Week 4: Human
Framing Question
The readings this week bring into question the notion of self-recognition as a marker of the ‘world forming’ human as distinguished from the ‘poor in world’ animal. This relationship is expressed through various dichotomies introduced in by Agamben in The Open..
--Bichat: animal life (as relational to external world) versus organic life (as habitual succession of assimilation and excretion”) [pg 14]
--Uexkull: umgebung (as objective space in which we see a living being moving) versus umwelt (as the environmental world that is constituted by carriers of significance or of marks which are the only things that interest the animal) [pg 40]
--Heidegger: disinhibitor (as the carrier of significance) and the disinhibiting ring (as the umwelt/ environment) [pg 51]
By way of this vocabulary Agamben formulates the poverty of the animal as resulting from their captivation within their umwelt, which withholds a ‘potential for revelation of being’– a fundamental lack in the relationship with their disinhibitor. A human, however is an “animal that must recognize itself as human to be human” (26) and is thus “awakened from its own captivation to its own captivation” (70). In this awakening the task is assumed to somehow secure the non-open of our captivation through the management of biological life, or rather biopolitics as Foucault posits. Does biopolitics then allow man to come full circle, from the animal - which allowed for the definition of man by comparison to the animal – back to the animal(ization of man) - which the sovereign is trying to ameliorate in longevity and health - ?
Close reading
On pages 253-254 in Society Must be Defended, Foucault introduces 'the power to manufacture and use the atomic bomb' as the paradox which allows a sovereign power to kill while simultaneously killing its (bio)power. He then posits that this resulting excess of biopower produces a biological threat which can only be controlled through the introduction of racism to 1. fragment the biological continuum and to 2. establish a positive relation between wanting to live and needing to kill. With this in mind, does racism then place biopower back within the confines of human sovereignty?
AM+AB
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Framing question:
ReplyDeleteIt seems that there are two senses of a biopolitic in Foucault and Agamben. Agamben identifies two lives: on the one hand is the vegetal or "bare life," on the other is the life of subject or "relational life." For Foucault while biopolitics establishes at the level of the individual body (the health of the body, "bare-life") its effects, which Foucault seems to privilege, are on the order of the social body. This can be seen in Foucault's definition of "death" which includes a "political" death in the expulsion from a social body. It seems that biopolitics isn't necessarily a return to the animal. Rather, it seems that the function of power in biopolitics works at the level of the "bare-life," a recognition of the vegetal always already in his individual and social existence. It is unclear if this is an "animal-ization;" if animalization is meant to signify "bare-life" then yes; if it is a reference back to an originary or ontological animal, then no. Biopolitics functions on the individual at the level of "bare-life" but that is only meant to establish a system of "control" that operates at the level of a population or social-body. If animalization is meant to refer to an actual animal it would seem to contradict biopolitics which promotes a greater or stronger social. The animal as defined by Berger, are merely "held by the look" unlike man which in his "return" recognizes himself and his social existence (5).
Close Reading Question-
We seemed to address this question in class. It seems that it is not that in racism biopolitics makes a return to a sovereign power, but rather that a sovereign right (to life) is already inscribed within the function of (bio)power. Just as technologies of discipline and regulation (control?), "succeed in covering the whole surface that lies between the organic and the bilogical, between body and population," sovereign and bio- power both function to "[cover] the whole surface" (Foucault, 253). Through racism these two powers are made to function at a mutual level.
SS + SF