Theory, Culture & Politics 16, 2: 185–206. Delahaye, E., 2016. About Chronos and Kairos. On Agamben’s Interpretation of Pauline Temporality through Heidegger. International Journal of Philosophy and Theology 77, 3: 85–101. Fabian, J., 2002. Time and the Other. How Anthropology Makes its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Foucault, M., 1978. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M., 1982. Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry 8, 4: 777–795. Foucault, M., 1985. The Use of Pleasure. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M., 1986. The Care of the Self. New York: Pantheon. Foucault, M., 1989. Foucault Live. Interviews, 1966–84. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M., 1994a. Dits et Écrits. III 1976–1979. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M., 1994b. Dits et Écrits. IV 1980–1988. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M., 1995. Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vintage Books. Foucault, M., 2002. The Order of Things. New York: Routledge. Foucault, M., 2005. The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Lectures at the Collège de France 1981–1982. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Foucault, M., 2006. Psychiatric Power. Lectures at the Collège de France 1973–1974. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

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Foucault, M., 2007. Security, Territory, Population. Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Foucault, M., 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Foucault, M., 2015. The Punitive Society. Lectures at the Collège de France 1972–1973. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Freeman, E., 2010. Time Binds. Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham/ London: Duke University Press. Hardt, M. and Negri, A., 2009. Commonwealth. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Hartog, F., 2015. Regimes of Historicity. Presentism and Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Harvey, D., 1989. The Condition of Postmodernity. An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. Cambridge: Blackwell. Hegel, G.W.F., 1989. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Heidegger, M., 1967. Sein und Zeit. Tübingen: Niemeyer. Hoy, D.C., 2009. The Time of Our Lives. A Critical History of Temporality. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Jameson, F., 1994. The Seeds of Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Koselleck, R., 2004. Futures Past. On the Semantics of Historical Time. New York: Columbia University Press. Lorey, I., 2016. Presentist Democracy: The Now-Time of Struggles. In: Oberprantacher, A. and Siclodi, A. (eds): Subjectivation in Political Theory and Contemporary Practices, pp. 149–163. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Luciano, D., 2007. Arranging Grief. Sacred Time and the Body in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: New York University Press. Mbembé, A., 2003. Necropolitics. Public Culture 15, 1: 11–40. McCallum, E.L. and Tuhkanen, M., (eds), 2011. Queer Times, Queer Becomings. Albany, New York: State University of New York Press. Michon, P., 2002. Strata, Blocks, Pieces, Spirals, Elastics and Verticals: Six figures of Time in Michel Foucault. Time & Society 11: 163–192. Negri, A., 2013. Time for Revolution. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Nietzsche, F., 1997. Untimely Meditations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nowotny, H., 1996. Time: The Modern and Postmodern Experience. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ojakangas, M., 2005. Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault. Foucault Studies 2: 5–28. Portschy, J., 2019. Biopolitik der Zeit. In: Gerhards, Helene; Braun, Kathrin: Biopolitiken Regierungen des Lebens Heute, pp. 67–93. Wiesbaden: Springer. Portschy, J., 2020. Times of Power, Knowledge and Critique. Time & Society 29, 2: 392–419. Prozorov, S., 2014. Agamben and Politics. A Critical Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rancière, J., 2017. Modern Times. Essays on Temporality in Art and Politics. Zagreb: Multimedijalni Institut. Reckwitz, A., 2019. Die Gesellschaft der Singularitäten. Zum Strukturwandel der Moderne. Berlin: Suhrkamp. Ricoeur, P., 1971. Foreword. In: Ihde, D. (ed.): Hermeneutic Phenomenology. The Philosophy of Paul Ricœur, pp. xiii–xix. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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Rosa, H. and Scheuerman, W. (eds), 2009. High-speed society. Social Acceleration, Power, and Modernity. Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press. Turetzky, P., 1998. Time. London: Routledge. Zerubavel, E., 1981. Hidden Rhythms. Schedules and Calendars in Social Life. Berkeley: University of California Press.

6. Identities on the border Ott Puumeister The border is a necessary precondition for the existence of socio-political and cultural identities. Borders create and institute separate groups of people who can then interact with each other; borders are the conditions of possibility for recognizing otherness. Borders and borderlands are sites of translation, a perfect manifestation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s dictum ‘politics precedes being’ (1987, p. 203). Politics takes place on the border in the form of negotiations and interactions with others and otherness; the border is thus a fundamental political space, marking both a separation and instituting a particular relationship. In contemporary (inter)national politics, borders have become one of the central concerns in a very specific manner: they are the primary site of practices and techniques of securitization (e.g., Huysmans, 2006). Securitization transforms the function of the border: it stops it being a space in which it is possible to recognize and interact with otherness, and turns it into a space for identifying threats and potential sources of insecurity. With the help of technological mediation, this process of identification is no longer confined to the immobile state borders, but is constantly working in the background of everyday life through digital technologies and in information networks (Amoore, 2006). Borders have thus become mobile (Szary and Giraut, 2015). Indeed, it is already an obvious fact that we must reply to machines’ demands – ‘Who are you?’ – for instance, when logging on to a computer, buying groceries, etc. It is imperative to be identified, otherwise, it is nearly impossible to carry on a normal life. In 2019, there were an estimated 272 million (3.5% of the world’s population) international migrants globally (McAuliffe and Khadria, 2019, p. 21). These are the people who cannot identify themselves according to the demands of the omnipresent securitized mobile borders. Thus, they remain stuck on the mobile border – a border becomes for them a space of confinement, it is no longer a line to cross by conveniently coming up with an identity card or simply wearing an appropriate face. Their identity is often (mis)assigned by (algorithmic) profiling and thus it falls to the subjects to (dis)prove, for instance, that they are not terrorists. There is thus a wide gap in the experience of those who can identify themselves and thus cross borders without problems, 109

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and those who are pre-identified as members of dangerous groups and have no papers to show (Balibar, 2010; Agier, 2016a). This chapter puts into dialogue the two forms of borders: first, the ontological or the theoretical border, which highlights translation, constitution of the self and other, and political interaction; secondly, the contemporary securitized border – its current historical reality – in which otherness, and thus the border’s political nature, tends to get effaced. In both senses of the border, its fundamental property is uncertainty and indistinction, but in the theoretical sense of the border, this uncertainty grounds the potentiality of borders, while the securitized border produces uncertainty as a means to confine and control people. The chapter concludes with a theoretical discussion on possible resistance to the (sovereign) power exercised on borders. It first outlines Giorgio Agamben’s view on ‘zones of indistinction’ and on inoperative coming politics and then moves on to consider how Agamben’s view is not enough to conceptualize a politics of the body on borders.

WHAT DO BORDERS DO? No border is merely material nor merely symbolic or semiotic. Each material border expresses a semiotic division – a border between cultures, classes, ethnicities, etc. (e.g., Barth, 1969). In Étienne Balibar’s words, ‘no political border is ever the mere boundary between states, but is always overdetermined’ by other demarcations – cultural, social, historical, etc. (2002, p. 79). And conversely, even a conceptual border finds its expression in material signs of division; one needs only to think of the distinctions between mind and body, culture and nature, man and woman, reason and unreason, etc. to understand the materiality of concepts. Thus, the reality of borders is always material-semiotic;1 it is a dual reality, which is to say, a semiotic reality in which materiality always entails meaning and meaning manifests in materiality. Having acknowledged the always-dual reality of borders, it is necessary to complicate things further. Saying, as Balibar (1998) has done, that ‘borders are everywhere’, means two things simultaneously: first, that the whole sociocultural sphere of life is traversed by borders (Lotman, 2005), each interaction materializes a border, expresses differences between groups, for instance. Even speech – how a language is spoken, how it materializes in interactions – manifests a border, a division (see Halliday, 1978). Secondly, that the material means of marking borders have proliferated and the (previously rather stable) state borders are now being policed via portable smart technologies that render

1

On material semiotics, see Law (2009).

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the borders ‘biometric’, that is, controlling mobile bodies rather than immobile territories (Amoore, 2006). The site of enactment of border functions of ‘division, regulation and control’ has shifted and expanded throughout our living environment (Szary and Giraut, 2015, p. 5). The first sense is theoretical, referring to the fundamental process of sociocultural interaction and transformation; the second is historico-sociological, referring to the contemporary reliance on information and communication technologies and data in techniques of governmentality of populations and securitization of borders. Dealing with political borders presents us with a difficulty, a moment of undecidability – as any question regarding borders would and should. This undecidability concerns the nature of the concept of the political, which, according to Carl Schmitt (2007), is exactly the distinction between the friend and the enemy, us and them. Consequently, the political – as the antagonistic precondition and ontological background of all particular politics (Mouffe, 2000) – is itself the practice of marking out borders, constituting distinctions and definitions. Indeed, in this sense, borders are at the heart of the political – not only historically, but also ontologically. Now, it seems to me that placing ourselves on the border, adopting a perspective from the border, has the potential to reconfigure the notion of the political. More precisely, the logic of borders seems to put under question the centrality of identity in the political (e.g., in Laclau and Mouffe, 2001). Indeed, when viewed from one or the other side of the border, the identity of the other, and consequently of the self, might seem nicely demarcated and even foundational for the structured space within the confines of the border. However, when shifting our perspective on the border, we are no longer dealing with clear-cut lines between identities, but with zones which, when examined more closely, have something else at their core than identity (see also Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013, p. 166). This something else is the zone of the political: the margin as a centre of contestation, dialogue, uncertainty. In order to make this argument, I will first elaborate the theoretical sense of the border, using anthropological and semiotic theory. Thus: what do borders do in an ontological sense? The border is a socio-cultural universal. As the semiotician of culture Juri Lotman says, ‘Every culture begins by dividing the world into “its own” internal space and “their” external space’ (1990, p. 131; see also Uspenskij et al, 1973). The anthropologist Michel Agier adds that ‘to institute one’s own place, whether social or sacred, involves separating this from an environment […] which makes it possible to inscribe a given collective, a “group” or “community” of humans in the social world with which, thanks to the border created, a relationship to others can be established and thus exist’ (2016a, p. 18). First, then, drawing a border signifies a separation, an institution of a meaningful and organized space. Secondly, however, it also means instituting a relationship to that other – often seen as unorganized, unstructured, or structured otherwise

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– space and to the creatures (whether human or non-human) inhabiting this space. The function of the border is thus always twofold, it simultaneously separates and unites – by separating it enables interaction with others and otherness in general. It is important to understand that the border is a structural feature of the semiotic or meaningful space: ‘The border of semiotic space is the most important functional and structural position, giving substance to its semiotic mechanism. […] only with the help of the boundary is the semiosphere able to establish contact with non-semiotic and extra-semiotic spaces’ (Lotman, 2005, p. 210). That is, the border marks a zone where it becomes possible to interact with otherness, and this zone is necessary for the existence of one’s own organized space: which is another way of saying something very common, but something worth repeating, namely, that without otherness, no selfhood would exist. It is also important to understand that the border is not a meeting place for pre-given selves and others. Rather, it is a space of negotiation where it is decided who is the other, which type of relationship will be established with the other – and, through this, who is the self and which type of relation the self should have with the other. Lotman speaks of the border as a bilingual filter (2005, p. 209), that is, a ‘membrane’ of translation between the self and the other, a space where these poles gain their identity (see also Monticelli, 2019; Torop, 2005). However, the border separating internal from external space is ‘just a rough primary distinction’ and in fact, ‘the entire space of the semiosphere is transected by boundaries of different levels’ (Lotman, 1990, p. 138). Thus, the inner organization of the meaningful space also depends on drawing borders (e.g., between social positions, expertise, sociocultural groups, genders, etc.). Summing up Lotman’s notion of the border, Daniele Monticelli points to three functions that the border performs: ‘(1) the border as an instrument of separation, internalisation and closure; (2) the border as an instrument of connection; (3) the border as an instrument of internal differentiation and external indetermination’ (2019, p. 393). In this sense, indeed, it is possible to say that borders are everywhere and are the most essential structural element of any meaningful space. Our environment is traversed with borders. The internal dimension of the semiotic space lying closest to the border(s) is named by Lotman as the periphery, which does not follow the norms, values, self-descriptions of the systemic centre, and thus is the space of the most vigorous semiotic activity (2005, p. 212). Being, so to say, uncontrollable by central self-descriptions, the ‘official’ language of the centre is, on the periphery, ‘treated as “someone else’s” language unable to adequately reflect the semiotic reality beneath it’ (Lotman, 1990, p. 134). It is a space where the central, official identity of a culture has no bearing – the periphery is thus an internal foreign zone in a culture, a zone that does not have a settled identity, whose

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being is not yet settled, and is uncertain. The periphery – margins, borderlands, spaces in-between places – is the fundamental political space. It is a space of translation and of the creation of new meanings. Furthermore, it is a space of ‘the political’ before the institution of any clear-cut politics – meaning here policies and techniques of government – for it is on the border that the nature and the included or excluded participants of politics will be decided. It is thus a space before the decision, a space of undecidability in which there are no guidelines for doing a particular sort of politics. The periphery, or borderland, is a fundamental political zone from which new social subjects can emerge. However, we need to keep in mind the fact that the border – and thus borderland or periphery – is something also internal to the semiotic space, to be found everywhere in its internal organization. In this sense, the central self-description of a culture can be contested and put under question from anywhere – no identity, no norm is settled once and for all. If the border is an essential structural element of the semiotic space, then the identity and organization of this space will always remain uncertain. Or, in other words, the division between the inside and the outside is always in question. It merits our attention that, although for Lotman, the border is what separates the self from the other or the own from the alien, it is at the same time the mechanism that tends to render this division itself highly problematic – when a perspective from the periphery or from the borderlands is adopted. As Robert Castel notes, the problems that the youths of the banlieues face are not that they are outside of society, since they are mostly citizens of France, but that they are not inside either, occupying no recognized position (2006, p. 788). Despite – or because of – this, the banlieues function as the creative motor for French culture (Caldiron, 2005, cited in Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013, p. 154). This is the result of adopting the border as method (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013): we would no longer see a unified society compartmentalized according to identities and groups, but a constant practice of bordering – that is, of definition via movement and spacing (and not opposition to another ‘identity’). This movement and practice, which creates and strives to define a (social, cultural, economic) space, is, in the case of borders, always uncertain, undertaken by trial-and-error. Since borders are everywhere, why characterize a socio-culture by a dominant identity rather than via stumbling movements? This uncertainty of the border – from which stems its potentiality – is highlighted in Michel Agier’s (2016a) anthropology of the border, which strives to give an account of borders in terms of social space-time, not simply of lines. Agier identifies three dimensions, or ‘elementary forms’, of the border: spatial, temporal and social: Border of places (here and over there), border of time (before and after), and border of the social world of experience, that is, of everything that comes to exist socially

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by delimiting within a defined environment an ‘own’ and a ‘different’: these are the elementary forms of the border, but also the contexts of its uncertainty, its incompletion in space, in duration, and vis-à-vis others. The social and non-natural character of the border ends up creating a particular situation: the uncertainty of its drawing is expressed in time – of waiting, reflection, conflict – and in space – vague, as if the border was the place where uncertainty had found its most exact recognition. (Agier, 2016a, p. 23)

He regards the border, then, as a specific socio-cultural space-time. This means that the border is a space-time that is being made in practice. This is why he prefers to speak of ‘border situations’ rather than simply ‘borders’, which could be confused with territorial marks and signs lying out there in the world, naturally: […] the border situation is observed in places, moments or experiences that bring into play a relationship with an ‘other’, an external subject who crosses or penetrates a space that is not familiar to him or her, themselves becoming the unfamiliar for those who are there. It is this event that creates a relative foreignness in the particular context, which is repeated and observable in other places. (Agier, 2016a, p. 28)

Regarded as constituted in an event where otherness is encountered, borders can, again, be understood to traverse the whole socio-cultural sphere. Similarly to Lotman, Agier views the border as constitutive of otherness (and through this, sameness or selfhood). But – and this is important – border situations are not reducible to assigning an identity to the other or assuming a self-identity. Insofar as they are ‘spaces and situations of the in-between, thresholds and limits, but also moments of uncertainty and indecision’ (Agier, 2016a, p. 101), border situations should rather be seen as highlighting the very uncertainty of any identity, and forcing subjects to renegotiate who they are in relation to the place they inhabit. The time of border situations is undetermined – or rather, to be determined in waiting, in conflict – their space is unstructured – or rather, to be structured via aberrant movement; and consequently, the (collective) subject emerging in border situations cannot be subsumed under a previous identity. Based on this understanding, Agier uses border situations to critique identitarian politics and anthropological theory, calling their strategy the ‘identity trap’, which makes ‘identity the ultimate truth of an individual’s or a collective’s expression or action’ (Agier, 2016a, p. 133). According to Agier, identity-based ‘reading leads to a deadlock’, forcing us to choose between the poles of society, or collectivism and individualism (Agier, 2016a, p. 141). It thus reproduces the old individual vs. society opposition: we have either free individuals or persons subjugated by collective identity. What is needed – and what the border situation illustrates – is a theory and politics of the decentered

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subject, or what Agier calls the ‘subject in situation’, which he distinguishes from the ‘intimate subject’, ‘engaged in the care of the self’ (the individual), and from the ‘subjugated subject’, being subjectified in and by its context (the persona) (Agier, 2016a, pp. 143–144). The subject in situation emerges most exemplarily in border situations, in which ‘subjects come into existence by detaching themselves from their social condition, from an assigned identity (racial, ethnic, humanitarian) and possibly a suffering self’ (Agier, 2016a, p. 153). The shift from identity to the subject in situation is, for Agier, especially important in that the contemporary political context, on the one hand, has placed a large number of people literally on the border, in border situations. These are the migrants and refugees for whom borders are immobilizing rather than something to be crossed; international borders – in the form of camps, for instance – are the places that they inhabit (see also Agier, 2008; 2016b). And, thus, they are unable, to any significant degree, to assume an identity to be recognized (a social status or position): inhabiting a border permanently means that drawing a border between the self and the other becomes impossible. A permanent or prolonged border situation means permanent uncertainty, without any context to claim an identity and thus even be recognized as ‘other’ and as a subject with legitimate political demands. On the other hand, those for whom crossing borders is a simple and straightforward matter which can be done just by producing an identity card, also have borders at the centre of their lives. The identities of business(wo)men and tourists, for instance, will not remain intact when constantly crossing borders – they are no longer merely local, fixed to a territorial place. For them, borders are different, a means for arrival and departing – transitory zones of slight inconvenience, perhaps. However, for both the migrant and the businessman borders are central, since the contemporary world is based on movement (of people, of goods, of information, etc.). This is best illustrated, of course, by the devastating effect of the restrictions enforced because of the COVID-19 pandemic: a world standing still is a world threatening to collapse. Thus, the context of any theoretical interpretation of contemporary politics should be, for Agier, cosmopolitanism – not a world without borders, but a world where borders, and thus uncertainty of the being of self and other, are central (Agier, 2016a, p. 156). A world traversed with borders does not divide neatly into two – the inside and the outside. Rather, it multiplies and fragments. Globalization has not resulted in a whole, but in an incomprehensible puzzle which never stops asking, at each corner: ‘Who are you?’ It is on this question of identification – not identity – that the practices of inclusion/exclusion are based, by which movements are facilitated or restricted.

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WHO ARE YOU? The border, in its theoretical sense, marks exactly the space-time that is neither inside nor outside a specific socio-culture, in which identities need to be (re) negotiated, and which enables, in its peripheral status, non-identification with official self-descriptions. The border is a heterotopia, ‘both a place of exception where the conditions and the distinctions of normality and everyday life are “normally suspended,” so to speak; and a place where the antinomies of the political are in a sense manifested and become an object of politics itself’ (Balibar, 2010, p. 316). To elaborate further from Balibar, it should be said that it is because of the fact that, on the border, normality is suspended that, on it, the political itself becomes an object of politics – that is, the very questions of who can become a political subject and of what terms and rules are decided in this zone of undecidability – the very condition of politics. ‘The border is a permanent state of exception, which makes the “normal” biopolitical control of government inside the territorial frontier of the state possible’ (Salter, 2008, p. 365). Now, if in the theoretical sense, borders could be understood to be everywhere in the sense of marking differences between groups, cultures, norms, values, etc., and also in the sense of constituting space-times of uncertainty which make this marking possible in the first place, it is also so today in the historico-sociological sense: borders, in a very specific form, are understood to be expanded everywhere. This form is the securitized border, which, with the help of digital and information technologies, has become mobile. That is, the border is no longer fixed to a single location between nation-states, but a mobile assemblage (Szary and Giraut, 2015, p. 6) potentially covering – through digital networks and multi-actor policing – the whole of the social sphere. Contemporary border control employs ‘state agencies, including the police, military, immigration and customs, as well as an ever-expanding range of private actors and commercial bodies’ (Loftus, 2015, p. 116). Further, even common citizens can now perform the duties of border guards using most wanted or terrorist watch lists, for instance, downloadable to their smart phones (Amoore, 2006). The continuous flow and immense proliferation of data on the mobile and biometric borders (Amoore, 2006; Amoore and Hall, 2009) are aimed at the identification of ‘risk factors’, through analysing people’s behaviour and compiling profiles on potential ‘security risks’. At every turn, then, the subject is being asked: who are you, what are your intentions, where are you going, why are you going there? However, the answer to these questions is often settled beforehand, by algorithms determining people’s profiles, for instance. Consequently, it falls to the subject to (dis)prove their identity and behaviour.

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The securitized border is a large identifying machine from which nothing can or should escape, and through which potential risks are sought to be eliminated. Securitization, in the words of Jef Huysmans, ‘constitutes political unity by means of placing it in an existentially hostile environment and asserting an obligation to free it from threat’ (2006, p. 50). The border is the space-time in which this attitude manifests, together with the performance of sovereign authority and power, most clearly. Consequently, each subject is no longer a foreigner, the ‘other’, but a potential threat, an enemy – someone who could cause harm to the political unity of the nation as a whole. The primary aim of identification is to anticipate any possible uncertainties, to render the border into a space where certainty – and, thus, security – is constituted. Of course, by this very demand, the border is also rendered the most insecure space, a space where threat lurks around every corner (see Hagmann, 2015). As we have seen in recent years, however, the primary answer to this increase in the perception of threat is understood to be the increase of security measures and militarization of borders (Jones and Johnson, 2016; Akkerman, 2018). This also means, in a vicious circle, that the perception of threats is dialectically amplified. It would appear, then, that the contemporary securitized border is a very different space-time from that of the ontologically and theoretically understood border of encountering the other and of translation. The border as an identifying machine operating in a paradigm of securitization works in the opposite direction to recognizing the other. Rather than recognize foreigners, travellers, etc. as ‘others’, the imperative of identification aims to recognize, calculate and predict potential harm, not ‘otherness’. And consequently, the question ‘Who are you?’ is aimed not at stepping into dialogue, encountering the other, but of determining their intentions, their interests. And this ‘risk-based identity of the person who attempts to cross an international border is in this way encoded and fixed far in advance of reaching the physical border – when, for example, he leaves the electronic traces of buying an air ticket, applying for a visa, using a credit card, and so on’ (Amoore, 2006, p. 340). Now, this identifying machine operates precisely by separating data and information from a specific form of life – a logic familiar in the writings of Giorgio Agamben (e.g., 1995; 1998; 2016). This operative logic of identification is, thus, paradoxically itself non-identificational. This is so in at least two senses. First, it is not the person’s identity – their way of life, belonging, etc. – that is in question, but their potential future behaviour: will they cause any harm or are they instead going to produce a profit? Identification thus seeks to bypass identity in order to reach a deeper truth. At the airports, for example, to reach this truth, full body scans are used to uncover hidden risks on and in a person’s body. ‘Linking the mobile body to stable or reliable information is a crucial technique of risk management. The mobile body of the traveller must be linked to information which reveals intentions – risk factors – which

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the individual him/herself will not reveal’ (Salter, 2005, p. 47). Secondly, the data gathered in profiling does not directly concern a person’s identity; rather, it concerns the (stereo)types compiled in and through databases. It is not a question of any singular identity, but of compatibility with pre-set types. The problem of racial profiling is, of course, an exemplary case here. The aim of this identifying machine is thus to know more than the subject reveals by a twofold process: to gather information on their body, movement, behavioural history, etc.; and to link this information to risk profiles, a linking which further develops the profiles. This process consists of separating information from the person’s life and deciding on them based on this separated information, rather than awaiting a reply to the question ‘Who are you?’. The body is scanned for truth, and this truth is found pre-given in other similar bodies. Furthermore, in order to cross borders, the subject is subjected to absolute authority. That is, the examination is a one-way process. Entering borders – but who can today not enter borders? – means relinquishing the right to decline from examination, from this type of identification and control, and relinquishing any kind of possibility for negotiation and contestation. In this sense, ‘Crossing the border is to become a refugee (a sans-papier if or until those documents, narratives, and claims to status are authenticated […]’ (Salter, 2008, p. 377). To become a refugee means to become a mobile body in uncertainty, with an uncertain way of life and identity, whose movement and being are controlled by others through the dispositif of government that is the border. Of course, there is a huge difference of experience between what Amoore (2006, p. 343) calls the ‘trusted traveller’ and the ‘immigrant’. To state that we all become, on the borders, refugees, is not meant to minimize or downplay this difference. Because, for the former, crossing borders is a simple matter of authentication in checkpoints; for the latter, however, these checkpoints become the insurmountable obstacles which capture them on the border for an unknowable time (the margins of cities and refugee camps should also be considered borders in the sense of borderlands – a space neither here nor there, inhabited by ‘illegal’ people); and even if they manage to cross borders, incessant surveillance and ‘hyper-documentation’ (Salter, 2005, p. 43) constantly track their behaviour. It is rather to stress that the identifying machine – which goes hand in hand with Agamben’s sovereign killing machine – has made an emancipatory politics based on identity impossible. This is because the mechanism of identification has been so thoroughly and effectively put to work on behalf of governmental dispositives, so that each articulation of a novel socio-political identity can be turned against itself – it can be used for the exercise of power. We are faced here with a curious situation: the identification machine, predicated on security, produces insecurity, e.g., in the form of detention centres and refugee camps, but also in the form of airports, citizenship schemes and

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job markets, which subject people to the indeterminacy of time and space. People are neither excluded nor included, but waiting for admission, forced to invent new ways of movement and getting by. Think of the scrap collectors in Parisian banlieues who perform un(der)paid labour which is constantly hampered by the officials demanding documentation from them (Florin and Garrett, 2019); although the scrap collectors can be seen to provide an essential service by recycling metal, they are seen as a problem that needs to be ‘solved’ from the perspective of citizenship or identification. Thus, to think of resistance to the sovereign power exercised on the borders, it is not enough to counterpose the cultural theoretical understanding of borders as dialogue, translation and uncertainty to the identificational logic of securitized borders. The latter also produce uncertainty demanding resourcefulness, dialogue and translation from the subjects inhabiting the borders. Uncertainty in the face of power that asks ‘Who are you?’ is the precondition of its smooth operation. However, as we have seen, a return to the identificational logic of politics is also out of the question since identity is a tool in the apparatuses of power. It seems that there is no escaping the non-identificational logic of the borders.

ZONES OF INDISTINCTION Of the theorists centring on non-identificational politics, Giorgio Agamben is undoubtedly the one who has recognized both the oppressiveness and the potentiality of the border. The border, to use Agamben’s phrasing, is an exemplary ‘zone of indistinction’ (1998; 2004; 2005a) in which habitual categories no longer function and lose their meaning. Categories such as nature and culture, self and other, home and abroad, inside and outside, etc. require borders in order to exist. To place oneself on the border is to be situated in a zone of uncertainty: neither the self nor the other, the inside or the outside have clear boundaries any longer, and negotiations over difference(s) need to commence anew, which is also to say, negotiations over the nature, location and value of borders. The ‘zone of indistinction’ plays a dual role in Agamben’s philosophy. First, it is a site for exercising sovereign (biopolitical) power. In this sense, the zone of indistinction is indistinguishable from the state of exception: ‘The modern state of exception is […] an attempt to include the exception itself within the juridical order by creating a zone of indistinction in which fact and law coincide’ (Agamben, 2005a, p. 26). The prime example of this kind of blurring of law and fact is, of course, the Patriot Act signed by George W. Bush after 9/11 which enabled the US government to put common citizens under immense surveillance without any legal obstacles, and which thus renders potentially everybody a suspect – a suspect whose life is liable to state intervention and

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exercise of sovereign power. In Agamben’s terms, every US citizen is exposed to potential sovereign violence. In the state of exception, political life and biological life become indistinguishable, producing bare life, or killable life. Agamben identifies this production of bare life as the ‘originary political element’, and thus the ‘political element is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion)’ (1998, p. 181). Perhaps the simplest example to understand the relation of the ban is to think of the outlaw who is not protected by the law (outside), but can be legally killed (inside). The outlaw is simultaneously outside and inside, in a zone of indistinction, a zone in which the exercise of power is absolute since exceptional violence is legalized. Alternatively, think of Nazi concentration camps, which were juridically legal institutions, stripping people of any legal protection. It is, of course, not necessary to go back to Nazi Germany; the migrant and refugee camps of the contemporary USA operate on similar principles (Pitzer, 2019). Agamben has (in)famously stated that it is ‘the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West’ (1998, p. 181), precisely because of this zone of indistinction that is manifest in the camp: the indistinguishability of law and fact, political life and biological life. And this is why the normalized state of exception ‘calls into question […] every attempt to ground political communities in something like a “belonging,” whether it be founded on popular, national, religious, or any other identity’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 181). The central problem for political theory and philosophy is not identity, citizenship, belonging, but life’s exposure to entirely legal, but exceptional sovereign violence. This is the reason why Agamben has stated that ‘the refugee is perhaps the only imaginable figure of the people in our day’ (1995, p. 114). This view is also present in Agier, for whom the central figure of the political subject is not one who is defined by an immobile location, but one who is on the move. The refugee or the migrant is a subject captured in movement – and the refugee camp is a space in which this movement is immobilized, but which does not enable any sense of home or belonging, that is, identity; the camp is a space of immobilized uncertainty, one which enables the control of movement without enabling migrants to assume or develop a social or political subjecthood (Agier, 2008). It is telling that the authorities dismantled the jungle of Calais precisely when solidarity between the inhabitants of the camp and networks of mutual aid with the residents of Calais began to develop (Agier, 2016b) – that is, as soon as some sort of collective, and thus potentially political, subjectivity began to take form. Secondly, despite the exposure to sovereign violence and power and the figure of bare life it produces, the ‘zone of indistinction’ also operates, for Agamben, as a site of (political) potentiality, from which a new form of politics, a ‘coming community’ (2005b) and a form-of-life which cannot be

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separated from its form could emerge (2000; 2016). Or perhaps it would be more precise to use the phrasing ‘because of the exposure to sovereign power’, a power which desubjectifies, strips of identities and shatters relations of belonging. A new form of politics can only emerge if the previous forms no longer function; if citizenship is fractured into trajectories of rootless mobilities, it no longer makes sense to base political theory on the concept of the citizen and its identity. Consequently, for Agamben, the ‘killing machine’ of the normalized state of exception (2005a, p. 86) has itself made a new kind of politics possible. This is why Sergei Prozorov (2010) calls Agamben an ‘optimist’: he can find hope in the gloomiest of situations. And Agamben himself has told an interviewer, ‘I am sure you are more pessimistic than I am’ (Smith, 2004). Agamben’s optimism lies in the view that a coming politics is immanent to the killing machine, and no transcendental solution can be hoped for. The reduction of human life to killable life is the precondition for happy life in a coming community. The immanence of a new type of politics to the dispositives of oppression results also in an understanding that no positive political program can be instituted to counter the contemporary ‘killing machine’. In this sense, Agamben’s view of a coming politics is decidedly ‘anti-strategic insofar as it explicitly renounces any involvement in the contemporary “apparatuses” of sovereignty and governmentality for the purpose of, for example, tactical alliances or reversals, playing one logic of power against the other, internal subversion, etc.’ (Prozorov, 2010, p. 1055, emphasis in original). But what is left to be done if we are inescapably captured in the immanence of dispositives – which operate through ‘desubjectification’ (Agamben, 2009, p. 20), that is, prevent people from attaining meaningful and coherent ways of being in the world, and instead fracture and fragment experience at every step – and if no positive program can be forged to counter the negative, reductive operations of power? It turns out that very little is needed to reduce even further, to disengage and to subtract oneself from the dispositives of power. Any positive construction of subjectivity would simply reproduce the operation and work of power; the Foucauldian ‘care of the self’ offers no way out from power relations, because ‘subjectivation into a certain form of life is, to the same extent, subjection to a power relation’ (Agamben, 2016, p. 106). Any positive work done to construct a subjectivity is already a work of power and government – exercise of power – over oneself. To escape from this stranglehold of power, Agamben relies on ‘potentiality’ – a potentiality that cannot be exhausted in act. Truly human potentiality is a capability to ‘not-be’: ‘The being that is properly whatever is able to not-be; it is capable of its own impotence’ (Agamben, 2005b, p. 35). The form-of-life or whatever being which can no longer be separated from its form is based, thus, on inoperativity, on non-work, on not doing what

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it is supposed to achieve, to produce, etc.: ‘Politics is that which corresponds to the essential inoperability of humankind, to the radical being-without-work of human communities’ (Agamben, 2000, p. 141; see also Prozorov, 2010). In this kind of politics is the being of the human revealed, in a potentiality that is not exhausted by the act. Here, potentiality to-be and potentiality not-to-be would coincide, existence would coincide with potentiality (Agamben, 2005b, p. 43) – and thus this ‘coming politics’ is also founded upon a zone of indistinction, or rather, it incessantly goes on in this zone, without ever realizing itself in a positive program or collective identity. It would not be far off to say that this type of politics of forms-of-life communicating their potentiality – and not information, messages, etc. – is quite distant from what we are accustomed to call politics: antagonistic struggle or governmental technologies. It is, in a sense, mere being, a ‘happy life’ that ‘appears as a life that does not possess its form as a part or a quality but is this form, has completely passed into it’ (Agamben, 2016, p. 219). This simplicity is, of course, Agamben’s very point. It is possible to carve a truly happy life out of the biopolitically produced bare life by re-appropriating this reduced state of being, subtracting it from biopolitical dispositives, inhabiting the zone of indistinction of the state of exception by preferring not to engage with it (see Agamben, 1999; Prozorov, 2010). In this manner, necessity (of producing, achieving, engaging, communicating, moving, etc.) is transformed into contingency – the very thing that power has always attempted to control and channel for its own benefit. Agamben’s view of a coming politics – his hope – is, thus, radically non-identificational, without a clearly delimited collective subject or any interested party anywhere in sight. This non-interest, indifference, non-work is that which, for Agamben, is able to halt the operations of biopolitical, violent dispositives – the latter would no longer have anything to control, since nobody wants or needs anything any longer. In a rather small twist, bare life has become form-of-life; a humanity reduced to its simple fact of biological living has become happy by simply not caring for power, which also means, by not taking care of power.

SURVIVAL AS POLITICS Following Agamben, I do not think that resistance – a different politics – should be sought elsewhere, e.g., in the (illusory) certainty that identity has to offer. For we all know that reclamations of identity have today resulted in the building of walls and further amplifying the figure of the other as an enemy. Thus, it is imperative to stress the centrality of the borders for all of us (Agier, 2016a, p. 156) – to render borders political, as opposed to tools in the hands of security policy. The political nature of borders would lie in the understanding

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that in the contemporary securitized paradigm, we are already desubjectified, disidentified by the very governmental technologies that constantly ask us who we are, all the same already knowing in advance – and better – than us. As Colin Koopman (2019) has shown, it is impossible to get through the day without identifying yourself with your data. To use Agier’s terminology, we are living in a permanent border situation. The socio-political context for both the migrants and refugees, and the ‘safe travellers’, is the same – the constant securitized demand for identification. The contemporary political dividing line runs between those for whom borders ensure the safe functioning of everyday life and those for whom borders are the permanent insecure dwelling place. The operation of the identifying machine has resulted in the fact that the latter are no longer recognized as ‘others’, but as potential threats or as potential sources of profit. Jacques Rancière has summarized the position of the migrant poignantly: The immigrant is first and foremost a worker who has lost his name, a worker who is no longer perceptible as such. Instead of the worker or proletarian who is the object of an acknowledged wrong and a subject who vents his grievance in struggle and disputation, the immigrant appears as at once the perpetrator of an inexpiable wrong and the cause of a problem calling for the round-table treatment. (2007, p. 105)

The immigrant – or the refugee or migrant or asylum seeker – has no grounds for grievances, since it is they who are the cause of problems, their very being in this place is the problem. While included in a society, they do not belong – they can be included in the folds of the economy, but have no protection of citizenship. Using Rancière’s (2010) words, they are a part with no part, and thus with no voice, no political subjectivity. Thought from this perspective, Agamben’s hope for a coming politics begins to seem rather futile, if not offensive for its elitism. It is well known that, for Agamben, survival is the lowest form of existence, since the need to care only for the needs of bare life does nothing to elevate humans above biological existence. Having himself criticized the division, the constitutive border between the human and the animal (Agamben, 2004), he cannot help but define the ‘form-of-life’, that is, the happy life expressing only its potentiality as the truly human life: ‘[T]he human being is the only being in whose living happiness is always at stake, whose life is irredeemably and painfully consigned to happiness’ (Agamben, 2016, p. 208). We might now ask: what about those whose life primarily consists in making ends meet, in negotiating and conflicting with structures and practices of power precisely for the need to survive? Is this life not political? It can seem non-political only within the framework of the distinctions between the social and the political, and the animal and the human, distinctions running from

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Aristotle (1998) and Hannah Arendt (1998) to Alain Badiou (2001; 2005; 2009) and Agamben. Although the latter identifies the zone of indistinction as the site of politics, he states that any true politics must be based on indifference, non-engagement, thus rendering this ‘true politics’ strangely non-political, into an expression of human potentiality. In this way, Agambenian coming politics strives to get rid of borders altogether, and with them, the potential for political subjectivation, because he sees the latter as always already confirming the operations of power. However, what if survival in conflict – the everyday necessity of fulfilling bodily needs in the context of permanent uncertainty – was not seen as the demotion of politics to questions of the social, but rather as its originary site? This is indeed how Partha Chatterjee (2011) uses the term ‘political society’ – a (marginal) collective operating in a state of uncertainty, constantly negotiating, inventing in conflict with governmental bodies. This possibility comes into view when we place ourselves on the borders, in borderlands, in the periphery. Then we might begin to realize that the so-called human potentiality does not necessarily have to do with ‘contemplation’, but with the question ‘What can a body do?’. Then it becomes clear that bodies are resourceful, they can provide mutual aid – as in the case of the Calais camp described by Agier (2016b) – they can invent new forms of procurement (Florin and Garret, 2019) or they can create cultural forms that even spread to the so-called ‘dominant’ culture, as in the case of banlieues. These are strategies for (collective) survival – and thus potential political subjectivations – these are not forms of ‘contemplation’. When we place ourselves on the border, strategies and trajectories of movement, bodily forms of collective existence come into view, and questions of identity, stemming from holistic understanding of political societies, recede. Political theory needs, to phrase it in Deleuzo-Guattarian fashion, to become-migrant. Only then is it possible to escape the stranglehold of identitarian theories.2

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, G., 1995. We refugees. Symposium: A Quarterly Journal of Modern Literature 49, 2: 114–119. Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 1999. Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

2 This chapter was supported by PRG314, ‘Semiotic fitting as a mechanism of biocultural diversity: instability and sustainability in novel environments’.

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Agamben, G., 2000. Means without Ends: Notes on Politics. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G., 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2005a. State of Exception. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Agamben, G., 2005b. The Coming Community. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Agamben, G. 2009. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agamben, G., 2016. The Use of Bodies. Homo Sacer IV, 2. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Agier, M., 2008. On the Margins of the World: The Refugee Experience Today. Cambridge: Polity. Agier, M., 2016a. Borderlands: Towards an Anthropology of the Cosmopolitan Condition. Cambridge: Polity. Agier, M., 2016b. Nouvelles réflexions sur le lieu des sans-état: Calais, son camp, ses migrants. Multitudes 64, 3: 53–61. Akkerman, M., 2018. Militarization of European Border Security. In: Karampekios, N., Oikonomou, I. and Carayannis, E.G. (eds): The Emergence of EU Defense Research Policy: From Innovation to Militarization, pp. 337–355. Cham: Springer. Amoore, L., 2006. Biometric Borders: Governing Mobilities in the War on Terror. Political Geography 25, 3: 336–351. Amoore, L. and Hall, A., 2009. Taking People Apart: Digitised Dissection and the Body at the Border. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 27: 444–464. Arendt, H., 1998. The Human Condition. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Aristotle, 1998. Politics. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company. Badiou, A., 2001. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil. London; New York: Verso. Badiou, A., 2005. Being and Event. London; New York: Continuum. Badiou, A., 2009. Logics of Worlds. Being and Event, 2. London; New York: Continuum. Balibar, E., 1998. The Borders of Europe. In: Cheah, P. and Robbins, B. (eds): Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation, pp. 71–78. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Balibar, E., 2002. What is a Border? In: Politics and the Other Scene. London; New York: Verso. Balibar, E., 2010. At the Borders of Citizenship: A Democracy in Translation?’ European Journal of Social Theory 13, 3: 351–322. Barth, F., 1969. Introduction. In: Barth, F. (ed.): Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference, pp. 9–38. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. Caldiron, G., 2005. Banlieue: Vita e Rivolta nelle Periferie della Metropoli. Rome: Manifestolibri. Castel, R., 2006. La discrimination négative: le déficit de citoyenneté des jeunes de banlieue. Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales 61, 4: 777–808. Chatterjee, P., 2011. Lineages of Political Society: Studies in Postcolonial Democracy. New York: Columbia University Press. Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Florin, B. and Garret, P., 2019. ‘Faire la ferraille’ en banlieue Parisienne: glaner, bricoler et transgresser. EchoGéo, 47 .

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Hagmann, J., 2015. (In-)security and the Production of International Relations: The Politics of Securitisation in Europe. London; New York: Routledge. Halliday, M.A.K., 1978. Language as Social Semiotic: The Social Interpretation of Language and Meaning. Baltimore: University Park Press. Huysmans, J., 2006. The Politics of Insecurity: Fear, Migration and Asylum in the EU. London; New York: Routledge. Jones, R. and Johnson, C., 2016. Border Militarisation and the Re-articulation of Sovereignty. Transactions of British Geographers 41, 2: 187–200. Koopman, C., 2019. How we Became our Data: A Genealogy of the Informational Person. Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press. Laclau, E. and Mouffe, C., 2001. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London; New York: Verso. Law, J., 2009. Actor Network Theory and Material Semiotics. In: Turner, B. (ed.): The New Blackwell Companion to Social Theory, pp. 141–158. Malden, Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Loftus, B., 2015. Border Regimes and the Sociology of Policing. Policing and Society 25, 1: 115–125. Lotman, J., 2005. On the Semiosphere. Sign Systems Studies 33, 1: 205–229. Lotman, Y.M., 1990. Universe of the Mind: A Semiotic Theory of Culture. London; New York: I.B. Tauris. McAuliffe, M. and Khadria, B. (eds), 2019. World Migration Report 2020. Geneva: International Organization for Migration. Mezzadra, S. and Neilson, B., 2013. Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor. Durham; London: Duke University Press. Monticelli, D., 2019. Borders and Translation: Revisiting Juri Lotman’s Semiosphere. Semiotica 230: 389–406. Mouffe, C., 2000. The Democratic Paradox. London; New York: Verso. Pitzer, A., 2019. ‘Some suburb of hell’: America’s new concentration camp system. New York Review of Books . Prozorov, S., 2010. Why Giorgio Agamben is an Optimist. Philosophy and Social Criticism 36, 9: 1053–1073. Rancière, J., 2007. On the Shores of Politics. London; New York: Verso. Rancière, J., 2010. Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London; New York: Continuum. Salter, M.B., 2005. At the Threshold of Security: A Theory of International Borders. In: Salter, M.B. and Zureik, E. (eds): Global Surveillance and Policing: Borders, Security, Identity, pp. 36–50. Cullompton: Willan Publishing. Salter, M.B., 2008. When the Exception becomes the Rule: Borders, Sovereignty, and Citizenship. Citizenship Studies 12, 4: 365–380. Schmitt, C., 2007. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Smith, J., 2004. ‘I am sure that you are more pessimistic than I am …’: An interview with Giorgio Agamben. Rethinking Marxism 16, 2: 115–124. Szary, A.-L.A. and Giraut, F., 2015. Borderities: The Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders. In: Szary, A.-L.A. and Giraut, F. (eds): Borderities and the Politics of Contemporary Mobile Borders, pp. 1–22. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Torop, P., 2005. Semiosphere and/as the Research Object of Semiotics of Culture. Sign Systems Studies 33, 1: 159–173.

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PART III

Practices

7. Governing by prevention: neoliberal management of sexual health in France Théo Sabadel On 26 March 2018, the French Minister for Solidarity and Health, Agnès Buzyn, announced the measures of the 2018–2020 roadmap for the national sexual health strategy (NSHS). The programme brought together measures ‘ranging from education to sexuality and reproductive health, including prevention and screening for communicable infections and HIV’.1 As a promoter of a ‘global’ vision of health, the NSHS was based on the three fundamental pillars of ‘autonomy, satisfaction, safety’ (NSHS, 2017, p. 5), which overlap with the 1946 WHO definition according to which health is ‘a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity’.2 The NSHS allowed the notion of ‘sexual health’ to be effectively incorporated into government policy and for non-profits and government to focus on prevention. In the fight against HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs), the change was notable. After being the specific focus of national plans, the incorporation of HIV and STIs issues into ‘sexual health’ reinforced the move towards ‘normalisation’ (Setbon, 2000) that started at the end of the 1990s, and illustrated the progressive biomedicalization of prevention at work in the field of HIV. The latter trend began with the introduction of antiretrovirals in 1996 and continued during the 2000s with the extension of medicine use, not only for treatment but also for HIV prevention. The NSHS is, in this case, the response from the public policy sector to the evolution in the prevention field of the past 20 years. It is not a question of contrasting two radically distinct periods in prevention, although it is possible to distinguish a clear shift at the turn of

Ministère des Solidarités et de la Santé, ‘Santé sexuelle, Agnès Buzyn présente la feuille de route à trois ans de mise en œuvre de la stratégie nationale de santé sexuelle’, 9 April 2018, consulted on 9 February 2020. 2 WHO 1946 constitution . 1

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2015 and 2016, both in terms of the tools promoted and the message being put forward. In fact, in line with the Lert/Pialoux report (2009) on Risk reduction, and also the Lert report (2016), the NSHS made it possible to add ‘diversified’ prevention to the agenda, by promoting a range of prevention tools that individuals were encouraged to combine with their behaviours and their risk-taking. This development is part of a particularly evolutionary context, in which biomedical tools (ARV, TasP, PET, PrEP,3 screening) have overturned the dominant paradigm of condoms, the use of which has been largely diminished over the 2000s. Scientific advances and the subsequent assimilation that has taken place, both by public bodies responsible for the promotion of health and by other associations, such as AIDES, demonstrate the construction of an environment and a specific preventive subject. The strictly biopolitical nature of education campaigns for health has already been the focus of analyses (Berlivet, 1997, 2004), that have shown the purposes of ‘safety measures’, namely, to encourage individuals to give up on ‘risky’ behaviours. Prevention campaigns carried out after 2015 changed direction, since the premise, which at the start was to change individual behaviours, appeared much too vague. On the contrary, these campaigns demonstrated a renewed approach to the government of conducts, in which individuals are encouraged to make choices according to behaviours or preferences depending on the situations in which they are involved. To understand this evolution, we have created a corpus that brings together the prevention campaigns by the main organizations fighting HIV in France from 2010 to 2019.4 First and foremost, it will be necessary to define the changing discourse that appeared from 2015 onward in order to understand what political rationality the campaigns reveal. In doing so, this chapter analyses prevention action as government understood in the Foucauldian sense of structuring ‘the possible field of action of others’ (Foucault, 1982, p. 790). The aim of the analysis is to take an interest in the organizational conditions of the prevention framework ARV: antiretroviral drugs; TasP: Treatment as Prevention – a seropositive person receiving treatment is no longer an infection risk for their partners; PET: post-exposure treatment – being treated with ARVs in the 48 hours following the risk of exposure to HIV greatly reduces the risks of seroconversion; PrEP: pre-exposure prophylaxis: treatment aimed at seronegative individuals at a high risk of exposure. Screening is the subject of particular attention as the recommended frequency varies depending on the group identified: every three months for men who have sex with men (MSM), annually for drug users (DU) and those from areas with high levels of prevalence, and once in your life for the general population. 4 This corpus brings together actions that had a message concerning the prevention of HIV and STIs. This excludes campaigns against homophobia, for example. The primary organizations used are: AIDES (N=12), French public health authority (INPES/SPF) (N=8), Paris City Council (N=2). 3

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and its normative effects for individuals. In fact, the multiplication of tools illustrates more a trend of adaptation to individual practices, rather than the adaptation of practices to the available tools, at least initially. The other aspect of governmental action strives to shape an individual who is rational and receptive to preventive incentives. It is a matter of shaping an individual who knows how to objectively assess the risks that they take when entering into a specific procedure. Creating a particular prevention framework and modelling a singular subject are therefore the two sides to one governmental action. It is here that the Foucauldian approach on neoliberalism in particular can shed light on the development of prevention policies. Despite being incomplete, the Foucauldian analysis of neoliberalism is an invitation to think about what is happening in our world and should be viewed as an original attempt to understand the transformations of public action. First, it is necessary to briefly explain the links between biopolitics, governmentality and neoliberalism according to the Foucauldian theory. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality (1978), Foucault renounces the traditional analysis of power in terms of sovereignty to opt for an approach in terms of power relations. The genealogical approach he takes highlights a shift in the way power has been understood from the 17th century, as a government issue, and how, since the 18th century, political rationality has considered biological life as an object for government (Foucault, 1977). This government rationality implies the development of institutions, devices and discourses aimed at taking care of individuals gathered within the population, shaping what Foucault names ‘governmentality’. Governmentality is linked to the birth and expansion of liberalism at the turn of the 18th century. This doctrine promotes a minimal state, the laissez-faire in the economic sphere and the advocacy of a political subject endowed with natural rights which the state cannot undermine. From a narrow understanding of biopolitics as governmentality, Foucault then extended the concept, which came to designate at a later stage ‘the very concrete, often subtle and invisible ways through which the populations are led. Therefore, it concerns the type of action that allows an individual to do what another individual expects of him, but also the ways in which he can escape from it’ (Laval, 2018).5 This is why we can understand governmentality as a synonym of ‘the conduct of conducts’. This widening led Foucault to question the tension of government rationality at the turn of the 20th century between a liberal art of governing (promoting a minimal state) and social policies that extend to the sphere of individual life, thus inducing important internal debates about the role of the state within the liberal arena. These debates led, during the inter-war period, to a renewed approach towards

5

Personal translation from French.

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the role of the state and, in the area of government of behaviours, to the promotion of a new governmental rationality branded as ‘neoliberal’. The 1979 lectures, which deal with the genealogy of power relations and (neo)liberalism, address the question of new power structures based not on discipline and punishment but on liberties in the shaping of bodies and individual behaviours. We will apply this grid to a set of reforms about ‘Sexual Health’ in France, by analyzing the roll-out of governmental action on prevention under the framework of governmentality, which implements free spaces where individuals can make choices and exercise preferences. Linked to our subject, the heterogeneity of ‘diversified’ prevention and its inevitable individualization in relation to the collective can be seen as a response to the relative homogeneity of previous measures. This chapter analyzes the recent developments in the field of HIV prevention, whose political rationality is fully neoliberal, from the perspective of the government of conducts and biopolitics. The shifts in dealing with both prevention and its very consequences for the individuals considered ‘at risk’ captured the attention of some researchers, who have intimated that these developments followed a neoliberal character. These researchers root their analysis in the pioneering work of Adam (2005), which defines ‘the neoliberal sexual actor’ by focusing on individual responsibility and ‘care of the self’. They focus their attention on the subject’s rational risk analysis, the market choice and the competition between numerous options (Sandset, 2019), or consider that the ‘pharmaceuticalization’ of public health in the HIV prevention area matches neoliberal ideas (Thomann, 2018), mostly in the US context. These works seem to show that the choice of rhetoric and market logics would be sufficient to characterize the neoliberal aspects of prevention policies. However, looking at these pieces of research, it appears evident that there is a need to go further in studying the application of neoliberal theories, especially when it comes to their mechanisms and devices to govern behaviours. What can appear as a ‘neoliberal nebula’ (Audier, 2008) deals with economic issues (the global financialization in the 1980s and the construction of the EU, for example) but also with political and social issues, notably when this literature argues that political legitimacy can no longer be based only on the general will but also on market principles (concurrency in particular). Regarding these market principles, this nebula also promotes a politics of the subject, and the aim of this chapter will in fact be to demonstrate how, in HIV prevention, this politics reflects main aspects of contemporary biopolitics. On the one hand, the variety of prevention methods and the a priori choice for individuals invites us to look at an environmental action, which Foucault had already observed (Foucault, 2004a) and which has proven to have a number of repercussions. The organization of a market for prevention brings this to light, insofar as the available prevention meets similar demand around

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diversity and choice. The objective of the governmental action would thus be to build this space and to enable it to function optimally. On the other hand, it is a matter of leading a policy on the subject understood as an ‘entrepreneur of himself’ (self-governing), through which individuals are responsible for their own health. From this point, if the individuals are driven by interests, it is possible to direct their behaviour using incentives or discouragements by means of additional knowledge, which fuels prevention campaigns and the promotion of certain measures among ‘at risk’ groups. Using standards of prevention, the government aims to publicize the empowerment of the individual subject, as the main actor in their health through self-limitation and through being proactive in managing their sexual behaviours. How does the Foucauldian view on neoliberalism represent an heuristic approach to understand the shifts in contemporary biopolitics, and what are the theoretical tools we can mobilize to grasp its materiality? To what extent do the campaigns led in accordance with the directives of this programme make it possible to analyse the policies according to the lines of contemporary governmentality (understood as the ‘conduct of conducts’)? What are the consequences of the NSHS being added to the political agenda for HIV/AIDS prevention and of the wording of NSHS principles in public health policies? In order to answer these questions, we shall demonstrate how a characterization of contemporary biopolitics is impossible without an analysis of neoliberal rationality. This rationality described by Foucault is composed of two distinct elements, even though, in his 1979 lectures, Foucault presents them merely as joint parts of contemporary governmentality. Subsequently, Christian Laval has shown that neoliberalism cannot be understood without a connection of these two aspects. This is why we will present them in their original context, before discussing their application to prevention programs against HIV/AIDS implemented in France since 2015–2016. We will then carry out a comparative study of prevention campaigns that were chosen in order to demonstrate that truly neoliberal change takes place in this policy sector.

SHAPING THE ENVIRONMENT AND MARKET LOGIC In their article ‘Biopower Today’ (2006), Rabinow and Rose define biopower in contemporary states with a list of three restricted criteria.6 Biopower must include: (1) ‘Truth discourses about the “vital” character of living human beings’; (2) Strategies for intervention in the name of life and health (these

They make these conceptual clarifications in order to show their opposing views on biopolitics to Hardt and Negri’s (2000) and Agamben’s (1998), who understand biopower as linked to domination and exploitation of the individuals’ vital existence. 6

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interventions can take place at the national level or be specified in terms of categories of race, ethnicity or gender, for example); (3) ‘Modes of subjectification, through which individuals are brought to work on themselves’ (Rabinow and Rose, 2006, p. 197). As they suggest, the general political rationality must preliminarily be analysed on a smaller scale and from particular cases, such as health prevention campaigns and, specifically, those which deal with sexuality, which is a biopolitical theme by excellence (Foucault, 1978). This approach considers biopolitics as a governmental rationality and not as an ideology (Flew, 2012). This categorization admits that the rationality might evolve according to historical and political contexts: if liberalism was the uncontested rationality regarding biopolitics until the end of the 19th century, the inter-war debates and the further developments during the second part of the 20th century gave birth to the neoliberal view on the government of life, and neoliberalism became, from the early 2000s, a key concept in the social sciences and in philosophy studies (Boas and Gans-Moore, 2009). Thus, we will come back to Foucault’s 1979 lectures at the Collège de France, in which he traces the origins of what will be fully developed in the next decades and that is related to the shift of biopolitical rationality during the first part of the 20th century. Foucault dedicated his 1979 lectures to that which ‘should only be learned in the introduction’ (Foucault, 2004a, p. 323), namely neoliberalism. As specified by Laval (2018), in his work, Foucault considered neoliberalism as the general framework of contemporary governmentality. In other words, it is not possible to carry out a critical analysis of current power structures without also critically analysing neoliberalism, and while the latter barely features in his 1979 lectures, Foucault strove to spell out the principal features of neoliberal tendencies. Historically, neoliberalism is seen as a criticism of the liberal naturalism of the 18th century. The latter is a proponent of minimal state action, the famous concept of laissez-faire, with a certain number of areas that government action cannot ‘touch’ (Foucault, 2004a, p. 23). This involves the guarantee of a market impervious to sovereign actions and the belief in the equation of the individual to the homo œconomicus (economic man), who is irreducible to power. Neoliberals criticized this approach in the 1930s because, in their opinion, liberal governmentality would have the opposite effect than what it intended, namely, greater economic and social intervention. In the inter-war period,7 the aim became therefore to find a middle road between liberal naturalism and Keynesian state interventionism.

Two of the founding acts of neoliberalism were the holding of the Colloque Walter Lippmann in Paris in 1938, which promoted a ‘new liberalism’ at a time when both fascism and communism were on the rise in Europe, and then by the establishment 7

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In these two criticisms of liberal and Keynesian movements, neoliberalism developed according to two interpretations that are different but can be considered complementary (Laval, 2018). On one hand, the postulate of ‘making market principles into a constitution’ acknowledges that law can be subordinate to economics. On the other hand, the understanding of the subject was radicalized by American authors, who defended a strictly economic understanding of all behaviours, regardless of their degree of rationality. German Ordoliberalism and the Framework Policy Post-World War II Germany was confronted with the question of the reconstruction of a state which had witnessed Nazism and a radical form of biopolitics based on race, which produced what we now call ‘thanatopolitic’. It was thus concerned with the question of the bases on which to rebuild the state and its political legitimacy. In response to this question, two objectives were followed: first, to differentiate the new regime from the previous National socialism, but also to answer to the new challenges facing the new state (Flew, 2012). The main issue, however, was that this radical reform could not rely on historical rights or on previous juridical institutions which had been discredited by the Nazi policies. If the political change could not come from History, it had to come from Economics: that was the idea of Ludwig Erhard, who declared that the priority would be to remove the price controls and ensure the separation of individuals from the state. Nevertheless, these policies should not be confused with the liberal approach taking place in other Western countries, such as the United Kingdom, France and the US, where the Keynesian theories were predominant, promoting economic planning. German ordoliberalism has its roots in works positioned at the intersection between political economy and social philosophy (Alexander Rustow, Walter Eucken) and some of them, such as Wilhelm Röpke, between liberalism and conservatism (Commun and Kolev, 2018). Their works were initially published in the 1920s and promoted a rational approach in explaining the economy’s influence on social life. Thus, from 1948, ordoliberal principles were gradually implemented into German policies. Sovereignty no longer strictly depended on juridical consideration (Rule of Law, individuals considered as subjects endowed with natural rights) but it was also grounded on an economic rationality guaranteed by the market. It is the market that founded the state, the latter being satisfied with a ‘societal policy’ (Foucault, 2004a, p. 151). Therefore, the role of the state consisted in the formulation of a ‘framework’

of the Mont Pelerin Society in 1947, which brought together (neo)liberal economists (see in particular Audier, 2008).

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policy, namely, the use of laws as the rules of the game, which allowed capitalism, or the competitive market, to function. This role is based on the premise that a natural order (from the classic liberal understanding) does not exist and that the state and its policies must create artefacts in order to ensure ‘pure competition’. Instead of sovereign authority, the new governmentality asserts the construction of artificial environments aimed at exercising an action on individuals remotely. In the realm of prevention, the range of tools and the freedom of choice associated with them do not mean the disappearance of preventative guidance. Quite the contrary, this is redefined by the multiplication of tools, which demonstrates a more precise, more subtle framework, in which governmental action is exercised on the ‘prevention milieu’, made up of the overlap of some types of knowledge (epidemiology, medical sciences, psychology) and the governmental measures (prevention campaigns, territorial networking). This arrangement of a free space makes it possible for individuals to choose their prevention tools, an issue which is at the heart of the attention of American neoliberals. Neoliberalism in the United States and the Question of Economics In this framework policy, American neoliberals, for reasons due to the specific history of liberalism in the United States,8 radicalized some ordoliberal ideas and upheld a social policy limited to the establishment of a competitive framework and an understanding of the subject as an ‘entrepreneur of himself’ (self-governing). Promoted by the Chicago School, American neoliberalism is broadly influenced by the theory of human capital9 and is situated at the interstice of economic and public policy theories. This approach, notably defended by Gary Becker (1964), applies economic reasoning to all types of behaviours, whether or not rational.10 Becker offered an extended definition, as

8 Foucault explains that liberalism in the United States is different to that in Europe, for in the former, it challenges the state, and in the latter, it is a founding principle of the state. Citing Hayek, who defends liberalism ‘as a living idea’ (Foucault, 2004a, p. 224), he demonstrates that liberalism is defined ‘as a general style of thought, analysis and imagination’ (p. 225). The result of this is an approach that leans far more towards neoliberalism in the United States. Also, it is worth taking into account the critics, from Hayek and Von Mises, to Keynesianism, associated with an expansion of the state’s role and which accompanied a shift in governmentality in the 1960s. 9 Numerous articles were published in the Journal of Political Economy, a prestigious journal of the University of Chicago. 10 Defined by Foucault as the ‘optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends’ (2004a, p. 272), this means that the optimal use of resources is inevitably limited for a determined purpose, through formal reasoning. On the other hand, a non-rational approach is one that does not conform to this formal reasoning.

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he defended the idea that all individual behaviour can reveal an economic analysis, based on the point that it ‘responded in a systematic fashion to changes to environmental variables’ (Foucault, 2004a, p. 273). While the liberal approach is based on a subject irreducible to power and endowed with natural rights that the state cannot touch without questioning its own legitimacy, American neoliberalism professes a subject which is governed by a framework built by the state in order to determine individuals’ action. Not only is a framework policy required, meaning an action on the rules and not on the players (Laval, 2018), these players must also be considered as individuals driven by the maximization of their own self-interest, under the assumption that it is now possible to direct behaviour through an environmental approach. This is what led Foucault to say, in this perspective, that ‘The homo œconomicus is one who is eminently governable. The intelligible partner to laissez-faire, the homo œconomicus now appears to be the corollary of a governmentality that acts in the milieu and systematically modifies the variables of the milieu’ (Foucault, 2004a, p. 276). This understanding of the subject as one who is governable has had some applications, including nudging (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008), which overturn the disciplinary approach and represent the archetype of no coercive government, with its postulate that individuals can be oriented by incentives or disincentives through a favourable environment. What is important to tackle now is how the two theories, at first glance apparently distant, can be seen as complementary, and how the concept of ‘mesopolitics’11 can offer a heuristic approach to understand the mechanisms of neoliberalism as a governmentality ‘at a distance’. Neoliberalism and ‘Remote Government’ through the Milieu Although these two forms of neoliberalism were developed in two contexts specific to them, Laval shows that they are ‘two complementary and correlative aspects of one single specific type of governance’. In itself, neoliberalism is a ‘unique form of governmentality that can only be fully understood from this perspective’ (Laval, 2018, p. 61). This is not a conflict between, but rather a combination of, ordoliberalism, which advocates a framework policy, and American neoliberalism, which gives an analysis of the economy and the 11 The neologism ‘Mesopolitics’ (Taylan, 2014) comes from Bertillon’s concept ‘Mesology’ to speak about the science of the milieu. ‘Mesopolitics’ corresponds to knowledge and technical actions mobilized to transform and govern human beings by improving their life environment. In other words, ‘Mesopolitcs’ is the modification of individuals by the transformation of their milieu (such as living conditions, regulation, legislation or financial and material incentives/disincentives).

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market, ‘the principle of deciphering social links and individual behaviours’ (Foucault, 2004a, p. 249). This complementarity is illustrated in part by the in-depth studies by F. Taylan, based on the Foucauldian theory on the notion of ‘milieu’ (Taylan, 2014). This approach makes it possible to see the two sides of the neoliberal biopolitical operation as a remote action on an environment (defining the framework), which makes it possible to give rise to a particular subject (objectification by the intervention on the framework). The concept of ‘mesopolitics’ (Taylan, 2013) shows how neoliberal governmental action is located at an intermediate level, acting on the milieu and not directly on individuals, thus losing its automatically limiting nature thanks to governing behaviours from a distance. While this notion already existed in liberal rationality, especially in Bentham’s form of utilitarianism (Laval, 2018, p. 44), Taylan demonstrated that neoliberal policy, through its increased action on the milieu, makes it possible to govern behaviour in more insidious, sharper ways, because the environmental adjustment is based, above all, on creating free spaces in which individuals can make choices and express preferences. In the realm of prevention, this action on the milieu through the mobilization of additional knowledge (taken, in particular, from public health, epidemiology, social sciences) leads to a policy of targeting and (re)constructing categories. For instance, the 2010 Lert-Pialoux report drives the notion of ‘high-risk groups’ with regard to two specific populations: men who have sex with other men (MSM) and those from sub-Saharan Africa. This report largely centres around sociological analyses that studied sexual behaviours and risk taking among MSM (de Busscher, Mendes-Leite and Proth, 1999; Adam, Hauet and Caron, 2001), and the declining use of condoms in this population. Alongside defining certain behaviours as being risky, new biomedical solutions are subject to confirmation from evidence-based medicine (Girard, 2016) and its randomized trials, in which the model is taken from statistics and exact sciences. All additional knowledge, including national studies, scientific trials, epidemiological reports and even social science studies, contribute to putting together the ‘prevention milieu’, because they all connect to frameworks of power that are specific to neoliberal technology. The constitution of groups based on risky behaviours contributes to reconfigure the milieu and to create the sometimes very specific orientation of its tools. This articulation between knowledge and governmental technology invites the individuals concerned to become self-aware and judge their behaviour. The subjects are called on to define themselves by their behaviours and their degree of exposure to the risk and, therefore, to express their preferences and choices accordingly. This is what was shown by the Santé publique France (SPF)

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2017 campaign on screening12 and on diversified prevention (2016–2019), which established the links between individual profiles, sexual behaviours and choices in types of screening. However, these choices are not definitive at all since the framework is continually evolving due to versatile individual behaviours, just like the therapeutic and medical innovations that, in turn, influence behaviours and the concept of risk. This knowledge therefore enables the temporary constitution of general categories to which prevention tools can be allocated according to the degree of risk exposure. It also goes on to recommend quarterly screenings for MSM and the Ipergay trial (2014–2016), which confirms the high effectiveness of PrEP for high-risk MSM (Molina et al, 2017). In addition to being rational and autonomous, the subject is also adaptable and flexible in view of changes promoted by prevention policies, a characteristic of neoliberal policies already highlighted by Barbara Stiegler (2019) and which finds an eloquent illustration here. What appears in the field of prevention is thus an individual understood as a homo œconomicus invited to make preferential choices that remain directed by the behaviours that define him. After having presented and analysed the primary features of contemporary biopolitics by means of the neoliberal corpus drawn from Foucauldian studies, it is now possible to show how this reading is manifested within public health policies and, specifically, in the French national strategy for sexual health. What is appearing as ‘new’ in the HIV prevention campaigns disclosed at the beginning of the 2010s in the US and in 2015 in France is the rhetoric of free choice resonating with the discourse of autonomy, which makes us understand biopolitics in another way. We propose to analyse this political rationality from an empirical perspective, as Rabinow and Rose suggested (2006), in order to highlight the mechanisms and the discourses that frame possibilities of individual choices and shape behaviours while working with freedom. In others words, what is at stake here is the double meaning of the subject, understood both as submitted to another by control and dependence, and as attached to his own identity: ‘both meanings suggest a form of power which subjugates and makes subject to’ (Foucault, 1982). In the next section, we shall describe and analyse how the environmental government (one of neoliberalism’s marks) takes place in the latest preventive policies and how the double meaning of the ‘subject’ becomes concrete. To this end, we will analyse prevention campaigns from the last ten years in France in order to illustrate the shift that has occurred in favour of neoliberal governmentality.

SPF, ‘HIV screening that fits with your life’ (accessed 22 February 2021). 12

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‘SEXUAL HEALTH’: A PIVOT BETWEEN TWO PREVENTION STRATEGIES The corpus on which the present argument is based is made up of 22 campaigns from three main organizations: AIDES, the National Institute of Prevention and Health Education (Institut National de Prévention et d’Education à la Santé, INPES, became Santé publique France in 2016) and the Mairie de Paris. These organizations were chosen due to their wide distribution capacity and the significant audience that their messages reach, both locally and nationally. Insofar as public policies are composed by a part of ‘déjà-là’ (‘already there’: see Lascoumes, 1996), there is no clear break between two distinct preventive periods but, rather, an evolution from existing elements (discourses, preventive tools, public agencies in charge of campaigns) to new ones. The first row of the 2015–2016 NSHS program led to a reorganization of the milieu and was aimed at reinventing the subject of prevention. The NSHS appears to be a sort of pivot that enables and supports the transition away from largely condom-based prevention towards an approach that relies on a variety of tools, and aims to structure individual prevention choices in order to give individuals autonomy. The plurality of tools is organized as a market where individuals are appealed to make their choice according to their best interest and regarding their own situation and practices. This is why the idea of homo œconomicus is at the core of these new strategies: behind sexual practices which could appear as subjective, the 2015–2016 reforms consider them as rational. In other words, after the condom-based campaign and under the argument of ‘diversified prevention’, the NSHS and the related campaigns manifest a form of governing through interests (Laval, 2006). Condoms: An Essential Tool From 2010 to 2015, campaigns by AIDES and INPES primarily promoted condoms: 7 of the 12 prevention campaigns listed dealt exclusively with promoting this tool, in addition to those that promoted condoms plus serological screening. This equates to 75% of campaigns (N = 9), which illustrates the importance of the representations mobilized by public action about this tool against HIV. These campaign materials reached a large portion of the general public and typically endeavoured not to stigmatize a particular group (Fassin, 2005; Keterrer, 2013). Analysis of these campaigns shows that sexuality is often presented in a binary manner, between the use of condoms and an absence of sexual relationships, and that a moral element, while greatly reduced, remains present.

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First, campaigns uniformly highlight condoms as a necessity during sex. The most cutting message comes from the AIDES association, which chooses to represent the binary choice in two ways. In its 2010 campaign,13 the video clip depicts a graffiti penis that is looking to have sex, but is unsuccessful. It only succeeds when a woman draws a condom on it, making it immediately attractive to all of the graffiti vaginas that were running away from it just seconds before. What is being suggested in the animation is made explicit in the 2015 campaign, in which the title ‘Pas de préservatif, pas de sexe’14 (‘No condom, no sex’) is accompanied by images where instances of unprotected sex are replaced by ‘long winter evenings’. INPES also illustrated the benefit of condoms as a ‘barrier’ against STIs and HIV by showing the viruses on a microscopic scale in an amusing way, with a clear message: ‘VIH, chlamydia, syphilis… la meilleure défense, c’est le préservatif’15 (‘HIV, chlamydia, syphilis… the best defence is a condom’). Alongside these illustrations, what qualities are associated with considerate people? Or, in the opposite view, what defines individuals who do not follow the norm for prevention? First, making the right choice is a sign of intelligence. The individual who makes an effort to use a condom stands out from others in his sexual behaviours.16 On the other hand, those who do not use protection are seen as abnormal, out of step compared to others, and may be the subject of belittling that can turn pathological (‘Male IQs fall as their clothes fall to the floor’17). These materials thus present prevention according to a binary and standard distribution between good and bad subjects of prevention (Girard, 2013) and tend to sum up the act of sex in wearing a condom. The encouragements to conform to the dominant norm for prevention are based, on the one hand, on the effectiveness of this tool, which is sometimes brought up to appeal to individuals to wear a condom and thus prove their capacity to adhere to the norm.18 On the other hand, it is the double aspect of preventing HIV, which has been the backbone of prevention since the start of the epidemic and focused on both individual and collective responsibility. This last point can be

13 AIDES,  ‘Zizi  graffiti’,  2010 . All campaigns from AIDES specified in this chapter are available at the Internet address above and were accessed on 3 March 2021. 14 AIDES, ‘Pas de préservatif, pas de sexe’ (2015). 15 INPES, VIH, chlamydia, syphilis… la meilleure défense, c’est le préservatif’ (2013). 16 AIDES, ‘Clever dick’, 2011. 17 AIDES, ‘Male IQs fall as their clothes fall to the floor’ (2014). 18 AIDES, 2012. The image is based on the following statement: ‘Here are two ways to stop AIDS. One has been proven, as for the other, we’ll find out in 2012’.

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seen in the use of euphemistic moralism to insist that people use condoms or get tested. Secondly, we understand euphemistic moralism to be the use of a certain moral tone that is characterized by the desire to avoid judgement directly and explicitly formulated against individuals who are outside the standard of prevention. This communication strategy is first used through social counter-representations. These are presented as an undesirable appearance (an unintelligent man) or undesirable behaviour. This last point is particularly interesting as the 2014 AIDES campaign19 plays on popular depictions of lying (nose growing) to encourage people to be aware of their serological status, especially when they maintain that they do not need to use protection. In this case, knowing your serological status means not having to lie to yourself or others, in an approach that aims to be ethical. This point, which straddles the individual and collective aspects mentioned above, is also addressed, from the perspective of domestic life, in the 2015 INPES campaign,20 where commitment is based on honesty, defined as knowing the serological status. However, the 2015 AIDES campaign was the start of the break from the classic story of prevention. Although the title seems definitive and the images illustrative, the description carefully shows the evolution that has reshaped the prevention of HIV for several years, namely, the use of biomedical solutions in the field of prevention (Vernazza et al, 2008; Molina et al, 201721). Condoms were ‘the major lever’ against the epidemic, but they are now used alongside measures that have been diversified. How can this ‘diversified’ prevention be integrated into what is known as ‘sexual health’ and contribute to a global and dynamic approach to individual sexuality? How will prevention now be viewed in terms of prevention policies? Giving the Choice of Prevention This is where the NSHS, which has been in use since 2017, and its principles, largely influenced by the WHO definition of health, makes ‘diversified’ prevention possible. The notion of well-being implies an understanding of sexual health (and thus of prevention), which is not limited to a precise period, in this instance, a disease or risk-taking behaviour, but is understood in a global, evolving and dynamic manner. The arrival of biomedical solutions actually AIDES, ‘Woody. Parfois on peut mentir sans le savoir’ (2014).. INPES, ‘Je suis amoureux… l’occasion de faire un dépistage’ (2015) (accessed 3 March 2021). 21 The article, published in 2017, is on the Ipergay treatment trial that started in France in 2015 following the success of the American trial in 2012. 19 20

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responded to the evolution of prevention-related messages that went from universality to defining new targets (Trachman, Gelly and Girard, 2018). Public action seems to put the multiple tools of HIV prevention into order. This organization, visible through the campaigns, takes the shape of a market where a demand (rational individuals who want to protect themselves against an identified risk) meets a supply (‘old’ and new preventive tools coming from therapeutic innovations). The preventive public action will seek to match these two poles based on individuals’ interests to make sure that they choose the best option for them. This correspondence between preventative measures, sexual behaviours and social profiles is illustrated, for example, in the 2017 World AIDS Day campaign.22 By using five different visuals (representing the different categories of individuals who can be affected by HIV), the government agency highlighted the variety of tools available to facilitate diagnosis. The slogan ‘HIV screening that fits with your life’ made it possible to showcase the different methods of diagnosis (self-test, rapid test, test at a sexual health centre (CeGIDD), test in a laboratory) depending on the individual profiles (needs to be accompanied or, on the contrary, needs privacy in the screening, free or reimbursed, lack of judgement during the test, guarantee of anonymity, speed or proximity to drop-in centre). The idea of a market where individuals are supposed to make choices is even more eloquent through the SPF campaign on ‘diversified’ prevention. This campaign ran from 2016 to 201923 and illustrated the balance that is sought by the prevention measures between providing certain tools and a specific prevention subject. It was broadcast to the general public in its first version in 2016, and was then aimed at the MSM population to create awareness of all prevention options in 2018. The third version (2019) also focused on the MSM community and emphasized the importance of screening every three months for those who have had multiple partners. In addition to a poster campaign in the community, this campaign also ran online through short YouTube commercials (SPF, 2018). Each of the five visuals presented corresponds to a prevention tool: condom, PrEP, TasP, PET and screening. The tone was deliberately light, sometimes funny, and avoided any judgement of certain sexual behaviours. The aim was to move away from the latter and convey the message of prevention through the role of each tool. 22 SPF, ‘World AIDS Day’, 1 December 2017 (accessed 3 March 2021). 23 SPF, ‘3e édition de la campagne de prévention diversifiée pour les HSH’, 8 July 2019 (accessed 3 March 2021).

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Unlike previous campaigns against HIV/AIDS, this prevention campaign did not use judgement of risky behaviours to convey its message. It was not a question of publicizing moral disapproval of some behaviours, as can be the case in some Act-Up campaigns, or of triggering disgust to create a reminder of the disease (Pézeril, 2011) in order to convey a message highlighting the collective aspect of prevention norms. The 2016 campaign adopted a comprehensive approach in which sexual behaviours were taken as such and offered a range of risk reduction tools. The use of humour, first and foremost, makes it possible to avoid alienating the target audience. Thus, condoms make it possible to ‘watch your backside’ in reference to anal intercourse, while PrEP means ‘always being one step ahead’, with reference to the use of chess games in which the knight pieces symbolize the ability to anticipate what is needed to play the game, while suggesting their ability in the game to ‘jump’ squares. The symbolism here is clear: the option to have sexual relations without the risk of infection combined with the necessary preparation that PrEP users must demonstrate. Lastly, TasP is presented as the option of ‘taking no risks’, inferring that there is no risk of infection when the viral load of those who are seronegative is undetectable. These images are based on the role of humour through the use of rather suggestive vocabulary and images that are eloquent in certain respects. However, although light-heartedness is a major factor, the other side to the prevention message illustrates the rationalization of risky behaviours. By using a combination of slogans and different visuals, ‘risky’ behaviours or situations are presented as situations in which it is possible to take action. All of the visuals imply anticipating risk. Thus, PrEP concentrates on the need to pre-empt risk-taking by using a specific prophylactic strategy, while TasP reduces the risk through a curative treatment that has preventative value for partners. If the individual has not been able to anticipate, or if this strategy has failed due to an accident, PET focuses on responsible behaviour in the event of exposure by using an emergency procedure. By starting with behaviours to develop a prevention message, this communication campaign erases the collective aspect that was prevalent in previous campaigns. It is no longer a matter of prohibiting or restricting certain behaviours, but simply providing guidance so that behaviours can continue without exposing the subject to a risk of infection. The message is no longer focused on spreading a vision of risk, but on individualization, whereby individuals are targeted by means of their behaviours. The policy rationality has thus moved from a negative approach, where understanding the risk led to prohibiting certain behaviours, to a positive approach, where behaviours are softly oriented with the goal to reduce exposure to risk. This reversal can be seen clearly in the formulation of messages by the use of the present imperative (‘Always

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be one step ahead’; ‘Watch your backside’; ‘Check up, check in’) or the indicative, which suggests authorization (‘You can pull’). The message ends with a reminder of the different options, followed by the statement ‘Today, everyone can choose their protection’. This conclusion takes on a specific aspect when it implies governing by preference for a subject understood as a homo œconomicus seeking his best-interest for his own health and well-being. The structuring of the prevention framework with a variety of measures allows individuals to make a choice according to their preferences and behaviours. The very fact of highlighting that each individual is able to choose their method of protection shows that this type of governmentality is deliberately structured around individual freedom over a personal and private topic. What is left to consider is the preventive milieu where the new subject will evolve to exercise his choices concerning his protection. The Field of Prevention: An Environmental Policy What we called above ‘market’ has, in reality, two scales: that of tools, which is also that of discourses (the best representation being the SPF campaign) and that of the environment. This section will tackle the (re)organization of the preventive ‘milieu’ through institutions and their access. Looking at prevention as a ‘milieu’ means interrogating the construction and organization of spaces, both tangible and abstract, in which individuals contemplate their behaviours and their risk taking. In his analysis of neoliberal rationality, Foucault highlighted the importance of environmental technology on the milieu as ‘the means and the medium of circulating an action’ (Foucault, 2004b). The prevention ‘milieu’ can be organized in two ways: first, by connecting territories through institutions where individuals can access information and prevention tools. Some spaces are partially transformed, for example in hospitals, where prevention statements are combined with more traditional curative missions, while others are created, such as the sexual health centres (Centres gratuits d’information, de dépistage et de diagnostic (CeGIDD24)) and the ‘PrEP centres’, when the latter are not included in larger institutions. Others, lastly, expand their missions as associations and sexual health centres. The prevention measures will therefore be rolled out across these locations as they are universally accessible, regard24 Created by decree in July 2015, the CeGIDDs are the result of merging free and anonymous centres (Centres de dépistage anonymes et gratuits (CDAG)) and the previous sexual health clinics (Centres d’information, de dépistage et de diagnostic des infections sexuellement transmissibles (CIDDIST)). Their remit was extended to include reproductive health, in line with the objectives of the NSHS, which was launched in 2016.

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less of circumstances or risk taking. Secondly, it is a question of ensuring the effectiveness and accessibility of the prevention measures for individuals, and of triggering their use; in other words, ensuring that individuals know that, depending on a risk taken or a particular behaviour, they can be directed to a specific service (CeGIDDs or a hospital for screening, PET or PrEP, or an association for a rapid diagnostic test). This therefore requires a clear flow of information using communication tools such as flyers distributed by the AIDES organization, that show (both literally and figuratively) the range of prevention tools available, specific dating apps or even the national SPF campaigns. The objective is no longer to directly constrain individual behaviours, but rather to take them into consideration in their variety so as to offer a suitable tool in a dedicated space. It is for this reason that changes to prevention policies can be considered as environmental, due to their action of modifying the prevention framework and acting remotely without directly influencing individual behaviours. This is therefore a framework that is both wide-ranging and that aims to be as specific as possible. Public action rationalizes social practices by ‘[putting] them in a form to be changed into governable behaviours’ as these can now be ‘reduced to choices with aims’ (Dubuisson-Quellier, 2016). Considering the theoretical developments above, it is possible to highlight some shifts in the way public action in France has considered the prevention against HIV/AIDS, and determine its political rationality. First, taking into account scientific progress, the 2015–2016 reforms engaged an environmental policy with the promotion of a panel of preventive tools next to the condom, but also (re)organized the ‘milieu’ where these tools are available. For example: giving new missions to hospitals, creating centres for screening or other ‘PrEP centres’. This action on the environment to reach individuals without using constraint (what have been designated by mesopolitics) exemplified the role of the state. The latter became an institution which acts ‘at a distance’, reshaping the rules of the game of HIV prevention, and giving to individuals the freedom to choose their own tool(s). Second, these reforms manifested a governmental rationality that affects the sexual behaviour of the subjects. This was promoted through prevention campaigns, whereby individuals are expected to be as rational as possible in their sexual practices, which implies the capacity to orient themselves into the preventive set and make choices according to their preferences and an inner cost/benefit calculation. Therefore, this is a two-folded approach in which the subject of prevention is understood as a rational being capable of asserting preferences in a field that comes to be defined as prevention in ‘sexual health’. This structure of the field of action for individuals, to paraphrase Foucault, can consequently be analysed from the perspective of governing behaviours, and manifests the elements that characterize neoliberal governmentality (Foucault, 2004a).

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CONCLUSION. NEOLIBERALISM AS GOVERNMENTS OF BODIES AND BEHAVIOURS Launched in 2017, the NSHS appears to have been a pivotal moment during which the prevention strategy can be considered neoliberal due to, on the one hand, changes to the prevention framework (extending the ‘toolkit’) and, on the other hand, a subject understood as homo œconomicus because of its capacity, via subjective prevention campaigns, to choose and assert their preferences in prevention tools with regard to their behaviours. The evolution of prevention demonstrates that the policy agenda is incorporating questions that structured the fight against HIV ‘from the bottom’ for several years: strong advances in biomedical solutions (screening, TasP, PET, PrEP, the latter having been the subject of a 2015 trial that resulted in its successful authorization and reimbursement by the French social security system), in addition to understanding health from a global and evolving perspective, among others. Nonetheless, this evolution towards neoliberal governmentality cannot be summarized as a single factor. Quite the contrary, these sources are varied and it is only through a genealogical study of prevention discussions that it becomes possible to correctly identify them. The result is not a clear break between restricting and non-restricting prevention, but a development in making the language surrounding the concept of ‘sexual health’ concrete in public policies, which respond to the medicalization of HIV from the end of the 1990s. It appears here that the tenuous and no less problematic relationship between the categorization of behaviours by knowledge and public action around health on the one hand, and the freedom of choice left to the individual on the other hand is far from exhausting the question of the normative implications of prevention campaigns. This is all the more the case as public action in this field operates through social marketing devices that can be adapted to different minority populations (MSM, ‘migrants’, etc.). It should be noted that neoliberal governmentality does not result in any formal loss of freedom, but is instead linked to promoting a framework of action in which individuals are free to make their choices. However, the intervention in the milieu and the shaping of a particular subject of prevention make it possible to discern a subject who is free to make certain choices, to assert certain preferences within a framework that is sufficiently large but does not obviously include the full range of individual actions. The question of differential mobilization of additional knowledge according to the individual socioeconomic profiles could constitute an interesting start to analyzing inequalities in the adoption of biomedical tools. Rather than governing bodies (Memmi and Fassin, 2004), neoliberalism engages some governance of some bodies and behaviours. It

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invites us to analyze the wave of measures to govern behaviours in the field of prevention.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adam, B.D., 2005. Constructing the Neoliberal Sexual Actor: Responsibility and Care of the Self in the Discourse of Barebackers. Culture, Health and Sexuality 7, 4: 333–346. Adam, P., Hauet E. and Caron C., 2001. Recrudescence des Prises de Risque et des MST Parmi les Gays: Résultats Préliminaires de l’Enquête Presse Gay 2000. Paris, Institut de Veille Sanitaire. Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Audier, S., 2008. Le Colloque Walter Lippman: Aux Origines du ‘Néo-libéralisme’. Lormont: Le bord de l’eau. Audier, S., 2012. Néo-libéralisme(s): une Archéologie Intellectuelle. Paris: Grasset. Becker, G., 1964. Human Capital: A Theoretical and Empirical Analysis with Special Reference to Education. New York, National Bureau of Economic Research: The University of Chicago Press. Berlivet, L., 1997. Naissance d’une Politique Symbolique: l’Institutionnalisation des ‘Grandes Campagnes’ d’éducation pour la Santé. Quaderni 33: 99–117. Berlivet, L., 2004. Une Biopolitique d’éducation pour la Santé. La Fabrique des Campagnes de Prévention. In: Memmi, D. and Fassin D. (eds): Le gouvernement des Corps, pp. 37–75. Paris: EHESS. Boas, T. and Gans-Moore, J., 2009. Neo-Liberalism: From New Liberal Philosophy to Anti-Liberal Slogan. Studies in Comparative International Development 44, 1: 137–161. Commun, P. and Kolev, S., 2018. Wilhelm Röpke (1899–1966). A Liberal Political Economist and Conservative Social Philosopher. New York: Springer International Publishing. De Busscher, P-O., Mendes-Leite, R.O. and Proth, B., 1999. Lieux de Rencontre et Backs-Rooms. Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 3, 128: 24–28. Dubuisson-Quellier, S., 2016. Le Gouvernement des Conduites: Instruments et Acteurs. In: Dubuisson-Quellier, S.: Gouverner les Conduites. Paris: Presses de Sciences-Po. Fassin, D., 2005. Faire de la Santé Publique. Paris: Presses de l’EHESP. Flew, T., 2012. Michel Foucault’s The Birth of Biopolitics and Contemporary Neo-Liberalism Debates. Thesis Eleven 108, 1: 44–65. Foucault, M., 1977. El Nacimiento de la Medicina Social (La Naissance de la Médecine Sociale). Revista Cecntroamericana de Ciencias de la Salud 6, 1: 89–108. Foucault, M., 1978. The History of Sexuality I. The Will to Knowledge. London: Penguin Books. Foucault, M., 1982. The Subject and Power. Critical Inquiry 8, 4: 777–795. Foucault, M., 2004a. Naissance de la Biopolitique. Paris: Gallimard. Foucault, M., 2004b. Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Paris: Gallimard. Girard, G., 2013. Les Homosexuels et le Risque de Sida. Rennes: PUR. Girard, G., 2016. VIH/Sida. In: Rennes J. (ed.): Encyclopédie Critique du Genre, pp. 818–829. Paris: La Découverte. Hache, E., 2007. La Responsabilité, une Technique de Gouvernementalité Néolibérale? Raisons politiques 28, 4: 49–65.

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Hardt, M. and Negri, A., 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Institut National pour la Prévention et l’Education à la Santé (National Institute for Prevention and Health Education, since 2016 renamed Santé Publique France), 2013 (accessed 3 March 2021). Keterrer, F., 2013. La production des campagnes médiatiques de santé publique: une dialectique entre normalisation des comportements collectifs et appel à la responsabilisation individuelle, Socio-logos, 8 (accessed 15 February 2021). Lascoumes, P., 1996. Rendre gouvernable: de la ‘traduction au transcodage,’ l’analyse des processus de changement dans les réseaux d’action publique, CURAPP, La gouvernabilité. Paris: Presses universitaires de France. Laval, C., 2006. Jeremy Bentham et le gouvernement des intérêts. Revue du MAUSS 27, 1: 289–306. Laval, C., 2018. Foucault, Bourdieu et la question néolibérale. Paris: La Découverte. Lert, F., 2016. Vers Paris sans sida. Paris: Rapport remis à la Mairie de Paris. Lert, F. and Pialoux G., 2009. Nouvelles méthodes de prévention et réduction des risques dans les groupes à haut-risque du VIH et des IST. Paris: Rapport de la mission RDRS auprès de la Direction générale de la santé. Memmi, D. and Fassin, D., 2004. Le Gouvernement des Corps. Paris: EHESS. Ministère des Affaires sociales et de la Santé, 2016. Stratégie nationale de santé sexuelle. Agenda 2017–2030. Paris: Ministère des Affaires sociales et de la Santé. Molina, J-M. et al, 2017. Efficacy, safety, and effect on sexual behaviour of on-demand pre-exposure prophylaxis for HIV in men who have sex with men: an observational cohort study. Lancet HIV (online), 4, 9. Available at: doi: 10.1016/ S2352-3018(17)30089-9 (accessed 15 February 2021). NSHS (Stratégie nationale de santé sexuelle – National sexual health strategy), Paris, Ministère des solidarités et de la santé, 2017 (accessed 23 March 2022). Oulc’Hen, H., 2014. Introduction. In: Oulc’Hen H., Usages de Foucault, pp. 5–11. Paris: PUF. Pezeril, C., 2011. Le dégoût dans les campagnes de lutte contre le Sida. Ethnologie française 1, 41: 79–88. Rabinow, P. and Rose, N., 2006. Biopower Today. Biosocieties 1: 195–217. Sandset, T., 2019. ‘HIV both starts and stops with me’: Configuring the neoliberal sexual actor in HIV prevention. Sexuality & Culture, 23: 657–673 (accessed 15 February 2021). Setbon, M., 2000. La Paradoxale Normalisation du Sida. Revue française de sociologie 41, 1: 61–78. Stiegler, B., 2019. ‘Il faut s’adapter’. Sur un nouvel impératif politique. Paris: Gallimard. Taylan, F., 2013. L’interventionnisme environnemental, une stratégie néolibérale. Raisons politiques 4, 52: 77–87. Taylan, F., 2014. Gouverner les hommes par leurs milieux. La rationalité mésologique et les technologies environnementales du libéralisme. In : Oulc’Hen, H., Usages de Foucault, pp. 159–173. Paris: PUF. Thaler, R.H. and Sunstein, C., 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. London: Penguin.

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Thomann, M., 2018. ‘On December 1, 2015, sex changes. Forever’: Pre-exposure prophylaxis and the pharmaceuticalisation of the neoliberal sexual subject, Global Public Health (accessed 17 February 2021). Trachman, M., Gelly, M. and Girard, G., 2018. Défaire et refaire un groupe à risque. Objectivation et prévention du sida chez les homosexuels masculins à l’heure des antirétroviraux. INED-Population 73, 4: 787–807. Vernazza, P. et al., 2008. Les personnes séropositives ne souffrant d’aucune autre MST et suivant un traitement antirétroviral efficace ne transmettent pas le VIH par voie sexuelle. Bull. Med. Suisses 89: 165–169.

8. Biopolitics of authoritarianism. The case of Russia Anastasya Manuilova During the last 30 years, the notion of biopolitics, brought to new attention by Michel Foucault, has been used as an analytical instrument by numerous researchers across many different fields within the social sciences. The term has been fruitfully applied to explain processes regarding different institutions, groups of people, and individual citizens in their relationship with the state. As such, biopolitics has made it possible to identify how power organizes and intensifies the life of men and women, patients and disabled, children and old people (Powell, 2015). At the same time, there are some areas of political analysis which remain disconnected from discussions about biopolitics, its characteristics, and consequences. One such area is the part of political theory which focuses on the investigation of different political regimes, especially, authoritarian ones (Levitsky and Way, 2002). It is possible to claim that such political regimes remained overlooked by political science in general, since they emerged in different parts of the world only after 1920 (Geddes, et al., 2018). Even more importantly, authoritarian regimes did not gain the attention of researchers for a long time, since they were treated as uninspired versions of one of the two other types of political regimes, totalitarianism and democracy, and, therefore, as something which could be transformed into a mature democracy. However, the third wave of democratization, which has taken place since the 1970s, demonstrated only partially successful results, and authoritarian political regimes were acknowledged as a single other type (Haggard and Kaufman, 2009). Still, research regarding authoritarian political regimes remains limited, partly because of the nature of such regimes, and partly due to limitations in the analytical vocabulary of political science. As we shall see, the salient characteristics of authoritarian regimes are not covered within the categories of conventional political theory. Therefore, the task to create a dialogue between Foucault’s work and research on these political regimes is dictated by our own need to find new ways to comprehend authoritarian political power, thus incorporating this concept into the vocabulary of classical political theory. 151

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In this chapter, we shall investigate the functioning of the authoritarian political regime, using the case of Russia. Since there exist many different types of authoritarian regimes, it would be difficult to claim that the results we will reach could be applied universally. Still, Russia could represent a combination of important subtypes, since it is not only an authoritarian but also a mineral-rich state: we will see that this economic classification implies a set of important strategic interests for the Russian state. In addition, it is a state with quite developed welfare institutions, which is more or less characteristic of the whole set of post-socialist countries. We take these three features – authoritarian regime, mineral-rich state, welfare state – as the most important for our further analysis, and the body of the chapter will be built around them.

METHODOLOGICAL REMARKS Even if we take Foucault as the first who suggested using the term ‘biopolitics’ to analyze relationships of power within state and society, it is hard to ignore how much this framework of research was developed by other authors subsequently (Lemke, 2011). The most prominent of these are Giorgio Agamben, on the one hand, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, on the other. In the attempt to overcome problems and lacunas in Foucault’s works, they have suggested two diametrically opposite interpretations of Foucault’s seminal inquiries into biopolitics. For Agamben, who uses a quasi-ontological concept of biopolitics, the main focus of attention is Nazi-fascist or Stalinist regimes, on the one hand, and liberal democratic states, on the other. All of them, he states, have similar structural features, which result in their ‘inner solidarity’ (Agamben, 1998, p. 10). By contrast, Hardt and Negri build their argument on the idea of a new stage of capitalism, which is responsible for the dissolution of the boundaries between economy and politics. A new economic order functions at the global level, diminishing the discipline and legal power of nation-states (Hardt and Negri, 2000). Both of these interpretations brought a significant contribution to the reformulation of Foucault’s ideas, even though not without some criticism, since Foucault’s important distinction between sovereign power and the mode of functioning of the liberal state is in fact lost in these later developments (Ojakangas, 2005). However, neither of these approaches seems to be suitable for the current study, since it would be difficult to develop an understanding of the authoritarian states on the basis of either. While Agamben dedicated his research to studying how biopolitics functions in relation to certain political regimes, his work does not seem to create any possibility of recognizing an authoritarian mode of power as different from a totalitarian one. On the other hand, the analysis suggested by Hardt and Negri stresses the irrelevance of any

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political regime in the modern world because of the growing dominance of international corporations and non-governmental organizations. By contrast, the concept of biopolitics suggested by Foucault was created in relation to an ideal type of liberal European state (Said, 1988). The prototype of this ideal was France, of which Foucault studied the economic and political history since the Middle Ages. Later he also gave a brief description of other kinds of states in his lectures and interviews, though, in his opinion, neither Nazism nor socialism had their own, fundamentally different, variety of power techniques (Foucault, 1980). According to Foucault, despite the differences in ideology, these political regimes, for example, followed the very same logic of racism, which was invented by European states in the 19th century in order to save the purity of their population. It should be noted that the concept of an authoritarian state itself was apparently not familiar to Foucault. The fundamental investigation of this type of state, created by Juan Linz, was published in the mid-1960s. However, it is obvious that it could not immediately claim great fame, since the whole field of research of authoritarian regimes was just emerging and was inevitably shadowed by the much more developed studies of totalitarianism (Linz, 1964). Foucault’s analysis of governmentality as a parameter of state action takes place on a different, more basic, level than that of political regimes. The political problem of governmentality is therefore not significantly determined by differences between democratic, totalitarian or authoritarian forms of government and it would not make sense to claim a special problem of governmentality for authoritarian regimes. However, it is possible to assume that, behind the similarity of these regimes, one can find some particular traits, unique for every type. For example, Sergei Prozorov proved this to be possible in the case of socialism, having investigated the biopolitics of the Great Break in Soviet Russia (Prozorov, 2014). When it comes to the methods used in this study, it should be noted that we are trying to rework not only the concept of biopolitics in Foucault by finding its place in relation to certain political theories. Such an approach was, for example, widely employed by Agamben, and, according to some critics, it led him too far away from the original works of Foucault, even if he was working with the very same concepts (Koopman, 2015). By contrast, this study of governmentality and the authoritarian form of government does aim to follow Foucault’s method very closely. By method of analysis we here chiefly mean his approach to the rationale of state action. It is clear that Foucault employed different concepts and methods in the course of his works (Ferreira-Neto, 2018). This study will not use methodological concepts such as discourse, archaeology or genealogy – Ian Hacking did this in some of his writings, employing the concept of ‘episteme’ (Hacking, 1979). Such a method is unfeasible for us because the aim of this study is to move closer to a qualification of

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the authoritarian state, which, in the case of Russia, is shaped, as we shall see, by heterogeneous historical factors, and cannot be defined by just one element, such as the relationship of the state to society, or a state ideology, or legacies from the previous Soviet regime. Indeed, Foucault himself, in his lectures on biopolitics of the late 1970s, is often open to a combination of different kinds of factors in the shaping of a particular conception of statehood, political goals and political actions at certain moments in history (Foucault, 2003). In the broadest sense, the basis of Foucault’s work always constituted an analysis of documents, varying from state laws to texts regarding government functions and institutions. At the same time, he never stated as his goal to focus merely on the structures of the state, but rather to study its techniques of power and governance. Such attention to the practice of power provides him with a unique place within political science, and offers a perspective of fruitful investigation for our approach to the analysis of the authoritarian political regime of Russia.

FOUCAULT AND RUSSIA Like other countries, Russia, its present and past, has become the subject of Foucault-inspired research, though this has happened only more recently. The ‘bio-political turn,’ which has impelled many scholars in the West to study Foucault, was much less influential in Russia (Campbell and Sitze, 2013). The first work exploring Russian history from a bio-political point of view is probably the study of the political theorist Sergei Prozorov. His work has generated an international following among researchers interested, first of all, in the biopolitical structure of state power in the Soviet period (Prozorov, 2013). It needs to be noted, however, that for this type of studies, a later biopolitical concept has become much more influential – the one developed by Giorgio Agamben on the basis of Foucault’s works. While, for Foucault, the death of the citizen represents the limit of state power, Agamben sees it as just another domain. For some researchers, Agamben is actually talking about thanatopolitics, not biopolitics (Campbell, 2011). And even if he is, he is interested in biopower in the form of governments’ explicit acts of violence towards its citizens, unlike Foucault, who mostly focused on indirect state power. It is much easier to find examples of the former than the latter within the history of the Soviet state – the creation of a labour camps system for detaining murderers and thieves being the most prominent. As official data about many aspects of the camp system is still not public, the number of people who were imprisoned there can be estimated only vaguely. Still, even if we take the most modest figures, it seems that at least 10 million people went through different Soviet camps. So, it is not surprising that the concept of Agamben, who was himself

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theorizing similar labour camps in Nazi Germany, has been used to study the Soviet persecution system (Healey, 2015). Another group of works dedicated to the biopolitical approach towards Russia is more focused on recent years. The focus of such studies is the state regulation of different minorities. The increase in these studies was determined by a change in Russian state ideology, which happened at the beginning of the third term of President Vladimir Putin. In 2012–2013, his government introduced a certain number of laws, which followed a ‘traditional’ ideological track (Kaylan, 2014). The most important of these were the law of Diva Yakovlev, which prohibited taking Russian orphans to the US; the law prohibiting LGBT ‘propaganda;’ and the law which put restrictions on the population’s access to abortion in state health institutions. For many authors, those and other similar laws became a starting point for a new biopolitical regime of the Russian state, with the help of which the state ‘controls its citizens’ (Weaver, 2014; Makarychev and Yatsyk, 2015; Stella and Nartova, 2016). This interpretation of the new forms of state control, though, showed itself to be an exaggeration, as most of these works were, in the end, focused not on how the Russian government ‘makes live,’ but on how it ‘makes die’ (Foucault, 2003, pp. 240–241). Restrictions enforced on groups of Russian minorities, of course, constitute an object of great interest, but the Russian state operates these restrictions through an exercise of sovereign power: this kind of state power is based on direct restrictions and, as such, it represents only one part of Foucault’s theory of modern state power. Another recent group of studies claiming to apply the concept of biopower to modern Russia, explores its official ideology, which started to get formulated after the beginning of President Putin’s third presidential term (Martínez, 2012; Makarychev and Medvedev, 2015). Authors of these types of works tend to overestimate the implementations of Putin’s ideology, mixing up intended consequences with actual processes taking place in society. For example, some of these works take the Russian law of ‘guarding the quality of sleep’ from 2013 as an example of unlimited power of the state, leaving aside the question whether the stated intention was ever put into practice. In this case, the rhetoric of power used by the government was not matched by actually implemented policies. Paradoxically, both of these last two directions of research done on Russian biopolitics mostly employ the ideas and methods of Agamben and not those of Foucault. Their focus on laws and ideology presupposes that these elements of state intention do indeed correspond to the actual power of the state. Thus, laws and ideology can be read as signs of power, or as the script for an analysis of power and its exercise. While such an approach could be productively applied to the study of liberal or totalitarian states, precisely because of their intention to function within a symbolic or lawful order, authoritarian states

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operate in a different way. Therefore, this study, in contrast to the works just mentioned, tries to explore the case of Russia with the help of the most classic interpretation of the concept of biopolitics, which we will now discuss further.

FOUCAULT AND BIOPOLITICS Foucault starts using the term ‘biopolitics’ in the 1970s, when his research focuses on different aspects of the rationality of the modern state. He analyzes biopolitics in the first volume of The History of Sexuality and in some of his lectures, presented in the Collège de France, such as ‘Society Must be Defended,’ ‘Security, Territory, Population’ and ‘The Birth of Biopolitics.’ According to Foucault, the modern state, unlike the traditional state, now cares only about its own existence and does not have any external goal – no salvation of its people, no salvation of the sovereign. No law, such as positive law or divine law, could be imposed from the outside on the state. Since there is, in this conception, no projected end to history, the modern state sees itself as an infinite reality within an infinite time horizon. The main source of its existence, therefore, becomes the people, not the territory, since there are other states around, and in order to manage territorial coexistence, the state should not start conflicts over land. In order to maintain peace, every state started developing two new mechanisms of government – international diplomacy, in order to manage relationships with other states, and police, in order to deal with its citizens. Before the modern political regime, the state could, according to Foucault, govern through a combination of different power mechanisms, whereby each of these mechanisms can be more or less dominating. First, the power of the sovereign, the most ancient form of authority, is used only to mark certain borders of action, to create a binary between allowed and forbidden codes of behaviour. The latter is represented by legislation. As Foucault explained, ‘it is not the right to put people to death or grant them life. Nor is it the right to allow people to live or let them live. It is the right to take life or let live’ (Foucault, 2003, pp. 240–241). Disciplinary power, by contrast, has the ability to create new dimensions within which it regulates human actions according not to laws but to norms: as Foucault explained, ‘discipline is a mode of individualization of multiplicities rather than something that constructs an edifice of multiple elements on the basis of individuals who are worked on as, first of all, individuals’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 12). Discipline co-existed with sovereign power for many centuries, but only in small communities like monasteries or craft unions, and started spreading more widely just after the 16th century, following the invention of penitentiary institutions, manufactories, schools, and hospitals.

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Finally, the third type of power technique, the technique of security, starts to rapidly develop in the 18th century. Security measures, Foucault states, ‘try to plan a milieu in terms of events or series of events or possible elements,’ whereas ‘the milieu appears as a field of intervention in which… one tries to affect, precisely, a population’ (Foucault, 2007, p. 12). Biopolitics is thus not a power to punish but a capacity to regulate the outlook that citizens may have on their bodily life according to certain norms. These norms are not limited to ideology, they are implicit in all state actions involving the body and life prospects of each member of the population. Foucault stressed that these projects are intrinsic to the modern state as the latter comes to see the population itself as governable. The rise of biopolitical regulation does not end the use of other types of techniques of power. Rather, all three types of power techniques are applied simultaneously, managing different aspects of the objects that the state intends to control. Together, they constitute what Foucault calls ‘governmentality,’ a rationale of the state which determines the way the latter organizes power relationships. In this study, we focus our investigation of the authoritarian state on the analysis of the biopolitical type of power technique, since the latter seems to be able to reveal more interesting results than that of sovereign or disciplinary power.

THE AUTHORITARIAN POLITICAL REGIME The concept of authoritarian state seems to be first presented in a chapter entitled ‘An Authoritarian Regime: Spain,’ by Juan Linz, published in 1964 in the book Cleavages, Ideologies, and Party System. Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology. Having lived in Spain under the rule of General Franco, Linz experienced a kind of political system which would fit neither a democratic nor a totalitarian mode of analysis. So, he suggested that, rather than being a slightly different version of any of either of these political regimes, the Spanish government at that time was functioning according to a new, third type of political system. It should be noted that, for Linz, the authoritarian political regime was possible only for a modern type of state; therefore, he clearly distinguished it from the rule of traditional leaders, such as a king. In the past, of course, political studies knew only the basic opposition between democracy and autocracy, and, obviously, authoritarian states fall into the second category. However, for Linz, absolutism, in contrast with authoritarian rule, based itself on a traditional type of legitimation. Considering such a difference, it is then possible to say that the authoritarian political regime was not taken by political thought as a concept worth exploring. There were only a few philosophers who tried to justify the existence of authoritarian political regimes, at the same time emphasizing its difference

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from totalitarian rule. Among them, one should name Heinz Ziegler and Eric Voegelin, who praised antidemocratic rule but favoured the separation between the state and society instead of their integration with the help of the dominant political party (Ziegler, 1932; Voegelin, 1994). However, this tradition of thinking was not continued after World War II. Existing authoritarian regimes generated some texts, aiming to justify their presence and actions, although, according to the nature of such regimes, these texts never actually guided the ruler or sufficed to explain the actions of the state. As a result, because of the lack of theoretical justification, it would be impossible to create an analysis of authoritarian regimes which would be similar to the one Foucault established for the modern state in general by investigating how its governmentality was changing over the centuries with the help of texts (Foucault, 2008). However, we are able to discuss the way power is practised within authoritarian regimes by using Linz’s concept as a description of practices which are common to the majority of such regimes. Linz would define political regimes as authoritarian if they are political systems with limited, not responsible, political pluralism, without elaborate and guiding ideology, but with distinctive mentalities, without extensive nor intensive political mobilization, except at some points in their development, and in which a leader or occasionally a small group exercises power within formally ill-defined limits but actually quite predictable ones. (Linz, 2000, p. 178)

By contrast, there would be no political pluralism within the totalitarian regime, since it would exercise complete control over political institutions in the country. Democracy, on the other hand, is characterized by unlimited political pluralism, which results in a regular change of the ruling party and the government. Authoritarian regimes, unlike totalitarian and democratic ones, have no tendency to claim that they represent a new economic or social order, based on a well-developed system of thought, which would sometimes be attractive even for intellectuals, like Nazism. Therefore, they usually present a rather simple set of beliefs, unable to guide individuals into the future, but offering a specific attitude towards some aspects of the past and the present. Defining authoritarian regimes, Linz uses the term ‘mentality’ as it was developed by Theodor Geiger, to denote ‘a way of thinking or feeling, rather emotional than rational’ (Linz, 2000, p. 162). Since authoritarian regimes are unable to produce an ideology that they could use to lead the citizens, they rarely try to initiate political mobilization. Because of that, they see political apathy as a desirable base for their rule, in contrast with totalitarian and democratic regimes, which rely on political mobilization. Despite the fact that this definition of the authoritarian regime was formulated almost 50 years ago, we still find it useful in order to analyse the contem-

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porary political realm. Of course, the interest in studying authoritarian regimes has gradually grown. However, these political systems have attracted wide attention only recently, after the fall of the Soviet Union, followed by the rapid development of such states on the post-soviet territory. Still, most of these studies inevitably use the concept of Linz as a starting point in their investigations, which proves that it remains one of the most influential accounts. Another reason why this work is using the concept of Linz is that the way it was formulated allows one to combine it with the concept of different power techniques used in the works of Foucault. The definition of Linz is based on purely political aspects of such regimes, it focuses on the way power is organized and exercised, rather than on the content of politics or ideology. That makes it possible to build a further analysis of such regimes based on the actual practices they use, and, therefore, to make it a Foucauldian one, since, according to Foucault, one ‘should not ask the question “why,” but the question “how”?’ (Foucault, 1989, p. 276).

BIOPOLITICS OF THE AUTHORITARIAN STATE As was proven by Agamben and Prozorov, states operating within either democratic or totalitarian regimes each have their own pattern of combining these practices (Agamben, 1998; Prozorov, 2014). If we can allow the authoritarian political regime its specificity within political science, it could also have its specific way of exercising power in the way that this was understood by Foucault. As was stated above, in this chapter authoritarian political regimes are treated as modern establishments, different from absolutist and despotic regimes of the past, even if they demonstrate some common characteristics. Given this distinction, it seems that there is one important aspect of governmentality which they all share. The state operating within an authoritarian regime is distancing itself from its citizens, since it does not rely on political mobilization. The fewer people who participate in politics, the better it is for the ruler. By contrast, in democracy and totalitarian states, citizens exercise some political subjectivity. In the case of the former, for example, they vote; in the case of the latter, they become members of the ruling party and have to represent the state with their actions. Such practices could be treated as a result of disciplinary power. In fact, Mitchell Dean saw the spread of discipline as the main condition for the emergency of liberalism in general (Dean, 1999). Moreover, there have been some investigations of disciplinary power in totalitarian states as well. For an authoritarian state, such micromanagement of the population is not necessary, since Linz demonstrated that its legitimization is not connected with the political activity of its citizens.

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The lack of disciplinary power may, then, lead to a more pronounced use of the power of the sovereign. In fact, the limited pluralism of authoritarian regimes can be the result of a lack of disciplinary power of the state. Since the state lacks the power to regulate the way its nation functions in detail, it tends to manage the population with the help of the law, or, in other words, by creating a binary code of power, where everything which is not forbidden is possible. This is exactly what Linz refers to as ‘execution of power within predictable limits,’ a process which focuses on denying the population the possibility of some actions and leaving all the others aside (Linz, 2000, p. 199). The existence of limited pluralism, which Linz also attributed to authoritarian regimes, can be the consequence of lack of power as well, since both the presence of a limited party system and the relatively weak level of state control over everyday life are attributed to the same cause, which is the limited power of the state within society. Such an attitude towards the citizens can also influence the practice of biopolitics within authoritarian political regimes. If the population can hardly be managed with the help of disciplinary techniques, the value of such techniques for the state is limited, since discipline was created in order to maximize the utility of every person. And, if so, then the capacity of the state to deal with the population as an object of management is limited as well. Biopolitics, therefore, is developed only imperfectly, within the limits of knowledge and power characteristic of such a state. When we approach authoritarian states, we face a relative absence of biopolitical measures compared with either the liberal or the totalitarian regime. This pattern of usage of power techniques inevitably would lead to a different form of governmentality within authoritarian political regimes. In addition, the last but not least characteristic of authoritarian rule, its lack of complex ideology, also points to differences among regimes. Although this notion was not used by Foucault himself, it is possible to see ideology as a component of discourse, and, therefore, to understand what its absence could mean for understanding governmentality in the authoritarian state (Rabinow, 1984). As Linz demonstrated, authoritarian regimes cannot produce a fully developed ideology and instead tend to encourage only a certain mentality, or, in other words, a certain emotional attitude among their citizens. In turn, mentality, unlike an ideology that presents a complex picture of the world, is more simple, has no orientation towards the future and is focused on the past or the present. Consequently, the role of the state in constituting power/knowledge relationships is also limited, especially when it comes to presenting itself to the population. Therefore, the authoritarian state as described by Linz functions as an external centre of power, and, as such, remains different from that of liberal or totalitarian governments, which are deeply rooted in the society.

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The state, which distances itself from the society, then, could be seen as both very modern and very conventional at the same time. In his lectures in 1971, Foucault presented his vision of how the art of government was changing over time and what served as an object of its focus. First, he claimed, to govern meant to have the power over a certain territory, and only later was this replaced by governance over the population. As Foucault himself explained, the first attempt to imagine the government as external to the territory it tries to rule was made by Niccolò Machiavelli (Foucault, 2007). Before, the power of the king was an object of investigation for mediaeval scholars, who saw it as an instrument for providing salvation for the king’s subjects. For Foucault, Machiavelli suggested a new way of thinking about the goal of the state, creating a rupture within the long tradition of legitimation of the ruler through theology. Analyzing The Prince, Foucault referred to a connection between the state and its territory which Machiavelli found to be contingent and pragmatic, based on the concrete agency of the ruler. Hence, political rule, in Foucault’s reading of Machiavelli, was always in need of further solidification, and could not simply be legitimized once and for all. However, this perspective soon evolved into a different model, developed by the so-called anti-Machiavellians. This assumed governance over a country to be similar to other types of domination, for example, over the family. Now, it became possible to theoretically determine state governance with reference to things and processes – and later to the population, considered as a particular example. The previous, mediaeval, type of governmentality, by contrast, saw itself as ruling over a certain territory and, only by implication, over the people who live there. Governance over the population, according to Foucault, later became biopolitics, and an integral part of the governmentality of both liberalism and totalitarianism. Governing over the territory, by contrast, seemed to have stayed in the past. However, now it is possible to see this type of territorial (and abstract) rationality within authoritarian governance. At the same time, authoritarian states, at least some of them, still rely on the very same mechanisms for organizing society as liberal states do. There are schools, hospitals, prisons and other welfare institutions, belonging to the state, being run by the state and acquiring a monopoly position towards the population. However, their scope needs to be studied specifically in the case of every country, since every nation has its own economic history. In the following section this question will be discussed in relation to Russia.

RUSSIA AS AN AUTHORITARIAN STATE According to Linz’s political theory, Russia can be classified as an authoritarian state over the last 20 years. In this chapter, we do not take into considera-

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tion the period just after the fall of the Soviet Union, but we limit our research to the period of the rule of Vladimir Putin. The approach Linz had suggested for analyzing political regimes does not itself include the role of the political leader. However, in the case of Russia, it was proved that the consolidation of the political regime as an authoritarian one corresponded with the period that Putin has been in power (Lewis, 2020). So far, Linz has determined four key characteristics of the authoritarian state, so the next step is to present our vision of their specificity within Russian political reality during this period. The first characteristic is limited political pluralism, which, in the case of Russia, could be justified by the presence of different election systems and political parties within national political institutions. At the moment in Russia there are several political parties, which have official registration and can take part in the different elections. However, the majority of seats both in the State Duma, which is the lower house, and the Federation Council, which is the upper house – together constituting the Federal Assembly – belongs to only one party, ‘United Russia.’ The latter was created at the beginning of the 2000s by allies of Vladimir Putin in order to control national elections (Chaisty, 2008). What is an even more important sign of limited political pluralism within the Russian state is the presence of different groups of interests among the power holders (Renz, 2006). These are the siloviki, a group usually including the military proper, the police, national security organizations and some other structures; the liberals, consisting of those who determine economic and financial policies and think positively about the power of market economy; and finally, the technocrats, which can have different posts, but usually managerial, and who prefer pragmatic solutions over the rule of any principles. These groups tend to create temporary alliances with each other in order to achieve their goals, while Vladimir Putin serves as an arbitrator, balancing the opposing forces. Another key characteristic of an authoritarian regime is the absence of an elaborate and guiding ideology. This is also true in the case of Russia. None of the official state documents, determining the current Russian political system, state that the country has an official ideology. Nor is it possible to say that there is an official ideology if we look at how the Russian state justifies its actions. Many scholars have tried to suggest different versions of what could be seen as an ideology of Russia; however, none of them was able to prove that there exists a sustainable, complex system of beliefs in the current regime. Some have tried to identify state ideology as ‘Putinism,’ or ‘state machism,’ a personality cult of Vladimir Putin, portraying him as the only possible leader for modern Russia, who alone can govern the country (Cassiday and Johnson, 2010; Riabov and Riabova, 2014). However, the cult of personality, according

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to Linz, even if it is usually an important part of a state ideology in totalitarian regimes, cannot serve as an ideology on its own. The lack of a proper ideological system of beliefs also results in limited political mobilization in Russia. Its government never actually tries to actively stimulate political participation. Rather, it prefers to eliminate most of the possible political competitors and present itself as the only option for the population. Even so, during the last 20 years, Russians have shown only moderate support for the ruling regime, according to polls, except for the period just after the annexation of Crimea in 2014 (Greene, 2017). Neither did they demonstrate a high rate of participation in different political organizations created by the state, such as the ruling party ‘United Russia,’ or the state union for teenagers ‘Ours.’ Finally, the last definitive characteristic of an authoritarian regime, according to Linz, is the way it exercises power, which is predictable, but formally ill-defined. One could view the change of the national Constitution, which took place in Russia in 2020, as an example of such a practice. It was predictable that Vladimir Putin would want to prolong the number of terms he could be president; however, it was impossible to know in what way he would choose to achieve it (Bressler, 2018).

POPULATION AS THE OBJECT OF BIOPOLITICAL MANAGEMENT IN RUSSIA According to the model of authoritarian regimes presented by Linz, we may assume that some form of biopolitics is practised by all of such states – and that would also include Russia. However, Linz also specifies that the concept of ‘authoritarian regime’ is quite loose and that these states differ greatly in many of their most important characteristics. The degree of development of state institutions, the willingness to use violence against political opponents and the size of national GDP vary significantly among authoritarian states around the world. The largest spread of national GDP is in fact to be found among authoritarian states (Levitsky and Way, 2002). Caution is therefore called for when we seek to move from the philosophical concept of biopolitics to the theoretical analysis of authoritarian states. When we now go on to consider Russia as a particular case of authoritarian state, we will, following Linz, have to highlight which factors are the most significant in defining its regime of government, and only then will we be able to consider the place of biopolitics in this regime. It seems that biopolitics in the modern Russian state is functioning according to several different factors. This list includes the national perception of liberalism, the country’s territory, and the current stage of welfare institutions. By putting together this list of factors, we begin to see, in a Foucauldian sense,

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a frame or a matrix of power and political action in which the current Russian state develops its techniques of governance. These techniques, however, are all bundled around a particular conception of the population and it is this conception which in the Russian case is distinct, in my view, from the population considered as an economic asset in the modern liberal states theorized by Foucault (Foucault, 2007). According to his lectures, Foucault saw liberalism and its economic rationality as an important driver in the development of power techniques within modernity. In his words, liberalism introduced the principle of governmentality through the idea that some processes are able to self-regulate – and that the state can rely on this dynamic, and does not, therefore, need to apply sovereign or disciplinary power to achieve certain results. However, Foucault based his analysis of power techniques on Europe, and France in particular, so it is possible to suggest that the history of other countries with a slightly different national economic rationality could have resulted in different dispositions of discipline and biopolitics. That thesis has already been successfully explored in the usage of Foucault within postcolonial studies (Bhatnagar, 1986) and in research about Eastern Europe (Plotka, 2018). Considering the economic history of Russia, it is clear that the fate that liberalism has had here is very different from the one it had in Europe. Some versions of liberalism were practised here only for short periods of time: first, from the last decades of the 18th century until World War I; secondly, during the last 30 years after the fall of the Soviet Union (Becker and Vasileva, 2017). For the majority of the 20th century, the Russian economy was functioning according to the strictly opposite principles of communism, which implies a much greater role of the state in economic life than does liberalism. As a result, discipline was the dominant power technique for the Soviet state. However, it was used in order to achieve goals that were formulated within a biopolitical rationale. As Sergei Prozorov has noted, ‘the Soviet project was paradigmatically biopolitical in its ambition to transform the forms of life of the population in line with communist ideology’ (Prozorov, 2014, p. 10). After the fall of the Soviet Union, however, this biopolitical project was replaced by a new one, of a very different type, which no longer considers communist ideology as a point of departure. Nevertheless, it is not based on liberal rationality either. As we stated earlier, the rationality of an authoritarian state tends to be more strongly focused on its territory and then, only in a secondary sense, on its population. In the case of Russia, this was reinforced by the fact that since the mid-1960s the country has become one of the world’s main exporters of oil (Sergi, 2019). It should be noted here that the use of oil, its place in the economy and the effects it has on the state could not be studied by Foucault, since this industry started rapidly developing only during the second half of the twentieth century.

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However, resource extraction differs from many other types of production and can significantly change the relations of power between the state and the population (Dean, 2012; Dale, 2016). It seems in fact that, in the case of Russia, for the last 20 years, the place of the territory within political thinking has been occupied by oil extraction. Of course, its production in the country started much earlier, in the mid-1960s; however, because of volatile oil prices, its value for the state varied between very big to very small. Now, seeing this in a historical long-term perspective and looking, in parallel, at the history of oil dependency in the Russian political economy and at the history of population-oriented biopolitical techniques, one can see an interesting correlation. If one looks at the history of biopolitical techniques in Russia from 1917 to now, one can observe that after a decline of the efforts to create a new Soviet man in the post-war period, the biopolitical project was not taken up again in the post-Soviet regime, whether under Yeltsin or Putin. Since the beginning of the 2000s, the income from oil extraction constitutes from about one-quarter to one-third of the Russian state federal budget; the economic value of the population was, obviously, of secondary importance (Kudrin and Knobel, 2018). That could explain the limited interest that the modern Russian state has had in its population as an economic asset. In other words, what in the language of economics is called the ‘resource curse,’ which leads to poor economic performance and low investments in human capital, could also be described as underdeveloped biopolitics. However, it is hard to agree with the statement that the Russian government does not invest in its population. The modern Russia of the Putin period has in fact reinstated many of the welfare institutions in much the same way that they functioned during the Soviet time, thus providing the population with state healthcare, a pension system, and social benefits. Since the start of the presidency of Vladimir Putin in 2000, the share of welfare provision in the national budget has been growing almost annually (Cook, 2007). All in all, they make up around 50% of the expenses of the federal and regional state budgets (Minfin, 2019). As a result, within the entire post-soviet region, which shows the largest variation of welfare spending as a percentage of GDP in the world, Russia now stands out as one of the highest spenders (Cook, 2007). This extraordinary resilience of social service systems in Russia since Soviet times has been particularly surprising to specialists against the background of a much more significant reduction in the social sector including healthcare, which accompanied macroeconomic reforms in Latin America (Haggard and Kaufman, 2009). In the time of the Soviet Union, developed welfare institutions functioned as centres of disciplinary power, regulating the population by training every member according to the new standards of medicine and social sciences. In modern Russia, they partly inherited these practices; however, their capacity

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to use them is limited, since the state has no communist ideals in play. We are thus left with the picture of a state which in its political economy follows a sovereign mode of power, conceiving the territory (oil) rather than the population as its main asset, but which, in its relation to society, nevertheless pursues welfare policies, which resemble those of Soviet times, but now without their former biopolitical rationale. What then, we may ask, is the purpose of welfare provision for the current Russian state? As we have seen, the authoritarian state does not have access to the full-blown biopolitical project. The Russian state thus neither strives to create a new man (communism) or to stimulate the population towards self-regulation (liberalism). It is a mainstream view in political science that the Russian state with its social services has entered into a bargain, or informal contract, with its citizens, offering welfare and continuity with the Soviet past in exchange for their acceptance of limited political participation. According to this view, the state’s purpose in offering welfare provision is very clear. It is to buy loyalty (Bueno de Mesquita et al, 2005). However, a Foucauldian perspective on this situation may introduce a less rationalistic understanding of the nexus between the state and the citizens. If we recall the emphasis by Linz on the lack of importance of state ideology in the authoritarian state, we can see that, in the Russian political regime, ideology is also not available as a source of social integration. In this light, one can see welfare institutions and social services as occupying a place of contact between state and citizens, a place that in other democratic or totalitarian regimes would be taken up in part by ideology. If the Russian state is almost ideologically neutral, this point of nexus can be seen to function as a pure container of power. This would not be the power of the state over its citizens, which in authoritarian states generally is limited, but a power that the state exercises without fully owning or controlling it. For example, this is shown by the government’s recent failure to reform the pension system (Maltseva, 2019). The Russian regime does use welfare as a way to establish continuity with the Soviet regime. This continuity is also significant within the context of the authoritarian political regime. The authoritarian state exists, as we have seen, in a present which does not point towards a projected future, but which may be supported by a national past. The Russian political regime, as seen through this perspective, is thus one which is confined within the present and dependent on the power that it exercises through its welfare institutions. We can see therefore that Russia as an authoritarian state demonstrates its own particular form of governmentality, distinct from that of other countries, including other authoritarian states. As we have demonstrated above, the biopolitics of the Russian states since 2000 shows a rather limited scope and potential, and this limitation is grounded in the state’s indifference towards the

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individual citizen, considered as a potential asset. As a result, people in Russia, in a bio-political sense, still live under conditions of anarchy when compared to the population in liberal democracies.

CONCLUSION This chapter has attempted to provide a description of authoritarian political regimes, using the case of Russia, with the help of the concepts developed by Michel Foucault. For a while, his notion of biopolitics was successfully applied to explain how power functions in totalitarian and democratic states; however, authoritarian states did not get much attention within Foucauldian studies. On the other hand, none of the several groups of works investigating the context of Russia through biopolitical paradigms focuses on the actions of the state in the way it was formulated by Foucault. So far, it seems that biopolitics is not that visible as an element of governmentality of authoritarian political regimes. Of course, it would be an exaggeration to term such states ‘archaic.’ In an archaic political regime, sovereign power is more actively employed since such regimes rely heavily on what Foucault refers to as disciplinary power. However, it is possible to say that such states see the population as secondary to the territory of the country. Therefore, authoritarian states have a partly pre-modern political rationale, according to the history of governmentality, presented by Foucault. In the case of Russia, the biopolitics of authoritarianism functions in relation to three main factors – the moderate practice of liberalism, oil extraction, and the relatively developed welfare institutions. As a result, the Russian state considers the population only partly as an economic asset since the extraction of oil is more profitable and does not require investments into human capital. At the same time, state welfare institutions become the centre of contact between the government and the population, upon which both of them depend.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Agamben, G., 1998. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Becker, U. and Vasileva, A., 2017. Russia’s Political Economy Re-Conceptualized: A Changing Hybrid of Liberalism, Statism and Patrimonialism. Journal of Eurasian Studies 8: 83–96. Bhatnagar, R., 1986. Uses and Limits of Foucault: A Study of the Theme of Origins in Edward Said’s ‘Orientalism’. Social Scientist 16: 3–22. Bressler, M.L., 2018. Understanding Contemporary Russia. Boulder, Colorado: Lynne Rienner Publishers, Inc. Bueno De Mesquita, B., Smith, A., Siverson, R.M. and Morrow, J.D., 2005. The Logic of Political Survival. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

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Campbell, T., 2011. Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Campbell, T. and Sitze, A., 2013. Biopolitics: A Reader. Durham: Duke University Press. Cassiday, J. and Johnson, E., 2010. Putin, Putiniana and the Question of a Post-Soviet Cult of Personality. Slavonic and East European Review 88: 681–707. Chaisty, P., 2008. The Legislative Effects of Presidential Partisan Powers in Post-Communist Russia. Government and Opposition 43, 3: 424–453. Cook, L., 2007. Postcommunist Welfare States: Reform Politics in Russia and Eastern Europe. Ithaca, United States: Cornell University Press. Dale, B., 2016. Governing Resources, Governing Mentalities. Petroleum and the Norwegian Integrated Ecosystem-based Management Plan for the Barents and Lofoten Seas in 2011. The Extractive Industries and Society 3, 1: 9–16. Dean, M., 1999. Normalising democracy: Foucault and Habermas on democracy. In: Ashenden, S. and Owen, D. (eds): Foucault contra Habermas: Recasting the Dialogue between Genealogy and Critical Theory. London: SAGE Publications, pp. 166–194. Dean, M., 2012. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. 2nd edn. London: SAGE Publications. Ferreira-Neto, J.L., 2018. Michel Foucault and Qualitative Research in Human and Social Sciences. Forum Qualitative Sozialforschung / Forum: Qualitative Social Research 19, 3: 1–18. Foucault, M., 1980. Power and Strategies. In: Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings: 1972–1977. New York: Knopf. Foucault, M., 1989. Foucault Live: Collected Interviews 1961–1984. New York: Semiotext(e). Foucault, M., 1990. The History of Sexuality, vol. I. An Introduction. London: Penguin. Foucault, M., 2003. ‘Society Must be Defended’: Lectures at the Collège de France 1975–1976. London: Picador. Foucault, M., 2007. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977– 1978. Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave. Foucault, M., 2008. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France 1978–1979. Basingstoke, Hants: Palgrave. Geddes, B., Wright, J. and Frantz, E., 2014. Autocratic Breakdown and Regime Transitions: A New Data Set. Perspectives on Politics 12, 2: 313–31. Geddes, B., Wright, J.G., Wright, J. and Frantz, E. 2018. How Dictatorships Work: Power, Personalization, and Collapse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greene, S.A., 2017. From Boom to Bust: Hardship, Mobilization & Russia’s Social Contract. Daedalus 146: 113–127. Hacking, I., 1979. Michel Foucault’s Immature Science. Noûs 13, 1: 39–51. Haggard, S. and Kaufman, R., 2009. The Eastern European Welfare State in Comparative Perspective. In: Cerami, A. and Vanhuysse, P. (eds): Post-communist Welfare Pathways: Theorizing Social Policy Transformations in Central and Eastern Europe, pp. 217–236. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Hardt, M. and Negri, A., 2000. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Healey, D., 2015. Lives in the Balance: Weak and Disabled Prisoners and the Biopolitics of the Gulag. Kritika 16, 3: 527–556. Hewitt, M., 1983. Bio-Politics and Social Policy: Foucault’s Account of Welfare. Theory, Culture & Society 2, 1: 67–84.

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Kaylan, M., 2014. Kremlin Values: Putin’s Strategic Conservatism. World Affairs 177, 1: 9–17. Koopman, C., 2015. Two Uses of Michel Foucault in Political Theory: Concepts and Methods in Giorgio Agamben and Ian Hacking. Constellations 22, 4: 571–585. Kudrin, A. and Knobel, A., 2018. Russian Budget Structure Efficiency: Empirical Study. Russian Journal of Economics 4: 197–214. Lemke, T., 2011. Biopolitics: An Advanced Introduction. New York: New York University Press. Levitsky, S. and Way, L., 2002. The Rise of Competitive Authoritarianism. Journal of Democracy 13, 2: 51–66. Lewis, D., 2020. Russia’s New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Linz, J.J., 1964. An Authoritarian Regime: Spain. In: Allardt, E. and Littunen, Y. (eds):  Cleavages, Ideologies, and Party Systems: Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology, pp. 251–283. Helsinki: The Academic Bookstore. Linz, J.J., 2000. Totalitarian and Authoritarian Regimes. Boulder, CO, Lynne Rienner Publishers. Makarychev, A. and Medvedev, S., 2015. Biopolitics and Power in Putin’s Russia. Problems of Post-Communism 62, 1: 45–54. Makarychev A. and Yatsyk A., 2015. Refracting Europe: Biopolitical Conservatism and Art Protest in Putin’s Russia. In: Cadier, D. (ed.): Russia’s Foreign Policy, pp. 138–155. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Maltseva, E., 2019. The Politics of Retirement Age Increase in Russia: Proposals, Protests and Concessions. Russian Politics 4: 375–399. Martínez, F., 2012. The Erotic Biopower of Putinism: From Glamour to Pornography. Laboratorium: Russian Review of Social Research 4, 3: 105–122. Minfin, 2019. State Budget of Ukraine 2018 (accessed 23 March 2022). Mitchell, D., 1999. Governmentality: Power and Rule in Modern Society. London: SAGE Publications. Ojakangas, M., 2005. Impossible Dialogue on Bio-power: Agamben and Foucault. Foucault Studies 2: 5–28. Plotka, B., 2018. Biopolitics, Ideology, and Citizenship. Journal of Contemporary Central and Eastern Europe 26: 131–146. Powell, J., 2015. Disciplining Truth and Science: Michel Foucault and the Power of Social Science. Journal of World Scientific News 7: 15–29. Prozorov, S., 2013. Living Ideas and Dead Bodies: The Biopolitics of Stalinism. Alternatives 38, 3: 208–227. Prozorov, S., 2014. Foucault and Soviet Biopolitics. History of the Human Sciences 27, 5: 6–25. Rabinow, N. (ed.), 1984. The Foucault Reader. New York: Pantheon Books. Renz, B., 2006. Putin’s Militocracy? An Alternative Interpretation of Siloviki in Contemporary Russian Politics. Europe-Asia Studies 58: 903–924. Riabov, O. and Riabova, T., 2014. The Remasculinization of Russia? Gender, Nationalism, and the Legitimation of Power under Vladimir Putin. Problems of Post-communism 61, 2: 23–35. Said, E., 1988. Michel Foucault, 1926–1984. In: Arac, J. (ed.), After Foucault: Humanistic Knowledge, Postmodern Challenges, pp. 1–11. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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Sergi, B.S., 2019. Exploring the Future of Russia’s Economy and Markets: Towards Sustainable Economic Development. Bingley, UK: Emerald Publishing. Stella F. and Nartova N., 2016. Sexual Citizenship, Nationalism and Biopolitics in Putin’s Russia. In: Stella, F. (ed.): Sexuality, Citizenship and Belonging: Trans/ national and Intersectional Perspectives, pp. 24–42. New York: Routledge. Voegelin, E., 1994. The Authoritarian State. In: Caringella, P., Gebhardt, J., Hollweck, T.A. and Sandoz, E. (eds): Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, Vol. 4. Baton Rouge, Louisiana: Lousiana State University Press. Weaver, C., 2014. Out of Sight, Out of Mind: Keeping Russia Closeted: A Biopolitical Analysis of Non-normative Sexualities in Russia. MA Thesis, University of Tampere. Ziegler, H.O., 1932. Autoritärer oder totaler Staat. Germany: Tübingen Mohr.

9. Biopolitics, New Materialism and Latin-American constitutionalism: a linguistic encounter? Gonzalo Bustamante-Kuschel In The Use of Bodies (2016), Giorgio Agamben highlights that the most indispensable category for the foundation of social order in Aristotle’s Politics is the master-slave relation, from which all the other relations are defined. The central question he derives from such observation concerns the definition of the slave as a human-animal, whose being is human yet whose ergon is not. For Agamben, what is decisive in Aristotle’s definition of the ‘slave’ has to do with the idea of chresis, which applies to the slave’s body: the slave is used, and what is used is his body. Agamben (2016) indicates that, in the idea of ‘slavery,’ there is a collapse of the human/nature/non-human animals distinction: humans normally use nature as a resource, but, with slavery, the human uses the human-slave as a resource through the use of his body. What is missing from Agamben’s analysis and narration is that, since Aristotle, an understanding of nature as a slave to be used through exploitation has been accepted as unproblematic. Normatively, the relevant problem for Agamben is not that of the exploitation of life as such, but, rather, that of assimilating some humans (slaves) into the same category as the mineral, vegetal, and non-human animal world.1 The absence of a critical perspective on humans’ exploitation of nature, even in critical genealogies like Agamben’s, is what New Materialism has tried to overcome. To that end, a critique of the linguistic and cultural turn has played a relevant role. New Materialism has argued that the identification of human language as the decisive element in understanding social reality necessarily implies a negation of the agency of matter. Since the work of Jane Bennett (2004), Cary Wolfe (2017), Diana Coole (2005), Karen Barad (2003), Rosi Braidotti (2002), and Samantha Frost (2008) among others, a new materialist For a deeper exploration of the bios/zoe distinction in Agamben and its relevance for understanding the role of patrimonialization as a response of the liberal state to indigenous demands, see Espinosa and Bustamente-Kuschel (2021). 1

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current has sought to generate a non-anthropocentric and post-human ontology. Political agency would then be deemed possible even for entities that are neither animal nor vegetal. Barad (2003), for instance, sees quantum physics as the potential basis for going beyond mechanical physics, in whose terms modern politics and economics – both centered on the human subject as the only agent – have been articulated (Barad, 2007, p. 132). Through an attention to the interaction between human agents and non-humans, New Materialism has also sought to develop an epistemology superseding the linguistic understanding of reality. Authors such as Slavoj Žižek, Thomas Lemke, and Kai Merten, among others, have expressed various doubts regarding the pretensions of such epistemologies, as well as reservations concerning the consequences of a political theory extending beyond human life to encompass the existence of entities in general. Non-Eurocentric constitutional forms like those of Bolivia and Ecuador, however, have incorporated an idea of rights and individuals that supposes non-human rights. These cases exemplify the possibility of structuring a political-constitutional order fostered by an encounter between non-European concepts and New Materialist proposals. In fact, non-European political languages go together with New Materialism’s proposals in more ways than one. One must therefore ask whether recent Latin American constitutionalism implies a reconceptualization of rights themselves, one compatible with New Materialist proposals. If so, it would follow that the incompatibility between New Materialism and an understanding of reality as substantially formed by language only obtains where language itself is understood in Eurocentric terms. New Materialism suggests, implicitly or explicitly as the case may be, a substantial critique of theories like those of Reinhart Koselleck (2006), Quentin Skinner (2002), John Pocock (1987), and even Michel Foucault (1980). All of them involve an idea of language as a central element of social reality and political agency, thereby overlooking the need to attend to existing relations among material realities. From a New Materialist view, the subject of history would then be matter, its variations, and its interactions, not human beings and their language. This chapter does not pretend to provide an exhaustive account of Koselleck’s ideas, of genealogical enquiries, or of what is known as the Cambridge School. What I do wish to highlight is that, notwithstanding their undeniable differences and internal variety, they all view human language as articulating all social realities and generating political order. All thereby regard language as the great actor of history. For Pocock (1987), for instance, the modes and forms of social-political reality take shape at the point of intersection and friction between langue and parole, understood, respectively, as the structural properties inherent in lan-

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guage and speakers’ individual declarations. Langue, in this view, contributes to structuring thought and speech in thematically delimited domains. Those linguistic structures, however, by no means exclude or prohibit diverse forms of thinking or speaking of a theme. In every society, more than one parole is at least potentially available to speakers. It is in that space of play between a dominant discourse and another that defies it that the agonal character of the political is configured. This agonality, thus, arises from human communication, the sole possible agent. New Materialism challenges this ontological perspective. New Materialism has also sought to set itself against the linguistic turn epistemologically. In the Cambridge School, German conceptual history, and also Foucault’s genealogy, the conditions of observation in the social sciences are likewise explained recursively from language itself. Conversely, as Lemke (2016) indicates, within the large family of New Materialism, there is a widely shared notion that primarily textual accounts associated with the ‘linguistic turn’ are not sufficient to understand the complex and dynamic interaction of meaning and matter. New Materialism often emphasizes that focusing excessively on discourse, language, and culture leads not only to impoverished theoretical accounts and conceptual deficiencies, but to serious political problems and ethical dilemmas as well. Such a language-centered focus, New Materialism argues, fails to take on the central challenges facing contemporary societies, such as the environmental crisis (Lemke, 2016, p. 62). An underlying assumption of this critique is that efforts to account for human phenomena through explanations of concepts and the analysis of their construction, and thus in isolation from non-human reality, are misguided. For New Materialism, the problem goes beyond that of failing to attend to context. Its deeper source is the Cartesian anthropological standpoint from which such analyses proceed. Contextualization alone would therefore not be enough to resolve the issue. New Materialism’s relevance for discussing the biopolitical lies in its radical post-anthropocentric shift of focus away from human life. Posthumanism, as Braidotti (2018) notes, centers on a critique of the humanist ideal of ‘Man’ as the supposed universal measure of all things, while post-anthropocentrism criticizes the hierarchization of species and supposed human exceptionalism. New materialism goes further. It is inscribed in an understanding of the Anthropocene as a posthuman, multifactorial situation in which environmental, social-economic, affective, and psychological elements converge. Within such an Anthropocene, agency is thus understood in horizontal terms, starting from matter and life in general. Braidotti (2018, p. 3) recognizes the contributions of biopolitics derived from Foucault. Those have allowed for an understanding of the ubiquitous character of power, how life itself is a central factor in the reproduction of capitalism as a socio-economic system and its resulting forms of governance.

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However, in her view, such a biopolitical perspective has failed to delve deeply enough into the relation between bios and zoe. The latter, she stresses, is not only found in the form of bare life; it is also a productive and vital force (Braidotti, 2002). For New Materialism, the biopolitical perspective has marked a seminal, initial advance, but it remains bound by a framework inadequate for tackling posthuman categories. For that, a new ontological framework and way of understanding agency, new human/non-human ties and new ‘zoontologies’ are required. The genealogical method of Foucault has shown how it was only at the moment of its own dissolution that ‘Man’ emerged as a thinkable category. Only then could ‘Man’ become a category subject to true critique. Gilles Deleuze took the analysis further: if the present is a complex process, then critical philosophy cannot stop at the critique of the real, of what we are ceasing to be. Instead, it requires moving on to creatively updating what nearly is, that is, what we are in the process of becoming (Braidotti, 2018, p.7). In that process of coming to be, New Materialism reinterprets the idea of zoe as an egalitarian principle extending to all life in general. As Braidotti indicates, this framework centered in zoe has been reinforced by analyses of the relations of power, social exclusion, and domination that have arisen from integrating zoe in the very notion of life. Braidotti’s New Materialism, thus, offers an alternative to Agamben’s notion of Bare Life. That alternative arises from a re-description of the forms of sustainable connection characteristic of zoe, forms that could counter bare life in its various forms. For Braidotti, this turn practically implies submitting Agamben’s Aristotle to Spinoza as received through Deleuze. For Agamben, Bare Life is effectively a-relational and confronts the same sovereign power that founds it as Bare Life outside the polis. Braidotti, in contrast, conceives of zoe as a life that is determined in an interconnected way and is ultimately never isolated and stripped of social context, as Agamben supposes (Butler, 2014, p. 24). For purposes of this chapter, it may suffice to note the privileged position of language, understood anthropocentrically, common to the aforementioned theories (as well as to Habermasian critical theory). That shared emphasis on anthropocentric language leaves all of them open to New Materialist critiques, as well as to calls to seek non-anthropocentric languages. Because the family of New Materialism is extensive and varied, I will concentrate specifically here on the works of Jane Bennett and Samantha Frost, particularly Bennett’s innovative conceptualization of the political and its underlying ontology, and Frost’s critical reconstruction of the Hobbesian origins of modern political thought. The chapter first retraces some of the central ideas of Bennett’s New Materialism and the criticisms of certain social scientific theories that follow from them. It then turns to a reading of Frost, particularly her alternative

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understanding of Hobbes and of the emergence of modern political concepts. The chapter thereby seeks to synthesize certain viewpoints developed parallel to the New Materialism that have tried to incorporate non-human realities in the political-juridical domain and into analyses of the phenomenon of late liberalism. Here I refer particularly to the work of Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos and Elizabeth Povinelli. Finally, in a tentative and preliminary manner, the chapter explores the idea that non-European hablas – as suggested, for instance, by new Latin American forms of constitutionalism – may offer ways of understanding politics more effectively by drawing together the semantic and the material.

THE NEW MATERIALISM AND ITS POLITICAL DIMENSION New Materialism aspires to dispense with anthropocentric ways of understanding society. The idea is to go beyond any form of human-centered structuring, drawing on approaches like biology and quantum mechanics as resources. It thereby develops an account that extends beyond human life alone and aims at understanding and explaining the collective phenomenon of existence. Within the New Materialism, there is a common denominator: rejection and criticism of the linguistic and cultural turn. The focus of its criticism of both turns is the same: reduction of the understanding of political action to an exclusively human phenomenon, and neglect of matter as an agent of semantic production. Both points distinguish New Materialism from other versions of materialism. Marxist historical materialism, for instance, remains prisoner of a theory of action that proceeds from an anthropocentric idea of the subject. According to New Materialist thinkers, through the linguistic turn, the social sciences have reduced the meaning of the social to communication. They have thereby excluded the agency of non-human entities at all levels of observation – from first-order observations of the intentionality of a subject regarding a context, to second-order observations of language2 or the semantic system (as understood by Niklas Luhmann and similarly by Koselleck).3 The problem, for New Materialism, is an ontological one: the general supposition that semantics exist independently from matter. Even considerations of the connection of semantics with phenomena of sociopolitical transformation remain limited to the human sphere, at most leaving one in a cultural turn scenario.

Here I refer to language as understood in Pocock. See Pocock (1972, pp. 5–6 and pp. 11–12), and Pocock (1996). 3 See Luhmann (2012) and Koselleck (2018). 2

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Though Bennett (2004, 2010) does not refer directly to Koselleck, one can extrapolate several objections to his views from her general criticism of the human-centric social sciences and her concept of politics. First, like William Connolly (1988), Bennett (2004) sees the political as defined basically by its agonistic character. The political, in that view, is a product of agonal struggle; disruption, that is, ruptures and discontinuities are thus what differentiates the political from other phenomena. The question that emerges, then, has to do with whether human semantics, on their own, have that agonal character. For that to be the case, it would have to be possible to dissociate human agency as such from the non-human, effectively nullifying the influence of surrounding, non-human matter. That possibility is exactly what Bennett negates. Instead, she maintains that semantic changes are catalyzed by the agency of matter. It is precisely that which explains the distinctively ‘vital’ brand she claims for her materialism: she wishes to emphasize material reality’s capacity not only to influence human conduct (the action internal to the matter in humans), but also to itself be a quasi-agent with the capacity to generate political events, even without humans serving as its intermediaries. Bennett elaborates on the link between disruption and politics as follows: ‘a political act not only disrupts, it disrupts in such a way as to change radically what people can “see”: it repartitions the sensible; it overthrows the regime of the perceptible.’ Such disruption, moreover, is not strictly human. According to Bennett, ‘we see how an animal, plant, mineral, or artifact can sometimes catalyze a public, and we might then see how to devise more effective (experimental) tactics for enhancing or weakening that public’ (2010, p. 107). Using terms reminiscent of those of Lucretius, Bennett suggests that matter can form confederations that facilitate its action. In her view, the only healthy anthropology is therefore one that pursues its own negation: a disanthropology. Bennett herself, in effect, advances a disanthropological definition of the political. The basis of that disanthropologization is that, from Bennett’s material point of view, the exclusively human does not exist: we ourselves are composed of bacteria and microorganisms that are more complex than the human genome (Bennett, 2010, pp. 112–113). Semantic changes are thus, as previously noted, catalyzed by the agency of matter. That explains why Bennett’s materialism is not static but rather vital. She understands as ‘vital’ the agency and capacity of blocking human will itself that pertains to all material entities, including those traditionally considered inanimate, such as metals (2010, p. viii). Therefore, the only ‘theoretically healthy’ form of anthropomorphism is that which permits desantropologization (Bennett, 2010, p. 99). For Bennett (2004, 2010), thinkers from Lucretius, through Hobbes, Spinoza, and La Mettrie, up to Deleuze are part of the tradition of material thing-power. In a sense, in their work, one finds a current

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of thought that has been outside the mainstream (or has been misinterpreted, as in the case of Hobbes). That current, in her view, has long understood the importance of such a non-human-centered ontology.

RE-READING HOBBES From a New Materialist standpoint, Samantha Frost (2008) has formulated the main critique of most contemporary reconstructions of modern political thinking: their failure to attend to Hobbes’s true material roots, which were far from Cartesian. Hobbes’s materialist ontological starting point is evident in his statement that ‘the Universe, that is, the whole masse of all things that are “is” Corporeal, that is to say, Body’ (Hobbes, 1994, p. 459). And from there, he embarked on the project of understanding individuals as thinking bodies. Frost (2008) sees an example of that underlying orientation in Hobbes’s thinking regarding fear, which revealed the impossibility of self-sovereignty and, therefore, the need for cooperation with others. In her interpretation of Hobbes, the self is connected to the community/context and is not an isolated reality. On the contrary, it is a product of the process of memory of a thinking body, which can only have experience in connection with other bodies; their encounter produces sensations, impressions, etc. in both bodies. In that sense, she argues, the need for political community was based on materialist principles. Insofar as it takes Hobbes as its point of departure, Frost’s critique of the modern understanding of the emergence of concepts is that it has been incorrectly assumed that Hobbes’ materialism could be regarded as equivalent to Cartesianism. In her view, the concept of ‘thinking bodies’ implied something traditionally unknown in Hobbes. It implied that corporality was strongly influenced by the environment, and that the autonomy following from that corporality was therefore subject to reconfiguration together with the environment. Modern concepts, starting with Cartesian mechanism, have been constructed as autonomous entelechies, products of a reason articulated independently of its environment and involving a negation of human animality itself. Hobbes, on the contrary, understood humans as yet another animal, whose liberty, even in the state of nature, was indistinguishable from that of a river. What is more, that Hobbesian materialism, in Frost’s judgement, was reflected in his theory of paradiastole, which supposed an understanding of individuals as determined not by a rationalist mechanism but rather by their own living bodies (Frost, 2008). While Skinner (2002) interprets Hobbes’s idea of paradiastole as inher-

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ited from the Renaissance,4 Frost sees it as following from his materialism. For her, paradiastole is explained by the very action of matter (2008, p. 30). Based on her reconstruction of Hobbes, Frost points to the possibility of an anti-Cartesian rationalism and calls for us to ‘explore what would happen to Hobbes’s ethical and political thinking if we were to grant him his account of the subject as wholly embodied rather than as somehow split between body and mind, or body and soul . . . You are a living body (you are alive)’ (2008, p. 22).5 Bennett and Frost concur in their critique of what the latter characterizes as one of the central objectives of materialism when it comes to address an ‘exclusivist’ understanding of humans. Taking Habermas as exemplary of that perspective, Frost points out that his ‘plea to retain the human as a moral category – to uphold human exceptionalism – is . . . also a desire to preserve the idea that humans are exceptional actors or agents’ (2016, p. 10). Both regard that move as comparable to a sort of aristocratic moral exclusivism: only a particular type of material beings would then possess the dignity required to be considered moral objects. If we follow the New Materialist point of view, Koselleck’s explanation (2011) of the four great ‘izings’ of modernity (temporalizing, democratizing, politicizing, ideologizing) fails to account for the fundamental material vitalism driving modernity. At the end of the day, then, modernity is neither more nor less than a new re-configuration of material and biological structures. So, if one extends the criticisms of authors like Bennett and Frost to Koselleck as well as to Skinner and Pocock (as could also be done where Foucault is concerned), it is possible then to characterize the latter’s genealogies of modernity and the State as suffering from more than just a theoretical deficit. Nor is it just that they ‘are not correct:’ for Bennett and Frost, the problem is that the perception that humans have of themselves as the ‘sole rational agents’ is pathological. Following from that pathological condition, a series of explanatory problems arises. For instance, explaining the advent of modernity as the product of a simple translation of theological concepts, emptied of their religious-semantic content, to secular understandings of the nascent State, sovereignty, and power amounts to confusing the linguistic form of expression of something (the semantic level) with what was responsible for generating and shaping it (the material level).

4 Skinner presents paradiastole, which was used as a rhetorical device for political discourse and analysis, as an inheritance of the humanist tradition, with Machiavelli as one of its principle exponents. In this regard, one may consult Skinner (2002). 5 See also Bustamante Kuschel (2021).

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In short, Frost’s reconstruction and Bennett’s proposal both entail a recognition of a series of problems similarly present in the thinking of Koselleck, Foucault, Skinner, and others. First, all suffer from an understanding of concepts as detached from the matter that affects political actors. Second, particularly in Skinner’s case, all fail to see that agents’ intentions cannot be explained in linguistic terms alone; a material perspective is also required for that. Third, each of their theoretical perspectives implies a similar lack of understanding of what the agents and circumstances operating in the political realm are. And finally, such thinkers’ genealogies have misinterpreted the materialistic premises animating Hobbes. They have taken into account only the idea that the political science of Hobbes was built from a strictly geometrical construction of concepts counterposed to the humanistic tradition. According to Frost (2008), such an interpretation of the ‘geometrical Hobbes’ is, like that of the humanistic Hobbes, an incomplete story. However, if Bennett and Frost are correct, then the understanding of modern and contemporary concepts has been decoupled from true reality, that is, from matter. In that case, then, the consideration of non-European concepts could potentially provide a better account of matter as a political agent. That would not imply a total abandonment of any form of thinking with Western roots. Rather, one can understand New Materialism as a radical form of critical theory that goes beyond strongly Eurocentric viewpoints like those of the first two generations of the Frankfurt school, and radicalizes the deconstruction of the subject realized by biopolitics itself in favor of an egalitarian idea of zoe. By doing so, examples of efforts to generate concrete political orders starting from non-Western concepts take on greater relevance for that zoe-centered political agenda. What I will go on to suggest, in an exploratory way, is that, due to its inclusive character when it comes to incorporating non-human realities, the non-Western conceptual structure present in certain Latin American constitutional forms is more readily compatible with currents like the New Materialism. Deliberately left open as beyond the scope of this chapter is the question of whether the conception of power and its basis in civilizations like the Maya, Aztec6 and Inca should be considered a form of ‘political thinking,’ much as the work of authors like Augustine of Hippo, Aquinas, or Jakob Böhme could be.



6

Regarding this, see the work of Miguel León Portilla on Náhuatl philosophy.

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LIVES, LEGALITIES AND GEONTOPOWER In recent years, alongside New Materialism and beyond the canons of biopolitics, there have also been a series of other attempts to rethink political and juridical categories so as to permit the inclusion of non-human realities. These attempts include the writings of those working on the Anthropocene and its boundaries. Often diffuse, those writings have overlapped with other tendencies, such as posthumanism. The most interesting of such efforts have included those of Braverman (2016), Wolfe (2012), and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2016). Those authors have attempted to recover ‘lively’ as a category for rethinking agency, political order, and distinct forms of legality. The category ‘lively’ relates to a living being that calls for a Deluzian – originally Spinozian – idea of the body. Such an idea of the body goes beyond the Cartesian notion of res extensa. Instead, it assumes an idea of the corporeal that extends to all animals, sounds, mental operations, ideas, linguistic corpora, social bodies, and collectivities. In this reconceptualization, what characterizes ‘liveliness’ is the singularity that an X can acquire in the context of an ontological continuum free of hierarchies and predetermined categories, such as human/ non-human, animate/inanimate, or person/thing. An X’s singularity, emerging within that continuum, has the capacity to generate a rupture. That capacity for disruption arises from the multiple possible relations and combinations that bodies can establish. It is in view of that combinational capacity that agency is reinterpreted as ‘lively agency,’ an agency inherent in the ability of any given body to combine with others, collapsing previously existing singularities in the process. The idea of lively agency makes it possible to consider the implications in terms of lively legalities: bodies’ capacity for agency logically implies a responsibility following from it, one that would need to have a privileged place in the judicial system. It is thus through lively agency, with its implication that bodies bear responsibility concerning their positioning in combinations and relations with other bodies, that responsibility would justly arise in the space of the law. In contrast to the individualist conception of responsibility in liberal law, the idea of responsibility associated with this idea of liveliness instead entails a more collective conception. That collectivization of responsibility derives from the fact that agency is defined by the capacity of the lively to act on an X. From there, it follows that an agent is always immersed in a collective ensemble, which may take many forms: material and immaterial, animate and inanimate (Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, 2016, pp. 199–201). Such a lively legality entails superseding Foucauldian biopolitics for several reasons. First, its decentralization of agency is far more radical. Second, it is based not on the Foucauldian biopolitical power ‘to make live,’ but rather on

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liveliness. Finally, it is entirely devoid of pre-established ethical-normative value, since the character of those fluid ruptures can be highly varied: agonal or not, hierarchical or inclusive, exclusionary or egalitarian. Independently of what form a rupture assumes, its result always remains part of an imminent ontological continuum that rupture itself does not destroy. In synthesis, the emphasis on lively agency starts from an extension of the idea of bodies, and a corresponding redefinition of their agency as a capacity for developing singularities through new combinations and relations. Reimagined from that perspective, all agents are lively, irrespective of whether they are categorized as animate or inanimate. Then, there follows a juridical responsibility concerning that agency from the moment that each singularity creates a rupture in a continuum. That said, given the predominance of human agency, human responsibility for such singularizing ruptures is correspondingly greater. Among those working – from outside but in parallel to New Materialism – to expand the political sphere beyond the exclusively human, one must also count those who have critically revisited the distinction between zoe and bios. Agamben only recognizes that distinction as problematic when human beings (slaves) are treated as zoe. His work, therefore, does not qualify here. However, others have recently gone further. Like Braidotti (2002), Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos (2016) criticizes the distinction between zoe and bios itself as one that has worked to further bios’ exploitation of zoe and therefore must be resisted. That contrast between bios and zoe reflects a hierarchy valuing animate over inanimate bodies. The bios/zoe distinction therefore always assumed an exclusionary and normative relation of animate to inanimate bodies, rather than conceiving both as part of a common continuum. Based on her ethnographic work with the aboriginal Australians, Elizabeth Povinelli7 postulates that liberalism, and particularly ‘Australian multiculturalism,’ generates policies of recognition that are articulated through a critical rationality concerning Aboriginal cosmovisions and ways of life. This rationality is blind to the supernatural and geological agents proper to the Aborigines (e.g., mountains, rocks). That kind of recognition obliges these actors to present their cultures in rational terms in order to lend credence to their claims, a process leading to what Povinelli calls ‘true beliefs’ (2012, p. 180). Confronting indigenous rhetoric rationally, only some elements of it are appreciated. Others, not considered rational, are meanwhile devalued.

7 In my interpretation of Povinelli’s work, I am indebted to Patricio Espinosa’s contribution to my reading.

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Povinelli makes sense of this moral limit through the concept of what she calls an ‘invisible asterisk.’ Accordingly, she calls on us to pay heed to how a naturalized hierarchy of moral and legal authority is reestablished at the very moment common and customary laws are being formally equated. Remember: an invisible asterisk, a proviso (…) This proviso interprets specific instances of cultural practices and indexes the monoculturalism of multicultural tolerance in liberal settler societies. (Povinelli, 2012, p. 176)

Based on her ethnographic experience and reflections concerning Australian multicultural recognition, Povinelli (2016) introduces the concept of ‘geontopower’: a mode of liberal governance that operates along the dividing line separating ‘Life’ and ‘Nonlife’ (e.g., the desert, minerals, rocks) and enables extractivist operations in Aboriginal territories. What is interesting about geontopower is how this distinction of Life from Nonlife legitimates particular forms of sovereignty and understandings of governance. As Povinelli notes: The sovereign people of geontopower are those who abide by the fundamental separation of Life and Nonlife with all the subsequent implications of this separation on intentionality, vulnerability, and ethical implication. That is, what is sovereign is the division of Life and Nonlife as the fundamental ground of the governance of difference and markets. (Povinelli, 2016, p. 35)

For Povinelli, geontology figures as a way of carrying liberalism beyond biopolitics, starting from a distinction between life and non-life that goes together with discourses, tactics, and affects that make the life/non-life binary possible as geontopower. Povinelli (2016) makes a very significant contribution with the concept of geontopower. As she herself indicates, that idea allows for radicalizing the difference (and therefore the tension) between the non-life of the geos and the form of being proper to the ontology in play in late liberal governance. What is more, she argues, geontopower has been the very form of governance of late liberalism (Povinelli, 2016, pp. 5–6). In Povinelli (2016), Agamben’s distinction between bios and zoe is an offshoot of the Aristotelian differentiation between those ‘sovereign things saturated with the present and those sovereign things endowed with an internal dynamic potential enabling them to create another potentiality’ (Povinelli, 2016, p. 50). In the case of humans, this dynamic potentiality takes on a normative character. At death, the individual is evaluated in terms of how much of his potential was realized. For Povinelli, it is that dualistic differentiation of matter in terms of potentiality that underlies Agamben’s distinction between zoe and bios (2016, pp. 49–51). Povinelli does not offer a political proposal properly speaking. However, reflecting on the Aborigines, she does propose the concept of ‘late liberalism.’ A critical mode of understanding liberal governance, the

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principal characteristic of late liberalism is that it is oriented by geontopower (Povinelli, 2016, p. 169). Recovering a notion of lively agency permits us to rethink law on the basis of a concept of life that incorporates the inanimate and allows us to analyze late liberalism from a viewpoint that goes beyond Agamben or Foucault’s biopolitical approaches to liberalism. What Povinelli and Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos fail to consider are the conceptual possibilities presented by politically rethinking the non-human from a perspective inspired by the recovery of non-Eurocentric conceptions of politics.

A NON-ANTHROPOCENTRIC LANGUAGE AND THE NEW CONSTITUTIONALISM OF LATIN AMERICA In the Quechua and Aymara languages, the concepts of sumak kawsay and suma qamaña, respectively, define political community’s normative form, both between humans and, equally so, with regards to humans’ connections with other entities. That normative mode of political community is understood as a form of equilibrium with its surroundings. The first of these concepts (sumak kawsay, in Quechua) refers to indigenous peoples’ broad understanding of membership, one that extends to Mother Earth, supernatural beings, and biotic communities. The second (suma qamaña, in Aymara) locates the human being within a network of non-hierarchical and circular memberships. In the notions of sumak kaway and suma qamaña, all aspects of life in community are intertwined, preventing one aspect of life (e.g., the economic) from expanding at the expense of others. These principles have been taken up and incorporated into the constitutional orders of Ecuador and Bolivia, serving as a standpoint for rethinking rights, a sustainable peasant-indigenous economy, plurinationality, and an intertwined idea of social justice. Through efforts to articulate them constitutionally, these concepts were translated into Spanish as Buen Vivir (Good Living) in Ecuador, and Vivir Bien (Living Well) in Bolivia. Of course, each of those translations has involved reinterpretation. Indeed, these indigenous ways of understanding membership and political community were not traditionally expressed through a literary culture. Rather, they were transmitted through oral traditions, songs, and ceremonies, all of which have served as the sources for their recovery (Albó, 2009). In the discussion that follows, I will refer to this closely related, already translated, pair of ideas shaping the Ecuadorian and Bolivian constitutional projects in Latin America as Good Living and Living Well.8 Consideration of how the origin of these two, closely related concepts within Quechua and Aymara societies may have differed is beyond the scope of this chapter. For discussion of that question, see Albó (2009). 8

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The Quechuas’ concept of sumak kawsay (Good Living) has to do with the reproduction of life as life, not with a view to an end external to it. This has led some Latin American constitutionalists to interpret indigenous thought as a source for thinking in terms that overcome the division between nature and culture. That distinction, fundamental in Western thought, has contributed to legitimating many forms of discrimination, from slavery, to the subjection of women, to the exploitation of non-human animals and the land in general. In that idea of Good Living, the human and the natural are understood as occupying a common continuum, from a material as well as a spiritual standpoint. That understanding, then, allows for rethinking the interaction between the human and the whole of non-human reality. In the case of the Ecuadorian constitution, this idea is reflected in the preamble, which states that the living together of citizens in harmony with nature is based on the principle of sumak kawsay. This point is reiterated in Article 3, which has to do with the State’s primordial duties, which must be guided by the notion of Good Living in order to enable sustainable and equitable national development. In the various sections of the second chapter, devoted to the rights that follow from Good Living, it is the principle of sumak kawsay that defines the contours of community members’ relationship to the State and to nature. In the case of the Bolivian constitution, the preamble begins by referring to Mother Earth, and in Article 8 of Chapter 2, which has to do with the principles, values, and ends of the State, a series of indigenous principles equivalent to the idea of Good Living that figures in the Ecuadorian constitution are included, among them that of suma qamaña, meaning Living Well. Development is presented as starting from an idea of human continuity with nature and of nature having rights. The Good Living/Living Well of Latin American indigenous peoples is distinct from the good life of the Western capitalist project, and from the project of progress pursued by real socialisms as well. Those Western projects rest on a dissociation of the human from nature and other animals. The latter are both treated as zoe, at the service of bios. Domination is thus intrinsic to the very nature of Western projects of development. The good life promised by Western capitalism is characterized by the will to carry life beyond its limits, a drive that Simona Forti (2014) identifies as central in her analysis of the mechanisms of domination. Power as a system of interaction always refers to pastoral power, in which the passivity of a multitude is the precondition for social life: it is the sheep who make the shepherd’s existence possible, making the herd a sine qua non condition for transmitting and exercising power. The selfish individualism of the human-mass seeks an ideal of permanent development, one which does not recognize limits and has as its sole end a style of living meeting an ever higher standard. The individuals-mass passively accepts a loss of its liberty in

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exchange for protection, so that the law and sovereignty may grant them the enjoyment of their individual happiness. Thus understood, it is possible to find in this contractual form of ‘less liberty in exchange for security’ the basis for a society that seeks its prolongation by forcing life beyond limits that are not merely biological but also inherent to human life (Forti, 2014). One objection that has arisen to the recovery of concepts like those of sumak kawsay and suma qamaña is that they have been reinterpreted and thereby effectively Westernized, creating clear apparent affinities with various forms of Western political thought, such as Aristotelianism, Marxism, eco-feminism, etc. Similarly, critics have pointed to the fact that not only indigenous people but also Westerners have figured among their defenders. Finally, others say that the inclusion of those non-anthropocentric concepts of indigenous origin in recent Latin American constitutional orders has not prevented the exploitation of nature or economies centered on primary resource extraction in the countries adopting them.9 I believe that, while some are understandable, these criticisms do not go to the heart of the matter considered in this chapter. With respect to the first two points, one needs to be clear that those making that criticism – e.g., Valcárcel and Reinaga10 – regard recovering indigenous values as part of an effort to negate European influence in Latin America. In other words, they understand it as a negation of the region’s Latin character (first coming from Spanish and Portuguese colonialism, and then from significant Italian immigration to countries like Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay). An example of this contraposing of Indian Americans to Latinos is found in the radical Indianism of Fausto Reinaga, which excluded the possibility of indigenous freedom within a Bolivia that remains hybrid or white. It therefore called for revolutionary action directed towards ending hybrid-white Bolivian society, thus enabling the indigenous people to arise. In keeping with that position, Reinaga opposed the national revolutionary movement of the farmers’ unions, which he accused of favoring the hybrid-white class and viewing the problem of justice in Bolivia from the standpoint of the European elite. From that perspective, even the radical program of a leader like Evo Morales could not be regarded as meaningfully advancing a project of eliminating indigenous oppression. Eliminating oppression, for Reinaga, necessarily involved ridding Bolivian society of any kind of occidental cultural elements and



In that regard, see Gómez Aguilar and Batthyány (2021). Luis Eduardo Valcárcel (1891–1987) and Fausto Reinaga (1906–1994) were, respectively, among the most influential exponents of Peruvian Indigenism and Bolivian Indianism. See Valcárel (1972) and Reinaga (1971). 9

10

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political-economic structures. Even literacy had to be resisted as a form of colonization. Others base their criticism on the idea that the values reflected in these new constitutional orders are actually Western interpretations of the indigenous world. They therefore see in those orders an effort to reconceptualize Western currents of thought (e.g., Marxism, eco-feminism, etc.) rather than a true move towards concepts and values proper to indigenous peoples. Rafael Bautista (2011) grants that the principle of Good Living can absorb different influences, such as Marxism and Aristotelianism. However, he argues that the recovery of the indigenous principle adds to them a distinct contribution: that of breaking down the human/nature, intellect/body, and animate/inanimate distinctions. The aim of my argument is not to rethink Latin American constitutional history, nor does it depart from an idealization of ancient, indigenous societies, in which brutal forms of exploitation obviously existed (for example, neither slavery nor war was brought to Latin American civilizations by Europeans; both were known already). As history shows us, from the idealization of the archaic and the search for purity, tragedy normally follows. What this chapter does seek to do is to show the importance of concepts and values originating from non-European traditions and how they can be useful when it comes to conceiving new forms of juridification relevant for overcoming historical political pathologies like those identified from the New Materialist perspective of Frost and Bennett. As for the degree to which these principles have been effective in practice in countries that have incorporated them in their juridical orders, Sieder and Barrera Vivero (2017) note that their materialization has met with both juridical and practical difficulties. Notwithstanding the political challenges those difficulties present, they do not annul the possibilities for opening up new, more inclusive and sustainable forms of democracy, and for reconfiguring concepts in terms more compatible with New Materialism’s epistemic advances.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS: A BIOPOLITICAL INTERMEZZO In Koselleck (2006), the idea of a constitution presupposes communities politically organized by law; without a constitution, collective political action is impossible. That understanding of a constitution excludes all forms of political organization without law (e.g., tribes), which, though possessing a certain order thanks to customs, are not political. Moreover, Koselleck (2006, p. 307) reduces the political-constitutional order to the process of legalizing political power. Schmitt’s idea (2005) of a process of secularization through which modern concepts take on a theological structure is very important in his genealogy of modern sovereignty and the constitutional arrangement accompany-

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ing it. In a sense, that idea from Schmitt always lives on within Koselleck’s own explanatory framework. A similarly political-theological reading of the origins of modern political concepts figures centrally in Kantorowicz (2016). In his own reconstruction of the emergence of modern sovereignty and the reconfiguration of the political-legal order that transforms religious concepts into political ones, the medieval period is crucial. First, during the Middle Ages a reinterpretation of Roman law and a reconfiguration of Seneca’s monarchist philosophy took place. These came together at historical moments decisive for the development of Jus Publicum Europaeum, such as the Constitution of Melfi and the work of Lucas de Penna. Second, the groaning figure of Christ was symbolically reinterpreted in that of the monarchy, with the sovereign thereafter figured as a head, endowing the people with unity and giving form to it as a body. Both of these processes were central in the emergence of the State and modern law. Political sovereignty, understood from the Western viewpoint, was thereby configured from the hollowing out and reinterpretation of Christianity, as well as law and Roman tradition (see Kantorowicz, 2016). In a series of different biopolitical forms, human-centrism was as present in antiquity and the early modern period as it is in the contemporary era. That is why the antithetical relation between a human animality founded on a nomos and an anti-animalistic humankind seeking to overcome the animal order by means of a lex capable of submitting nomos to some kind of transcendent justice is basically revealed in human-centrism. Ojakangas (2016) has examined the presence of the biopolitical in the ancient world and its rebirth in the medieval period. A question that can be taken away from his investigation is the extent to which the presence, or absence, of biopolitics has not depended on the question of human nature. Kullmann (1980, 1998) argues, quite plausibly, that Aristotle’s characterization of the human political agent as a political ‘animal’ is neither rhetorical nor intended as an analogy. Rather, he maintains, it is ‘descriptive anthropology’ (1980, pp. 423–425). In other words, Aristotle thereby meant to assign human beings to the category of ‘animals.’ If that is so, then biopolitics is the way to approach the existential basis of that particular animal: biology becomes the substrate of human behaviour and sociability. In that sense, it can be noted that the master-slave relationship described by Aristotle at the beginning of the Politics would not differ radically from the distinction that one might establish between females, alpha males, and beta males in other species. The only thing is that, because of the existence of logos among these animals, who are human ones, it would be necessary argumentatively to indicate the reasons why that relation between alphas and betas is necessary. In Aristotle (as well as in Plato), natural orders are all therefore nothing more than products of laws constitutively anchored in types of organisms. For Kullmann (1980), Aristotelian political theory is thus a politisches biologisches.

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If, as Ojakangas (2016) suggests, Roman law is the underlying basis of Cicero’s political thinking as well as of Augustine’s Christianity, then both should be regarded as moments of forgetting of the biopolitical understanding of politics itself (and, ultimately, as moments of forgetting animality). To understand biopolitics’ current operation, we should examine the current reasons for that. Let us consider the case of Cicero in particular. Insofar as his juridical subject implies a suspension of biopolitics, the factor decisive for that suspension is Cicero’s abstract idea of a natural law (which legitimizes lex), one to which the biological was normatively subordinated. From there, a society teleologically ordered towards justice becomes conceivable. Following that line of argumentation, one can then see in Hayek’s neoliberalism a return to the Greek tradition. That return was far from casual, and involved much more than just a predilection for employing Greek concepts. Much more importantly, Hayek’s neoliberalism marked a return of nomos as a replacement for lex. Ojakangas’ work (2016) opens up the possibility of critically re-reading Hayek as having rehabilitated the Greek tradition through the prism of the market. Just as for Aristotle the master-slave relation was descriptive of a given nomos, likewise for Hayek the identification of winners and losers in the game of the market was nothing more than a description of the nomos of catalaxia. For his part, Lindholm11 (2017) seeks to make sense of some of the main events in the conceptual history of population policy from a biopolitical perspective. To that end, he focuses on the writing of Jean Bodin, father of the modern theory of sovereignty, as a relevant biopolitical author. Bodin’s biopolitics, Lindholm shows, was shaped less by authors contemporary with him than by his re-reading of the classic Greeks and of pagan Rome. Bodin’s work may therefore be regarded as connected to that of the fathers of ancient biopolitics that Ojakangas (2016) describes. Regarding the contemporary understanding of biopolitics, Puumeister12 (2018) proposes that we revisit Foucault’s notion of dispositif. Foucault’s idea of milieu only characterizes individuals as constrained by environmental conditions and, therefore, appears incapable of grasping individual subjectivity. His notion of dispositif, however, integrates heterogeneous elements in pursuit of a given strategic end, thereby introducing a point from which the creative dimension of individuals can be reconsidered. Indeed, the construction of subjectivity is at the very core of Foucault’s understanding of dispositif. For

11 Lindholm’s chapter, ‘Governing according to nature: Jean Bodin on climates, humors, and temperaments’, is Chapter 3 in the present volume. 12 Puumeister’s chapter, ‘Identities on the border’, is Chapter 6 in the present volume.

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example, the dispositif of sexuality constructs subjects who find themselves in their sexuality; even the panopticon constructs docile subjects who practise self-discipline (Puumeister, 2018). As an alternative to the ‘static’ notion of milieu, Puumeister (2018) instead proposes that of umwelt (citing Uexküll, 1982), a subjective process directed at semiotic mediation of the world. Umwelt would then be that within an individual which is modified by biopolitical normalization. This notion thereby allows us to better understand modern biopolitical action (Puumeister, 2018). Native American peoples did not have forms of biopolitics like these. The idea of continuity between nature and man in Renaissance authors and in Hobbes was the product of non-religious and material influences. For Native American peoples, by contrast, it was the fruit of a religious cosmology that conceived the human as continuous with other beings. The human, in that cosmology, did not hold a privileged place relative to the non-human. At most, greater responsibility followed from being human, as a product of awareness of men’s great power over nature. That power generated obligations towards other species and nature itself. These Native American ideas were reflected in a conception of political community in which there was no clear distinction between ‘humans as citizens’ and other entities, with the latter regarded as ‘things’ (a distinction that was, for example, traditional in Roman law). That idea of inclusive citizenship is based on an understanding of the universe, and the earth in particular, as living entities, producers of specific forms of life but, at the end of the day, including them all. Here it is sufficient to think of the Amazonian peoples, for whom human entities and those that are non-human, as a product of their interaction, suffer processes of metamorphosis that explain their evolution. Juridically, in contemporary constitutionalism, those ideas of political community are reflected in the Ecuadorian and Bolivian charters. Alberto Acosta, who served as President of the Ecuadorian Constitutional Assembly in 2008 and played a leading role in introducing ‘rights of nature’ as a constitutional category, stressed the possibility of ‘ecocide’ as well as that of gradually generating a ‘jurisprudence of the earth’ concerning the application and execution of such rights of nature (see Acosta, 2008; Acosta and Martínez, 2009). In the Bolivian case, the more central idea, common among indigenous peoples, has been that the earth is the mother of all and therefore must not be affected beyond what her ecosystem can tolerate. Bolivian law thus provides for ‘the right of the Earth and nature not be affected by mega infrastructure and projects of development that affect the balance of ecosystems’ (Vidal, 2011). That right safeguards the capacity of ‘regeneration of life’ proper to the Earth as a fundamental value. It therefore seeks to safeguard life in general, and (from a theoretical perspective) subordinates human interest to a superior, non-human interest.

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If, applying the same assumptions that link anthropology and concepts in Koselleck, one understands anthropology in a novel manner, the result is an approximation of the phenomenon of the political more compatible with New Materialism. Moreover, this way of reconceiving the human would also open the way to closer interdisciplinarity between the social sciences, biology, and quantum physics. As Wendt (2015) has suggested, quantum physics would bring to the social sciences a form of contextualization that includes material agents. Today, the New Materialism, the linguistic turn, experiences like Latin America’s recent constitutional innovations, and quantum physics each walk separate roads. The distance separating them is basically anthropological. Lifting that barrier would potentially allow them to work together in an integrated manner, with corresponding epistemological gains.

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10. The two faces of biopolitical theory: genealogies and current approaches Marco Piasentier and Sara Raimondi In the ever-growing plethora of its uses, biopolitics has come to define a multiplicity of studies across the humanities and social sciences: from political theory, to economics, to legal studies, passing through history and anthropology. Drawing from the enquiries developed by Michel Foucault in the 1970s, biopolitics refers to perspectives that are concerned with the entrance of biological life in the sphere of political techniques. Tracing the origin and the definition of biopolitics, however, has proven to be a challenging task (Ojakangas, 2016). Campbell and Sitze capture this difficulty by noticing that competing versions of the origins of biopolitics as well as ‘of the question of its principal subject and object, will continue to spark debates’ (Campbell and Sitze, 2013, p. 2) and even contrasting developments. Following from this, they conclude that the task for today’s scholarship on biopolitics is not so much seeking to impose a dominant or overarching definition, but rather to ‘dramatize’ biopolitics, in order to offer a framework that is able to make sense of the complex and multifaceted encounter of the concepts of ‘life’ and ‘politics’ (Campbell and Sitze, 2013, p. 2). The current chapter partakes to this intent and aims at contributing to this field of research, which appears of paramount importance in the discussion of the compelling and difficult problems of our time. The concern of the chapter lies not so much with attempting to outline a definition of biopolitics and, even less, aspiring to any conclusive synthesis or summary of the ongoing debates in the area. Rather, its purpose is to build on the conclusions advanced by Foucault and further problematize the way in which multiple perspectives around life and politics can be assessed and interpreted after Foucault’s legacy, and the different genealogies that his work has generated. With this aim, the chapter identifies two trajectories: a historico-discursive strand and a naturalist-vitalist strand that structure the landscape of the discussion of biopolitics in the field of Foucauldian studies and critical theory. In order to explore the two strands, it will be necessary to temporarily resume the work of authors – such as Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger and Georges Canguilhem – that have had an 193

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important influence on Foucault’s work and that have been central in defining the development of each trajectory.

THE HISTORICO–DISCURSIVE STRAND We shall attempt to delineate the main characteristics of the historico-discursive strand, starting from a concept that Foucault formulates in dialogue with the Kantian conception of the a priori (see Gutting, 1989; Djaballah, 2008) and that exerts an important role in Foucault’s critical inquiry: the ‘historical a priori’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 126). According to Kant, the subject is not a passive receptacle of experience, but it actively organizes and constitutes its world, insofar as it possesses the ‘a priori concepts to which all objects of experience necessarily conform, and with which they must agree’ (Kant, 1965, p. Bxvii–xviii). The a priori concepts are thus not learned from experience, but they are what make the empirical content of experience possible. Although empirical knowledge must conform with its object, this knowledge becomes possible only thanks to the a priori conformation of the subject. ‘The order and regularity in the appearances, which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We could never find them in appearances, had we not ourselves, or the nature of our mind, originally set them there’ (Kant, 1965, p. A125, emphasis in original). The Copernican Revolution that Kant brought about in philosophy proposes that the world of appearances, the intelligible nature, depends on the subject, because there cannot be empirical knowledge without a priori conditions, which have the function of ‘prescribing laws to nature, and even of making nature possible’ (Kant, 1965, p. B159f). Although Foucault defines his archaeological project in Kantian terms, arguing that his historico-discursive inquiries are aimed at outlining the ‘conditions of possibility’ for knowledge in a particular historical moment (Foucault, 2005, p. xxii), at the same time, he puts into question the Kantian system in a radical sense (see Braver, 2016). Whereas Kant believed that the a priori conditions had an immutable and necessary nature, Foucault holds that they are contingent on a given time and domain of experience. According to Foucault, the historical a priori ‘is what, in a given period, delimits in the totality of experience a field of knowledge, defines the mode of being of the objects that appear in that field, provides man’s everyday perception with theoretical powers, and defines the conditions in which he can sustain a discourse about things that is recognised to be true’ (Foucault, 2005, p. 158). In Foucault’s historico-discursive approach, Kant’s universal set of conditions for experience disappears and leaves the place for a proliferating series of historical transformations that will never bring us in the presence of an ultimate and necessary set of a priori conditions.

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In the well-known 1971 essay entitled ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,’ Foucault delineates the traits of a new methodology that he takes from Nietzsche. The genealogical method, which Foucault will first deploy in Discipline and Punish (1995), does not lead to a radical change in Foucault’s historical inquiry, but rather to an enrichment of his methodological toolbox. As Gary Gutting pointed out, Foucault’s ‘approach to each topic is driven much more by the specific historical subject matter than by prior methodological commitments’ (Gutting, 2005, p. xiv). In his 1970 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, he explains that archaeology and genealogy do not exclude each other, but they ‘are to alternate, support and complete each other’ (Foucault, 1972, p. 234). Despite its importance, archaeology addresses the question of power only indirectly. Genealogy fills this gap by showing the relations of power underlying the discursive formations. The Foucauldian notion of power does not find its raison d’être in the analysis of the mechanism of punishment and surveillance, insofar as Foucault does not consider power as intrinsically repressive or limited to a certain dimension of our existence. On the contrary, he believes that power is ‘productive,’ and its existence should not be confined to specific institutions or political regimes: ‘[p]ower is everywhere; not because it embraces everything, but because it comes from everywhere’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 93). Power is constitutive of social practises, which could not exist without it. What, in the earlier period, Foucault called ‘historical a priori,’ in the later period takes the name of ‘historical ontology’ or ‘historical ontology of ourselves,’ or more simply ‘ontology of ourselves.’ In a late interview entitled ‘The Subject and Power’ (2000b), Foucault explains that his historical enquiries were not aimed at the understanding of the mechanisms of knowledge and power per se but to comprehend the ways the subjects conceive themselves through these mechanisms. In light of these considerations, the core of his studies is neither knowledge nor power but the question of the subject (Rovatti, 2008 and 2009). For this reason, the notion of ‘ontology of ourselves’ is the one that probably better captures the essence of Foucault’s enquiries, starting from his early works on madness to the later writings on biopolitics and the care of the self. If we look at Foucault’s works from this perspective, we can read them as an attempt to deconstruct the Kantian conception of the Subject. The announcement of the ‘death of man,’ which we encounter in The Order of Things, is one important step in Foucault’s deconstruction of the transcendental subjectivity, but it should not be considered as the final point of his confrontation with Kant. In fact, Foucault will show that the death of the Kantian Subject does not lead to the

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disappearance of the subject itself but rather to the passage from a theory of the Subject, with the capital ‘S,’ to a theory of subjectifications: What I rejected was the idea of starting out with a theory of the subject […] and, on the basis of this theory, asking how a given form of knowledge [connaissance] was possible. What I wanted to try to show was how the subject constituted itself, in one specific form or another, as a mad or a healthy subject, as a delinquent or nondelinquent subject, through certain practises that were also games of truth, practises of power, and so on. I had to reject a priori theories of the subject in order to analyse the relationships that may exist between the constitution of the subject or different forms of the subject and games of truth, practises of power, and so on. (Foucault, 2000a, p. 290)

How does this confrontation with Kant’s theory of the subject help Foucault to critically address contemporary biopolitical societies? The transcendental subject and the biopolitical one seem to have nothing in common: whereas the former implies a form of idealism, the latter is the result of a naturalist worldview; if the transcendental subject is detached from nature, the biopolitical one can be conceived only thanks to what Foucault himself defines as the ‘animalisation of man’ (Foucault, 1978). Despite these significant differences, the historico-discursive strand considers both conceptions of the subject – the transcendental and the naturalistic one – as rooted into a meta-historical worldview. When Foucault addresses the question of biopolitics from the perspective of his historico-discursive strand, he inaugurates a new way of understanding the relationship between politics and biology. In contrast to the previous conception of biopolitics (Lemke, 2011), Foucault challenged the possibility ‘to trace political processes and structures back to biological determinants. By contrast, he analyses the historical process by which “life” emerges as the centre of political strategies. Instead of assuming foundational and ahistorical laws of politics, he diagnoses a historical break, a discontinuity in political practice. From this perspective, biopolitics denotes a specific modern form of exercising power’ (Lemke, 2011, p. 33). By exercising a critical epoché from theories that view biology as the foundation of politics, Foucault’s historico-discursive approach challenges the possibility of grounding politics into a vital imperative. Thanks to his historico-discursive toolbox, Foucault can thus show that a biopolitical conception of the human being has been a powerful mode of explaining the observed inequalities of status, wealth, and power in modern western societies (Oksala, 2011). In fact, the supposedly neutral and objective definition of human ‘universals’ of behaviour as natural characteristics of societies allows the biopolitical regime of knowledge and power to function as a social legitimator; for if these inequalities are rooted in nature, they may be deemed inevitable and any attempt to subvert them may be framed as a viola-

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tion of the natural order regulating the living beings. The discursive approach has thus proved to be extremely effective in challenging the normativity that deterministic biology can have on social differences. This form of critical inquiry has had a major impact on Continental political and social thought. If we limit ourselves to consider the field of biopolitical studies, we can briefly take into consideration the work of one of the political philosophers who has greatly developed and problematized the research path inaugurated by Foucault: Giorgio Agamben. The aim of the present chapter is not to decide whether or not Agamben’s biopolitical theory is correct but simply to show the connection between Foucault’s historico-discursive strand and his theoretical proposal. Agamben defines the genealogical method as that enquiry that looks for the conditions of possibility of knowledge and, for this reason, takes the paradoxical notion of ‘historical a priori’ as its point of reference (Agamben, 2009, p. 43). In his most important book on biopolitics, Homo Sacer (1995), he has adopted this methodology to show that the politics of life has a history much longer than the one delineated by Foucault. According to Agamben’s genealogy of biopolitics, Ancient Greek philosophy had already set the foundation for western biopolitics: the ‘historical a priori’ at the core of western politics is a problematic relationship between the humanity and animality of the human being which can already be found in Aristotle’s political writings. The logic of inclusive exclusion lying at the root of this relationship implies that the human being can find its human face only through the inclusive exclusion of its animal nature. Agamben outlines the excluding logic of biopolitics in his early works such as Infancy and History (1993) as well as Language and Death (1991). Whereas these books address the mechanism of inclusive exclusion from an ontological perspective, later works such as Homo Sacer (1995) and The Open (2002) show the political implications of this regime of discourse and power. As Sergei Prozorov has clearly put it: Just as the state of exception suspends the law, rendering it informulable and unobservable, the ceaseless caesurae of the anthropological machine necessarily fail to stabilise the human-animal distinction and instead separate ever more forms of life from themselves by drawing this distinction within living beings. Once again, we encounter the idea of bare life not as a synonym of natural, physical or animal life but rather as its negation: while there exist living beings, animal and human, bare life exists nowhere but in the machine that seeks to both separate and articulate the two and ends up negating both. (Prozorov, 2014, p. 157, emphasis in original)

In other words, the aim of the anthropological machine is the production of a life that cannot be considered either properly human or simply animal but ‘bare.’ Hence, Agamben can conclude that the ‘decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and the humanity of man. That is to say, in its origin, Western politics is also biopol-

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itics’ (Agamben, 2002, p. 82). If the essence of western politics is biopolitics, and the production of bare life is the mechanism that sets politics in motion, then the deconstruction of the anthropological machine of western politics starts by showing how the caesura between human and animal has neither divine nor natural origins but is a purely political dispositif established in the course of western history. Despite the profound divergence in the history of biopolitics delineated by Agamben and Foucault (Ojakangas, 2005 and 2016), both philosophers seem to agree that the perimeters of inclusion and exclusion traced by a given biopolitical rationality are not the result of a divine or natural law, but are the product of specific social order. In other words, the truth on which a given biopolitical order finds its legitimacy is ‘a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint, and it introduces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its “general politics” of truth – that is, the type of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements’ (Foucault, 2000a, p. 131). Despite the undeniable importance of this approach, we believe it is also necessary to shed light on the risks it involves. When Foucault argues for ‘the omnipresence of power’ (Foucault, 1978, p. 93), his conception of power can be interpreted in a strong or weak manner. If we embrace the former interpretation, power becomes an omnipotent and ubiquitous principle that ultimately reveals itself to be another type of Absolute because it forbids the possibility of conceiving a dimension independent of power itself. This idea of the Absolute corresponds neither to the divine Mind of theological metaphysics nor to the transcendental Subject of Kantian philosophy, but it nevertheless shares the same ineffability that characterizes these philosophical approaches, insofar as power cannot but be conceived as a background condition of intelligibility that remains unexplained by empirical inquiry. The consequences of the strong interpretation of the historico-discursive strand become particularly evident in the very understanding of biopolitical humanity, because its method reduces every definition of biological life to a discursive invention produced by specific political ‘apparatuses.’ Therefore, the possibility to decide whether the human being is or is not a living being becomes impossible because before and beyond the processes of subjectivation and desubjectivation, there is only the historical proliferation of mechanisms of power. If the human being of transcendent and transcendental philosophies was more than a living creature, the human being of the historico-discursive approach is less than an animal in the sense that its nature remains lost in a ‘great ignorance,’ to use an Agambenian term. At the end of The Signature of All Things, Agamben wonders about the ‘ontological anchoring’ of those social sciences and humanities that want to be in line with the philosophical and methodological principle of genealogy. Contrary to those disciplines that

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find this Archimedean point in naturalism and in a definition of the human being as an animal among other animals, the genealogical disciplines should look for a different grounding point. In other words, ‘the human sciences will be capable of reaching their decisive epistemological threshold only after they have rethought, from the bottom up, the very idea of an ontological anchoring, and thereby envisaged being as a field of essentially historical tensions’ (Agamben, 2009, p. 111). The ‘ontological anchoring’ of genealogy becomes history and, in turn, history becomes a phenomenon that explains everything but whose origin remains ontologically inexplicable. The result is a radical and complete de-naturalization of biopolitical theory that challenges not only the idea of a vital imperative rooted in nature but the very notion of nature itself. For these reasons, an important part of Foucauldian scholarship has shown growing discontent with the historico-discursive strand and has started to look for new forms of criticism in the writings of the French philosopher. In a text that traces the geophilosophical boundaries of contemporary Italian thought, Esposito writes that ‘[i]t is as if at some point it began to occur to people, or it simply occurred, that there was a new “turn” coming after the linguistic one – in some ways encompassing it – that as a whole belonged to the paradigm of life’ (Esposito, 2012b, p. 8). This turning point should certainly not be considered a prerogative of Italian critical thought, because pluricentric power of the paradigm of life radiates to various territories of contemporary critical thought; it can be traced both in French critical thought, from Gilles Deleuze to Catherine Malabou, and in the English-speaking world, with reference to some interpretations of animal studies and post-human studies. What binds these authors, despite the fact that they differ profoundly, is not only the predilection for a certain history of philosophy – which, from Aristotle reaches Nietzsche, passing through Spinoza, Schelling and also drawing on the work of modern thinkers such as Gilbert Simondon, Georges Canguilhem and Henri-Louis Bergson – but, above all, the conviction that the engine of critical theory resides in a force of life, transversal to all living beings.

THE NATURALIST–VITALIST STRAND The opening of a vitalist strand of biopolitics can, once again, be traced back to the privileging of certain interpretations of Foucault’s texts. As we will further restate, the idea of ‘life’ remains ambivalent in the works of Foucault, and this is undoubtedly the result of an undertheorization of this notion in favour of other concepts (see Fassin, 2009 and 2010; Lemke, 2010), to which the author swiftly moves in his Collège de France lectures. In his attention to the biological dimension of life and history of biology, Foucault was certainly inspired by the work of Georges Canguilhem. Canguilhem played a pre-eminent role in laying the foundations to philosophy of science in the 20th century. As we

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analyzed above, Foucault challenged the assumed relationship of politics and biology that was found in previous forms of biopolitical analysis. In particular, he questioned – and rejected – the very possibility of deriving political processes from biological factors in a deterministic fashion, which itself was made possible by a foundational and deterministic view of biological sciences. The critique of the latter is a legacy of the work of Canguilhem and of his particular type of ‘vitalist’ approach. Georges Canguilhem’s name is chiefly linked to his analytical reflections on the concept of life in the emergence of modern biology. His work has been labelled a ‘vitalism’ (Fraser et al, 2005; Greco, 2005; or also, an ‘idiosyncratic brand of vitalism,’ see Wolfe and Wong, 2014), if we take this label to indicate an account that refuses to conceive of life in mechanical terms, and sees living phenomena as fundamentally irreducible to the principles of positivist sciences (see Benton, 1974; Lenoir, 1982; Hoyningen-Huene and Wuketits, 2012, pp. 9–10). Canguilhem takes distance from an essentializing reading of the idea of life itself: for him, vitalism indicates that life is traversed and subjected to organic laws that can never be reduced to sole positivist explanations. As Monica Greco (2005) suggests, Canguilhem’s vitalism forces us to look at life in a diachronic dimension: its function is to point to a motor force that, while not definable in fixed and absolute terms, opposes tendencies towards reductionist explanations. The latter understanding captures the ‘vitality’ of Canguilhem’s thought (Gutting, 2002; Greco, 2005): biological sciences have been able to make advancements precisely because an element of life constantly escapes rational definitions. In other words, biological knowledge could progress only insofar as ‘the problem of the specificity of life and of the threshold it marks among all natural beings was continually thrown back as a challenge’ (Foucault, 1989, p. 18). Central to Canguilhem’s thought is the notion of the ‘error:’ knowledge (of life) is co-extensive with error, since the latter ‘undoes the experience of life, seeking to analyse its failures’ (Canguilhem, 2008, p. xviii). Vitalism, in Canguilhem’s terms, invites us to think of life as always in excess to any possibility of reducing and subsuming it to any positive knowledge – not as a factual assertion on life as separate entity or substance, but as a regulative principle that allows one to think of new modes of being. By framing his work in terms of a discussion of the ‘error’ that pertains to life, Canguilhem enables us to reframe the very understanding of ‘normal’ and pathological states (2012): ‘normal’ is not identified with what is established by the data gathered by the positive sciences. ‘Normal’ expresses the movement whereby life establishes and expresses itself despite and regardless of scientific and statistical knowl-

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edge. Elizabeth Povinelli (2016) provides a beautiful description of this point in her commentary on the author: Canguilhem rejects the idea that what was normal about any particular organism could be found in a set of the statistical distribution defining its kind. What is normal about organic life is not defined by how close or distant the individual is from the statistical norm of its species […]. What is normal about an organism, and about organic life is an indwelling capacity and drive to seek to establish the norms that would allow to persist and expand its powers of existence. Life is creative striving (conatus) to maintain and expresses its capacity to establish norms (affectus), not the reduction of its being to a set of quantitative data. (Povinelli, 2016, p. 96)

With Canguilhem, the norm of life becomes explicated as an expression of the affective dimension and of a striving as a conatus, itself a reminiscence of Spinoza’s system of thinking, understood as the tendency to persevere in their state of being as long as it does not run into negative encounters which diminish their vitality and energy (Spinoza, 1985). The move back to Canguilhem helps unpack the vitalist element with which the idea of life in this second strand is invested. Among the contemporary authors, it is Roberto Esposito who chiefly takes on the idea of the affective capacity of life to generate its own norms and imagining of new ways of being-in-common, which defines Esposito’s own brand of (vitalist) biopolitics. Like Agamben, Roberto Esposito elaborates on Foucault’s grounding work on biopolitics and biopower to formulate his particular kind of biopolitics. If Agamben applies these concepts to the juridical dimension of the relation that life holds with the law and language – which justifies the definition of ‘legal’ or ‘juridical’ biopolitics attributed to his position (Braidotti, 2013) in addition to the historico-discursive or linguistic definitions used above – Esposito articulates a biological variation, which focuses instead on the biological and bodily existence of subjects. Esposito identifies the advent of the regime of biopolitics with the progressive biologization of politics (Esposito, 2011) at the beginning of the twentieth century. Esposito’s definition of biological life as an object of governing is linked to the conceptual dichotomy of communitas-immunitas, which the author uses to devise his critique of modern politics. Our analysis, however, is interested in the author’s theoretical departure beyond the thanatopolitical outcome of modern political rationales and the potentially deadly immunitary drive. Esposito’s later work is preoccupied with superseding the initial conceptions of biopolitics as power over life (biopotere, in a purely limiting and disabling sense of the ‘politicisation of biology’) and replacing it with the idea of a power of life (biopotenza, through a ‘vitalisation of politics’), identified with the flourishing organism and the healthy social body to be realized at the pre-personal, im-personal level of existence and built on an understanding

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of a life as immanence and relationality (Esposito, 2012a). This outcome is reached through the deconstruction of the theologico-political categories of the ‘person’ and personhood, aimed at unveiling the multiple layers that are folded within every living being, and thus the commonality that bound humans to other living forms. In the course of modernity, the definition of the person as a rational actor has been made possible through the clear-cut distinction between two dimensions of the human being: the rational and the irrational, the human and the animal. In the words of the author, ‘no one is born a person. Some may become a person, but precisely by pushing those who surround him into the dimension of the thing’ (Esposito, 2012a, p. 126). The attribution of the personal, however, is simultaneously an act of separation of life from itself, through a reification of the impersonal biological layer of the living (Esposito, 2012a, p. 127). To him, ‘person’ represents a dispositive through which the classification of what counts as life (as human life) has been shaped and classified in ‘degrees’ separating it from other entities. From these premises, Esposito commits himself to explore a related notion of life as ‘impersonal.’ In several points of his oeuvre, Esposito returns to a Deleuzian idea of life as captured in Deleuze’s work Pure Immanence (2001). Following Deleuze, Esposito embraces the shift towards an ‘indefinite life’ that moves away from the individualized life found in the sphere of biopolitical modernity, and embraces the absolute, impersonal but still entirely immanent singularity of ‘a life’ (Deleuze, 2001, p. 52). Crucially, ‘life constitutes the indivisible point in which the being of a human perfectly coincides with its mode, in which the form, precisely of life, is the form of its own content’ (Esposito and Campbell, 2010, p. 132). If life is seen as coinciding with its immediate form without any predetermination or norm, then it does not conform to any rule or standard, but, rather, is the source of its own norm. In this perspective, the normativity that regulates ‘a life’ cannot be imposed from any outside or from an external point of reference (in this, differing from the discursive-linguistic understanding of biopolitical power), but can be generated only internally and immanently to the sphere of life itself. In a passage from Bios, Esposito notices that the logic that animates the idea of ‘a life’ requires a ‘norm of life that doesn’t subject life to the transcendence of the norm, but makes the norm the immanent impulse of life’ (Esposito, 2007, p. 214). As Campbell notes in relation to the author’s theory, Esposito’s aim with the idea of ‘bios’ is to attempt the ‘elaboration of norm and immanence, or better, the immanent norm’ (Campbell, 2006, p. 15). In this move, Esposito takes distance from the conclusions that he had reached in the analysis of the biopolitical degeneration into thanatopolitics witnessed in the history of the 20th century. His goal is now to rethink the relation between norm and life

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beyond any annihilating closures, and develop another framework where no fundamental norm exists. This happens because: every kind of behavior brings with it the norm that places it within the more general natural order. That there are as many multiple individuals as infinite modes of substance will also mean that the norms will be multiplied by a corresponding number. (Esposito, 2007, p. 206)

In this perspective, the notion of ‘individual’ no longer refers to an individual subject, but to a process of individuation that pertains to all forms of life: the function of an immanent norm is to express and acknowledge the fact that the human body ‘lives in an infinite series of relations with others’ (Esposito, 2007, p. 206), drawing from a clear Spinozian sensitivity. The condition of possibility for impersonal life consists in recognizing the intrinsic relationality through which every entity comes into being. If beings come to life only through their immanent relationships, then there is no preliminary ontological distinction among them. The impersonal expresses an ‘openness to relationality with forms not limited to the person … (it) puts in relation completely heterogeneous terms like human, animal, and microorganism … [T]he becoming animal of human alludes to a mode of being human that does not coincide either with person or with thing’ (Campbell, 2010, pp. 145–146). The relationality considered by Esposito is understood in its most general sense: it is a bond among all living phenomena, the links established in a shared bios or in the possibility of a nonsocial relationality (Viriasova, 2013, p. 184). Esposito makes it clear that a life in the impersonal is that of one ‘who lives to the degree he or she is open to a larger horizon of relations not encompassed by the social form of the person’ (Campbell, 2010, p. 147). This leads to the attention for the theme of a new form of ‘community’ in Esposito, that is, one that is not grounded on an identitarian position but generated from the absolute relationality of beings that self-constitute themselves as a community with its own mode and norm of existence. This outcome makes Esposito the figure that chiefly contributes to a vitalist strand of biopolitical literature after Foucault’s legacy. Similar to what we have outlined with regard to the historico-discursive approach, the naturalist-vitalist strand of biopolitics has not been exempt from a parallel and, in many ways, specular, criticism. Its assumptions on life and of biological understandings of the ‘nature’ of the human open up normative and epistemological implications that lend themselves to analogous claims around the hidden foundationalism of these positions. The latter become especially apparent not only in the authors analyzed, but, crucially, in the more recent legacy of interpretations found across the fields of animal, post-humanist and neo-materialist studies. Despite their importance in challenging the idealism of the historico-discursive stand, the way in which these approaches have

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developed the biological and natural-vitalist strand of biopolitical analysis risk resulting in a replication of qualifying understanding and definitions of modes of living that remain deeply normative. Life seems here to be turned into a foundational principle pervading, and indeed, informing and giving meaning to the plane of immanent materiality. To phrase it better, in these discourses, life ultimately emerges as an ahistorical and absolute category that appears already oriented towards a predetermined outcome of liveliness, positivity and harmony. This move turns life into an a priori principle which betrays a closure and an inherently foundational character (Noys, 2010, 2011 and 2012; Rekret, 2016). Despite the declared intentions to remove any residual principle or ‘essence,’ a vitalist approach risks absolutizing and essentializing ‘life:’ life is seen to reproduce necessarily – almost in a direction stated a priori. As Claire Colebrook advances, ‘a certain image of life has now become dominant [and] life is accepted as prima facie good, and as the foundational virtue in a world without foundations…’ (Colebrook, 2010, p. 134). Moreover, a natural-vitalist approach does not dispense with the idea of normativity, but the latter is again grounded, if in a disguised manner, in a deterministic biology that influences social affairs and ways of organizing socially and politically. Crucially, what we found ourselves dealing with is ‘a form of residual anthropomorphic normativity’ (Braidotti, 2013, p. 76). Not only does life function as taken-for-granted a priori force that transverses all living beings in an ontological continuum; this assumption replicates an aspiration to autonomy that is nothing but the residual of humanist and anthropocentric ontologies, one which remains deeply ‘modern.’ As Davide Tarizzo (2011 and 2017) has lucidly suggested, the modern turn to life produces an episteme whereby ‘the word life irradiates a secret force that flexes all discourses about “life” in certain directions rather than others. And it makes it so that, each time we speak of “life,” it is always us, the modern, who are talking’ (Tarizzo, 2011, p. 13, emphases in original). For Tarizzo, life, defined by Foucault as an ‘untamed (savage) ontology,’ defines the very metaphysics of modernity, which carries with it the residues of an anthropomorphic normativity that fosters itself through the natural sciences as well. This leads to a further, parallel critique or intrinsic limitation of vitalist approaches: if, in his study of biopolitics, Foucault and the heirs of his analysis such as Agamben, are preoccupied with the ‘animalization of man’ – and the animalization of the human was indeed at the centre of the concern of discursive biopolitics – what we witness in vitalism is its re-naturalization, by means of a recuperation of the ‘animal’ or ‘natural’ element intrinsic to human existence in a broader, more comprehensive ensemble that puts forms of living on the same, flatter ontological terrain. The intent to absorb human exceptionalism within a homogeneous realm of living nature, however, comes at the cost of the maintenance of dualistic normative schemes, this time inverted in

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their polarity towards the side of the animal, the natural, the environmental. Vitalism produces a humanization of the environment and of the ‘natural’ world of life, which is now infused with the same anthropomorphic subjective properties. This ‘appropriation’ of the social domain by natural life produces a shaping of the laws governing the human and political sphere by the assumption of the absolute principle of life: this time, it is natural life to define the laws and norms regulating socio-political existence. The theoretical manoeuvre found in the variants of naturalism-vitalism expressed in more recent forms of vitalisms, posthumanisms and neo-materialisms, thus, ultimately end up risking reaffirming the (modern) dualisms of nature-culture, subject-object, nature-world that they try to overcome. This shortcoming marks a specular, and yet analogous, outcome across both historico-discursive and of naturalist-vitalist current takes on biopolitics.

CONCLUSION While the debates associated with biopolitics are becoming increasingly plural and rich, we have attempted to show that the work of Michel Foucault provides a fundamental point of reference in raising the question of the politics of life itself. Despite its unquestionable importance, we also believe that the research field inaugurated by Foucault is permeated by a problematic divide, which is possibly best captured by Esposito’s definition of the ‘enigma of biopolitics.’ In his work Bíos: Biopolitics and Philosophy (2007), and crucially in the first chapter titled ‘The Enigma of Biopolitics,’ the author introduces his enquiry into biopolitics by noticing that ‘notwithstanding the theorisation of the reciprocal implication … politics and life remain indefinite in profile and qualification’ (Esposito, 2007, p. 43). The ambiguity and complex relationship highlighted by Esposito emerges from the fact that the distinction between a naturally- and politically-defined life is not clearly and fully established in Foucault’s original thought itself. As Thomas Lemke has clearly shown in his introduction to biopolitics (2011), Foucault is the first author in the field of biopolitics to demonstrate how the domain of natural life is appropriated by power by means of the establishment of systems of power-knowledge (Foucault, 1972 and 1978), which aim at gaining control over the natural dimension of life with the end of managing, directing, and, in many cases, even maximizing and optimizing it. Foucault links the rise of these political mechanisms with the advent of political modernity. First, therefore, Foucault establishes a new definition of biopolitics as the processes whereby life has become the object-target of specific techniques and technologies of power. However, Foucault’s account does not stop at the analysis of how life becomes the object of mechanisms of political control. Rather, Foucault’s specific formulation of biopolitics also introduces

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an innovative understanding of life and the body. Contrary to the idea that ‘the body obeys the exclusive laws of physiology, and that it escapes the influence of history’ (Foucault, 1984, p. 87), Foucault holds that ‘the body is molded by a great many distinct regimes; it is broken down by the rhythms of work, rest, and holidays; it is poisoned by food or values, through eating habits and moral laws; it constructs resistances’ (Ibid.). In this chapter, we have attempted to show that the complex articulation of the relationship between politics and life cannot be addressed by crystalizing and reifying the two terms into hierarchical conceptual structures that subordinate one to the other. The authors working in the wake of Foucault’s historical and naturalistic strands have had the fundamental merit to enrich and further problematize Foucault’s conceptions of history and life; however, we believe that the articulation between the two remains still partially unthought. If Foucault himself simultaneously implied two approaches in his answering the problem of the relation between politics and life, we believe that the answer to the question of the enigma of biopolitics does not lie in choosing one strain over the other but rather in the attempt to produce an affirmative tension between the two. In our opinion, the tension between the historical and naturalistic strain is not simply the source of an ambiguity that must be solved but also the mark of the openness of a research paradigm that cannot be reduced to one of the two poles. The possibility of such reduction and collapsing of one pole under the traction of the other would come at the cost of a (potentially limiting) epistemic closure, which risks leaving us unequipped with the adequate tools to make sense of some of the most pressing problems of the present. One does not need to look too far to appreciate how both scholarship and public discourse show an increasing mobilization of the question of life and its implications in political phenomena. This no longer encompasses only the preoccupation with some long-lasting (and, yet, constantly renewed) problems in biopolitical governance, such as asylum and refugee policies; medical research and its bioethical implications, or most tangible questions of public health policies (with the example of the responses to the COVID-19 pandemic being only the latest, most obvious, instance). Today, we are in the midst of a series of ‘new’ questions that put the engagement with life and its forms front and centre of political and social affairs, such as the urgent preoccupation with the human impact on natural life and the bio-sphere foregrounded by the impending ecological emergency. At the same time, the conceptual toolbox offered by the biopolitical critique of discourses and apparatuses of power remains central to interrogate questions of societal and structural inequalities and differential vulnerabilities that have been so urgently and necessarily given voice by recent events such as the Black Lives Matter movement.

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With diverse scope and focuses, all these issues confront the question of what qualifies as life politically and what the political value attributed to forms of life is. At the same time, the interrogation of life and the way it mobilizes conducts, relations and behaviours in the socio-political sphere also force a reconsideration of the concepts that sit at the very centre of well-established categories and paradigms of understanding in political sciences and the humanities: the scope and boundaries of the political community; the forms of inequalities and injustices, be they more hidden or visible; the possibilities to imagine sustainable futures. As only one of the last in a series of terminological and conceptual expansions that have sprung up after Foucault’s rehabilitation of the notion of ‘biopolitics’ (and that have produced the burgeoning lexicon of terms such as biopower, necropolitics, thantopolitics, neuropolitics, etc), the emergence of terms such as ‘geontopower’ invite an expansion of the biopolitical concern for life even to the question of non-life, so far excluded from the Western metaphysical edifice and its limited reliance on the paradigm of bios and zoe. As Guyer and Keller note, ‘in a political context in which a differential value of life – black, queer, female, human, animal, fetal – remains fundamental, and in which the future of life itself is in question, the concepts and forms through which we imagine life are more important than ever’ (Guyer and Keller, 2016, pp. 229–230). That is, the ‘enigma’ so aptly captured by Esposito is more preeminent than ever. Yet, in order not to preclude avenues for imagination, and not to close down opportunities of meaningful responses, in theory and practice, it seems necessary to keep the inner tensions to this discourse open, lest falling short of the intellectual and conceptual arsenal that can allow us to tackle and formulate new responses to ever-evolving issues. By so doing, our claim in this chapter, and volume, is not to suggest that biopolitics, understood in its double and ambivalent acceptation, is an ubiquitous and omni-comprehensive framework that can provide an explanation to all these problems; rather, we suggest looking at biopolitics as an angle that can contribute to open up new perspectives in discussions of the political through the tension between the complex encounter of history and life; discourses and biology. We think that the tension between the two approaches of the historico-discursive and the naturalist-vitalist strands, a sketch of which was offered in this chapter, constitutes the most original aspect of Foucault’s biopolitical proposal rather than its weakness, insofar as it exposes the methodological and theoretical pluralism required to address biopolitics in its plural manifestations listed above. It is our opinion that the incompleteness of each strand should not be considered as a theoretical lacuna to fill with more robust theories of life or history, because it expresses the insurmountable void at the core of both life and history. If there exists any solution to the ‘enigma of

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biopolitics,’ it probably consists in an articulation of the relationship between life and history that exposes their reciprocal incompleteness.

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Povinelli, E., 2016. Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Prozorov, S., 2014. Agamben and Politics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Rekret, P., 2016. A Critique of New Materialism: Ethics and Ontology. Subjectivity 9, 3: 225–245. Rovatti, P.A., 2008. Il soggetto che non c’è. In: Galzigna, M. (ed.): Foucault, Oggi, pp. 216–225. Milan: Feltrinelli. Rovatti, P.A., 2009. Foucault Docet. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy 5, 1: 16–19 Smith, D.W. and Patton, P., 1996. Deleuze: A Critical Reader. London: Routledge. Spinoza, B., 1985. The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tarizzo, D., 2011. The Untamed Ontology. Angelaki 16, 3: 53–61. Tarizzo, D., 2017. Life: A Modern Invention. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Viriasova, I., 2013. Life Beyond Politics: Toward the Notion of the Unpolitical. Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository 1106 (accessed 12 November 2021). Wolfe, C. and Wong, A., 2014. The Return of Vitalism: Canguilhem, Bergson and the Project of Biophilosophy. In: de Beistegui, M., Bianco, G. and Gracieuse, M. (eds): The Care of Life: Transdisciplinary Perspectives in Bioethics and Biopolitics, pp. 63–75. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International.

Index Arendt, Hannah 5, 82–3, 90, 94, 124 Aristotle 8, 52–6, 63–4, 68–70, 75–6, 78, 82, 89, 98, 124, 171, 174, 187–8, 199 adynamia 70 chresis 171 De Anima 75 dynamis 70 energeia 70 master-slave 171, 187–8 Metaphysics 70, 75 Meteorology 55, 58 Nicomachean Ethics 89 Politics 63, 187 authoritarian regime 7, 151–3, 157–67 Aymara 183

aboriginal 181–2 cosmovision 181 actuality 5, 23, 68–71, 73–7, 81, 99, 100, 103–4 Agamben, Giorgio x, 2, 4–6, 10, 12–13, 19–26, 31, 35, 40, 68–82, 84, 86–7, 90, 93–4, 97–100, 103–5, 117, 119–24, 152–5, 159, 171, 174, 181, 183, 197–9, 201, 204 anthropological machine 197–8 ban 20–21, 120 form-of-life 24, 81, 120–23 Homo Sacer x, 20, 71, 80–81, 197 homo sacer 93 impotentiality 22, 68, 70, 74–6 Infancy and History 97, 197 inoperative 71, 110 Language and Death 197 Means without Ends 99 modal ontology 80 Muselmann 24, 26 Remnants of Auschwitz 23 The Coming Community 22 The Open 197 The Signature of All Things 198 The Use of Bodies 80, 171 Time that Remains 98–9 agency 2, 83, 90, 143, 161, 171–6, 180–81, 183 Agier, Michel 110–11, 113–15, 120, 122, 124 identity trap 114 subject in situation 115 animalisation 44, 204 animal studies 199 Anthropocene 173, 180 anthropology 4, 6, 35, 113, 176, 187, 190, 193 apparatuses 9, 44, 81, 84, 86, 96, 104, 119, 121, 198, 206 a priori 10, 88, 132, 194–5, 197, 204 Aquinas, Thomas 55, 179

Badiou, Alain 87, 91, 102, 124 Balibar, Etienne 110, 116 bare life 2, 10, 20–22, 26, 93, 120, 122–3, 174, 197, 198 Benjamin, Walter 25, 43, 89–90, 98–100, 103, 105 Bennett, Jane 171, 174, 176, 178–9, 186 Bergson, Henri-Louis 199 biomedicalization 129 biopolitics viii–xi, 1–10, 12–15, 17, 19–22, 26–7, 38–40, 42, 44–5, 49, 86, 131–5, 139, 151–7, 159–61, 163–7, 171, 179–80, 187–9, 193–7, 205–8 affirmative xi, 38, 40, 45 chronobiopolitics 87, 94 historico-discursive strand 9–10, 193–4, 196–9, 201, 203, 205, 207 naturnalist-vitalist strand 9–10, 193, 199, 203, 205, 207 of time 86–7, 94 biopower x, 12–13, 15, 42, 92, 95–6, 133, 154–5, 201, 207 211

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bios 24, 81, 93, 171, 174, 181–2, 184, 202–3, 207 Bloch, Ernst 89–9 Bodin, Jean 2–4, 49–65, 188 climate theory 3–4, 49–52, 57, 61, 63–4 commonwealth 3, 57, 62, 64 habitats 60 humours 49–56, 59–64 latitudinal zones 49, 54–5, 58, 60 microclimates 49, 54, 56, 60, 64 natural inclinations 51, 56, 60–62, 64 République 50, 56–7, 63 body viii, 1–3, 7, 13–15, 20–21, 30, 34–5, 37–43, 45, 50, 52, 56, 60–61, 63–4, 80–81, 93–4, 96, 101–2, 105, 110, 117–18, 124, 152, 157, 171, 177–8, 180, 186–7, 201, 203, 206 Bolivia 172, 183, 185 border 5–6, 109–19, 123–4, 188 anthropological and semiotic perspective 5, 111, 114 biometric 111, 116 historico-sociological perspective 5, 111, 116 mobile 109, 111, 116–18, ontological 101, 110–11 situations 114–15 socio-cultural 111, 114 Cage, John 71–4 Cambridge School 172–3 camp 20–21, 23–4, 103, 115, 118, 120, 124, 154–5 Canguilhem, Georges 10, 193, 199–201 care of the self 16–18, 27, 115, 121, 132, 195 Cartesianism 177 Christian eschatology 88–9 Chronos 5, 86–9, 91–2, 97–9, 102–5 Cicero 188 climate crisis ix, x, 83 community viii, 2, 3, 12, 20, 22–7, 30–32, 34–9, 41, 44, 46–7, 82–3, 111, 120–21, 143, 177, 183–4, 189, 203, 207 conceptual history viii, ix, 173, 188 constitutional forms 6, 8, 172, 17

constitutionalism 171–2, 175, 183, 183 coronavirus pandemic viii cultural turn 171, 175 Deleuze, Gilles 109, 174, 176, 199, 202 Pure Immanence 202 democracy x, 25–6, 28, 104, 151, 157–9, 186 discipline viii, 50, 62, 64, 92–6, 104, 132, 152, 156, 159–60, 164, 189 dispositives 42, 86, 93, 95, 97, 103–4, 118, 121–2, 188–9, 198, 202 environment 7–8, 23, 45, 49–51, 55–6, 58, 60–64, 82, 97, 111–14, 117, 130, 132–3, 136–46, 173, 177, 188 Esposito, Roberto xi, 2–3, 10, 30–47, 199, 201–3, 205, 207 Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy 31, 34, 42, 46, 202, 205 biologization of politics 201 communitas 31, 34, 37, 45, 201 enigma of biopolitics 2, 205–6 immunitary paradigm 31, 38–47 Immunitas 31, 34, 40, 43, 46, 201 immunity 3, 30, 34, 40–41, 43–4 impersonal 76–8, 202–3 individuation 203 Living Thought 31–2 ethics ix, 12, 17–18, 21–5, 27 fear 3, 30, 36, 43–4, 177 Fordism 90 Foucault, Michel 2, 4–7, 9, 12–19, 27, 38, 42, 54, 56, 61, 64, 81, 86–8, 92–7, 100–105, 131–8, 145–6, 151–9, 161, 164, 167, 172–4, 178–9, 193–200, 204–6 archaeology 80, 153, 195 desubjectification 24, 121 disciplinary power x, 156–7, 159–60, 164–5, 167 Discipline and Punish 195 History of Sexuality 94, 101, 131, 156 pastoral care 94 Security, Territory, Population 156 Society Must Be Defended 156

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The Birth of Biopolitics 17, 156 The Order of Things 195 freedom viii, 7, 13–14, 18, 28, 31–2, 38–9, 82, 98, 100, 136, 139, 145–7, 185 Freeman, Elisabeth 86–7, 94–5, 103 Frost, Samantha 171, 174, 177–9, 186 Galen 53, 62 genealogies ix, 2, 8–9, 171, 178–9, 193 genealogy 3, 4, 7, 14, 16–18, 26–7, 90, 131–2, 153, 172–4, 186, 195, 197–9 Gould, Glenn 4, 68–9, 71–80, 84 governing 2, 4, 6–7, 9, 13–14, 17, 19, 49, 51, 59, 61, 62–4, 82, 86–7, 101, 104–5, 129, 131, 138, 140, 145–7, 161, 188, 201 governmentality 6–7, 86, 111, 121, 131–4, 136–7, 139, 145–7, 153, 157–61, 164, 166–7 Greek ix, 5, 52, 54–5, 64, 80, 82, 88, 90, 101, 188, 197 hablas 175 Hardt, Michael 17, 105, 133, 152 Harvey, David 54, 90 Hayek, Friedrich 136, 188 hearing 73–4 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 89, 98 Heidegger, Martin 90, 98, 193 Hippocrates of Cos 52 HIV 7, 129–30, 132–3, 139–44, 146–7 Hobbes, Thomas 2–3, 30–39, 43–4, 46, 175–7 Leviathan 32–6, 39, 42 The Elements of Law 32 homo oeconomicus 2, 12–13, 16, 19, 27, 134, 137, 139–40, 145, 147 identity 4–5, 22–4, 32, 37, 41, 46, 84, 109, 111–22, 124, 139 identity politics 69, 82–4 ideology 98, 134, 153–5, 157–60, 162–4, 166 immanence 32, 93, 121, 202 Indigenous 171, 181, 183–6, 189 inequalities 84, 147, 196, 206–7

information technologies 109, 111, 116–17 insecurity 6, 34, 109, 118 jus publicum europeo 187 kairos 5, 86–92, 97–105 Kant, Immanuel 10, 193–5 Kjellén, Rudolf x, 38 Kierkegaard, Søren 90 Koselleck, Reinhart 172 Language 8, 22, 24, 42, 71, 80–81, 110, 112, 147, 165, 171–5, 183, 201 anthropocentric 172–5, 183, 185, 204 law 13–16, 18–22, 25–6, 34, 36, 41–3, 52, 56, 59, 71, 92–3, 119–20, 135, 155–6, 160, 180, 183, 185–9, 197–8, 201 legality 180 lively 180–81, 183 Lemke, Thomas 21–2, 26, 152, 172–3, 196, 199, 205 liberalism 13–15, 17, 131–2, 134–6, 159, 161, 163–4, 166–7, 175, 181–3 life viii, ix, xi, 2–6, 8–10, 13–15, 19–22, 24–6, 28, 30, 32–4, 36, 38–43, 45, 51, 62, 81–3, 86–7, 89, 92–7, 99, 100, 102–5, 109–10, 116–23, 130–31, 133–5, 137, 139, 142–3, 151, 156–7, 160, 164, 171–5, 181–5, 189, 193, 196–207 linguistic turn 173, 175, 190 Linz, Juan 153, 157–160, 162–3, 166 Machiavelli, Niccoló 31–2, 38, 51, 161, 178 The Prince 161 madness 14, 54, 60–61, 195 Malabou, Catherine 199 manner 4, 5, 68–9, 71, 77–84 mannerism 4, 69, 78–80, 82, 84 Marxism 97–8, 185–6 Mbembe, Achilles 95, 103 Necropolitics 103, 207 metaphysics 24, 25, 104, 198, 204 migrant 115, 120, 123–4

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moment 5, 37, 80, 89–92, 95, 98–102, 104, 111, 147, 162, 174, 181–2, 194 Nancy, Jean Luc x, xi National Sexual Health Strategy (NSHS) 129–30, 133, 140, 142, 145, 147 Nazism 15, 20, 34, 40, 120, 135, 153, 158 Negri, Antonio 17, 30–31, 91, 105, 152 neoliberalism 5–6, 97, 102, 131, 133–7, 147, 188 presentism 5, 86–8, 91–2, 99, 102–4 New Materialism 8, 171–5, 179–81, 183, 190 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 36–7, 44, 90, 99, 193, 195, 199 non-human 8, 97, 112, 171–7, 179–80, 183–4, 189 norm 5, 20–21, 39, 42, 87, 91–2, 96, 102, 113, 116, 141, 145, 156–7, 200–203, 205 normalization 13, 21, 92, 189 normativity 5, 96, 102, 197, 202, 204 ontology 5, 8, 25, 37, 80–81, 101, 110–11, 117, 152, 172–5, 177, 180–82, 195, 197–9, 203–4 of actuality 5 historical 195 of ourselves 195 ordoliberalism 7, 135, 137 pathological 141, 178, 200 patria potestas 92 Patriot Act 119 person 31, 35, 52, 53, 83, 117, 130, 160, 180, 202–3 Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, Andreas 175, 180–81, 183 Plato 53, 56, 63, 82, 89, 187 Timaeus 63, 89 pluralism 10, 158, 160, 162, 207 Pocock, John Greville Agard 172, 175, 178 poietic 69, 82, 83 potentiality 4, 5, 14, 17, 22–3, 68–79, 81, 84, 110, 113 119–24, 182

potentiality not-to 68, 70, 71, 73, 74, 77, 81, 84, 122 political (the) 13–15, 18–20, 27, 33, 38, 111, 113, 116–17, 123, 162, 173–6, 190, 207 politics ix, xi, 2–5, 8, 9, 12–15, 18–22, 24–7, 30, 32–3, 38–9, 42, 45–7, 49–50, 54–5, 63, 69, 80–84, 87–8, 90, 92, 94–5, 97, 101, 103, 105, 109–11, 113–16, 118–24, 132, 152, 159, 171–2, 175–6, 183, 187–8, 193, 196–8, 200–201, 205–6 Polybus 62 posthumanism 173, 180, 205 Povinelli, Elizabeth 175, 181–3, 201 geontopower 180, 182–3, 207 gerontology 182 late liberalism 175, 182–3 power ix–xi, 2–3, 5–7, 9–10, 13–19, 21, 24–5, 27, 30–33, 35, 39, 42–5, 58, 62, 64, 69, 77, 81, 84, 86–7, 90, 92–6, 98, 100–103, 105, 110, 117–24, 131–2, 134, 137–9, 151–67, 173–4, 176, 178–80, 184, 186, 189, 195–9, 201–2, 205–6 Prevention 6–7, 97, 129, 134, 136, 138–48 diversified 130, 132, 139–40, 142–3 framework 130–31, 145–7 milieu 136, 138 progress 90–91, 103, 146, 184, 200 Prozorov, Sergei viii, 1, 9, 39, 86, 103, 121–2, 153–4, 159, 164, 197 Putin, Vladimir 155, 162–3, 165 ‘state machism’ 162 Ptolemy 55 quantum physics 172, 190 Quechua 183 queer studies 5, 86–7, 94–5, 207 Rabinow, Paul 17, 133–4, 139, 160 racial theory 55 Ranciere, Jacques 87, 91, 102, 105, 123 rationality x, 13–17, 86, 93–4, 101, 130–35, 138–9, 144–6, 156, 161, 164, 181, 198 refugee 21–7, 115, 118, 120, 123, 206

215

Index

relationality 8, 202, 203 resistance 5–6, 16–17, 28, 35, 78, 84, 87, 95, 103, 105, 110, 119, 122 Rose, Nikolas 133–4, 139 Russia vii, 6–7, 151–7, 161–7 oil 164–7 sacrifice 33–4, 36–7, 46 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph 199 Schmitt, Carl 26, 98, 111, 186–7 securitization 6, 109, 111, 117 security 94–7, 104, 116–18, 122, 147, 157, 162, 185 semantics 175–6 semiotic 4–6, 110–13, 124, 189 Sexually transmitted infections (STIs) 129–30, 141 Simondon, Gilbert 199 singular xi, 5, 80, 87–8, 91–2, 99, 102–4, 118, 131 Singularity 22–3, 90, 92, 102, 180–81, 202 Singularization 92 Skinner, Quentin 172, 177–9 Socialism ix, 104, 135, 153, 184 sovereign power x, 7, 10, 13–14, 19, 21, 30, 39, 42, 81, 92–4, 98, 110, 119–21, 152, 155–6, 167, 174 sovereignty 2–3, 12–16, 18–22, 24–9, 31–3, 38, 41–2, 50, 71, 94–6, 103–4, 121, 131, 135, 177–8, 182, 185–8 Soviet state ix, 153–5, 159, 162, 164–6 Spinoza, Baruch 24, 174, 176, 199, 201 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 5, 84 state of emergency 19–21, 25, 90, 99 state of exception 20–21, 93, 99, 116, 119–22, 197 state of nature 3, 30–33, 35–6, 39–40, 42, 45, 177 St. Paul 90, 100 style 4–5, 68, 71, 76–81, 84

subject 2–3, 7, 12, 16–20, 22, 24, 26–7, 34, 43, 45, 51, 56, 80, 87, 97, 101, 105, 114–20, 122–3, 130–41, 143–7, 154, 172, 174–5, 177–9, 188, 193–6, 198, 202–3, 205 subjectification 24, 134 sumak kawsay 8, 183–5 suma qamaña 183–5 surveillance 13, 45, 96, 118–19, 195 thanatopolitics 21, 38, 40, 154, 202 temperaments 51–4, 59–60, 62, 64, 188 temporality 4–5, 86–8, 92, 94–5, 97, 105 terror 33 thanatopolitics 21, 38, 40, 154, 202 time viii–ix, 4–7, 33, 72, 86–92, 94–105, 113–14, 116–19, 156, 164–5, 193, 194 Chronological 88–92, 94, 98–9, 101–3 clock time 87–8, 103 Hegemonic 5, 87–8, 90 linear 87–92, 98, 103 Newtonian 88–9, 104 now-time 91, 99 post-modern 91 Tudor, David 72 Vesalius, Andrea 54 violence 20–21, 25, 28, 38, 43–5, 94, 120, 154, 163 vitalism 178, 200, 204–5 Vitruvius 56 welfare 152, 161, 163, 165–7 zoe 13, 24, 81, 93, 171, 174, 179, 181–2, 184, 207 zone of indistinction 20, 119, 120, 122, 124