Conclusion: Biopolitical Violence
Both Foucault and Agamben describe modern biopolitics as a political system that is charac-
terised by the indistinction of tactics and laws, norms and facts. They both warn us that ‚in
the biopolitical horizon that characterises modernity, the physician and the scientist move in
the no-man’s-land into which at one point the sovereign alone could penetrate.‛64 However,
they differ on their views on the grounds of modern biopower as well the possible forms of
resistance against it due to their fundamentally different understandings of sovereignty.
Foucault has a more historically and politically grounded conception of sovereignty
than Agamben, but it is theoretically very rudimentary. He understands sovereign power es-
sentially as a repressive and coercive form of power, which operates through legal pro-
hibitions. This narrow conception leads him to claim that sovereignty fails to account for the
modern biopolitical techniques of power that function largely outside of the law. We need an
understanding of political power that can account for the way that sovereignty has incor-
porated elements that are productive of life: forms of power that administer and manage life
outside the juridical realm. Agamben, on the other hand, relies on a Schmittian understanding
of sovereignty according to which sovereignty is irreducible to the law because it must form
its constitutive condition: it can issue policies that are nothing other than politically driven
sovereign decisions. Therefore, it is exactly sovereignty that must account for those modern
biopolitical mechanisms that fall through the grid of the juridical realm.
Agamben’s account can be understood as a re-conceptualization of sovereignty, which
Andreas Kakyvas has aptly called ‚bio-sovereignty.‛65 Bio-sovereignty does not simply exer-
cise external control over its subjects or limit itself to the juridical regulation of social relations.
Its powers are not confined to mere repression and coercion, and it does not rule solely
through legal prohibitions. It is capable of producing, administering, and managing life itself,
and ultimately deciding on its value or nonvalue. However, by assimilating all power rela-
tions and political rationalities to this comprehensive, ahistorical and ontologised notion of
sovereignty, Agamben’s account makes it very difficult to imagine forms of resistance. He
does not offer us tools for the analysis of the theoretical tensions, political struggles and
historical transformations that have characterised sovereignty in modernity.
In Foucault’s framework, biopower and sovereign power cannot be assimilated into
one comprehensive power formation such as bio-sovereignty. Biopower is opposed to sove-
reign power not only in terms of its productive aims and rationality, but also in the sense that
it is essentially not the power of a democratically elected sovereign body. It is typically the
power of experts: managers and administrators of life. This opposition is important in terms
of imagining possible forms of resistance against biopolitical violence. Rather than attempting
to eradicate sovereignty, we are left with the option of trying to break apart bio-sovereignty—
a form of sovereignty in which biopower and sovereign power coincide seamlessly—and
strengthening the power of popular sovereignty. His analysis thus leaves open the possibility
64
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, 159.
65
Andreas Kalyvas, ‚The Sovereign Weaver: Beyond the Camp,‛ in Andrew Norris (ed.), Politics, Meta-
physics, and Death, 109.
Oksala: Violence
42
that a viable way to resist biopolitical violence would be to reinstall legal protections and de-
mocratic mechanisms of accountability rather than launch a wholesale critique of sovereignty
aiming at its eradication.
There is no originary sovereign violence for Foucault because state-violence must al-
ways be understood as a set of specific practices connected with a historical power formation.
However, the rise of biopower in modernity means that the sites for practices of state-violence
unregulated by juridical mechanisms have potentially increased. Biopolitical practices of vio-
lence are typically grounded on effective policy, professional management and expert know-
ledge, or legitimised through the deployment of the law as an administrative tactic. They are
practices of violence that are not strictly illegal, but they are extra-legal.66
Hence, even if we do not accept Agamben’s analysis that we are living in a permanent
state of exception wholesale, the fact that techniques of biopower often fall outside, or through
the grid of politically accountable sovereign power, implies that they can, for this very reason,
easily revert to exceptional sovereign power in the Schmittian sense: biopower can become
sovereign power in a state of exception uncontrolled and unregulated by any law. The bio-
political practices of violence are often hidden within various institutions in which petty
sovereigns can reign, uncontrolled by parliamentary or judicial restrictions. Hence, even if we
deny any de jure connection between biopower and sovereign power, we have to be mindful
that the growing importance of the former in modernity means that the hidden sites for
exceptional sovereign violence—violence that is direct, unregulated and arbitrary—have
therefore also multiplied. Although Agamben’s analysis of the originary intersection between
sovereign power and biopower is thus inconsistent with Foucault’s understanding of
biopolitics to the extent that it ontologizes the biopolitical violence of the 20th century, it
should nevertheless be credited as a stark and radical exposure of the dangers of biopower.
The modern dominance of this distinct rationality of power centred on the care and protection
of life has opened up sites for unprecedented forms of violence.
It is thus my contention that if we want to understand the specific forms that political
violence takes in modernity, we need a careful analysis of the points of tension, as well as the
points of coincidence, between sovereign power and biopower. By such an analysis, Foucault
exposes a form of power that does not threaten us with violence, but is nevertheless an effec-
tive way of controlling and directing people’s lives. The effectiveness of biopower lies pre-
cisely in the fact that it explicitly refrains from killing and instead grounds its demands on
scientific truth and the goals of wellbeing and care of the population. Without an under-
standing of the rationality of biopower it would be difficult to explain how we willingly par-
take in the profound and violent disciplining and medicalisation of our lives that characterises
modern societies and their specific forms of biopolitical violence. Because violence is the in-
verse logic of biopower, biopolitical violence is in some ways even more dangerous than
sovereign violence because it is harder to detect and to regulate.
Elena:
I can’t agree with J. Oksala here because she’s failing to undertand that we participate in the mechanisms of biopolitics not because they protect our lives but because we do not know how to protect our lives our selves. Because we, the human being is and has been under oppressive and domineering structures for centuries and empowering our selves out of them is a problem of consciousness. The struggle seems to be necessary but the criminality of unconsciousness is not for that justified. This has been a wonderful and enlightening paper for me so I have nothing but gratitude for the expediency with which you’ve exposed the thoughts of these great thinkers that I must eventually look into properly, researching their books.
One of the problems I find in the text is that you are somehow avoiding to include the relationship between politics, biopolitics and property. Instead the division is made between politics and bare life and a separation between them is established. Politics has become biopolitics because sovereignty has shifted from the king to the government leaving out the people and appropriating the goods! The ideal of the King was not the appropriation of the territory for itself but for its people and the expansion of his culture nor was it for the destruction of the people through forced labor but for the protection and development of the people and their culture and when the monarchy falls into a descending decadent process the King abuses his sovereignty and is subsequently overthrown. (All this in my “language” but still clear enough to understand). If my intuition that we are moving from the rule of the King to the rule of the people stepping through the rule of governments representing the people has any viable accuracy, what we need to understand is the relationships that the particular “rulers” establish with what is ruled upon: essentially property and rights. What is and what rights we have in relation to those things that are objectively before us determines the characteristics of our culture. Culture is something else that is not being addressed in the text and the lack of it is certainly significant to the possibility of understanding the relationships involved. Let me check and see what definitions of culture I can find. Culture: The set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that characterizes an institution, organization or group. Of the many definitions on offer this is the one closest to how I am using it.
If we look at the ancient Egyptian kings there was an “aim” for the society and everyone participated in that aim. In the medieval structure there are also specific roles of participation. The inequality between the people and the monarchs was certainly there but the “vision” of the monarch embraced all the people. What has been lost in biopolitics is precisely the “vision” of the whole, the integrity of the human, of the “homo sacri” proper of the sovereign individual not just the king.
The question then resides in our willingness to discuss our relationship to what we have. If we opt for any form of racism, nationalism or classicism to justify the right of a few to have more than the many then every gesture of violence against the many claiming their rights on what we have is justified but if we opt for equality and the right of each and every individual to the whole and its corresponding portion, then we have to change and adapt our laws to that consciousness of our selves as human beings with equal rights to what is there.
The discussion would then not center as much on who but on how are we going to distribute what is there for us to share. And when dealing with how the complexities of the problems are a great deal more exquisite than when dealing with “who”. The creative power of our selves has to come into play to understand a myriad other factors in our lives besides the pie that we are going to share for some of us only need half of it, while others need twice the amount and for that to remain “human” we need to trust that in developing the consciousness that we each matter equally, we can trust our selves to share proportionately to our needs. Our “needs” then cannot be reduced to our instinctive needs but a whole sphere of physical, emotional, intellectual and self without the “ish” needs would need to be incorporated in our understanding of the “needs” of each and every individual as an individual as much as a “social” being.
The understanding of our needs would necessarily take us to the objective realities of life itself and by objective realities I do not only mean physical realities such as food and space but also non-physical realities such as music, love, sex, thought, speech.
We would need to recover the “vision of life” in its entirety to formulate for ourselves the path that we are each willing to struggle towards conscious of our individuality as much as our sociability.
There seems to be a parallel consistency in the inability to address “the whole” in the subject of study for what we talk about is what we our selves are able to perceive not only in the outside world but in our own selves. The justification that we are looking at just THIS aspect is valid in as much as we often need to focus on a particular point but we need to be careful to not exclude inherent aspects of the whole to justify our particular point of view. That too is an aspect of objectivity. ________
To conclude, Foucault would agree with Arendt that what characterises modernity is
that we have become ants. He contends, however, that the reason we have become ants is not
that we mistakenly comprehend our biological life in political terms. We become ants pre-
cisely at the moment when we are no longer able to pose questions concerning our biological
life in political terms. Political power in biopolitical societies has evaporated and has been
replaced by purely administrative and economic power. Complex biopolitical techniques aim
at making our life as long and happy as possible with the most scientifically advanced means
available. There are no political decisions or debates left when the aims of biopower are
unanimous and its means scientific. The crisis of politics in modernity cannot be resolved by
depoliticising biological life in the sense of returning it to the private sphere. On the contrary,
it must be explicitly politicised by dispelling its naturalness and revealing its historically
specific connections with the biopolitical regime of power/knowledge.
Johanna Oksala
Philosophy Programme
School of Humanities
University of Dundee
Dundee DD14HN
Scotland, UK
Elena: Yes, Bravo! We would all agree to that: that we are in the process of becoming ants if we cannot empower our selves to be humans. In the end we seem to agree with Johanna Oksala but that point of how it is that we are to do so is still in question.
My deepest gratitude for your work no matter the disagreements.
It is a fact that you may never see my work on your work for I write here to learn about what I understand more than to share with others who have not yet arrived but should that ever be possible, it would be a pleasure to deepen our knowledge and understandings and celebrate each other’s company.
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